When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, it threatened hopeful parents across the state. Several clinics have now paused IVF treatments while they consider the legal implications of the ruling. “We were at the doctor’s office when the doctors and the clinics said they would close down. The very next day, I got progesterone shots delivered. It’s just been gut punch after gut punch for us,” one Alabama woman told The 19th. Most Americans support the legality of IVF, and as outrage grows, Republicans struggle in a trap of their own making. This isn’t what they wanted, they insist: They support IVF. In Congress, Nancy Mace of South Carolina said in a statement she would “stop any and all efforts to ban IVF,” and Byron Donalds of Florida expressed support for the procedure on Meet the Press. “We really want the Alabama legislature to make sure that that procedure is protected for families who do struggle with having children, that helps them actually create great families, which is what our country desperately needs,” he said.
But did he tell the truth?
Donalds, like Mace, co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act in 2021. The bill defined a human being as a “member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization or cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being,” the Washington Post reported. Not only would it have banned almost all abortions, it did not protect access to IVF. Neither Mace nor Donalds have co-sponsored the reintroduced bill, the Post added, but they also have yet to square their current positions on IVF with their previous support for the legislation. Senate Republicans are hardly more moderate. On Wednesday, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi blocked a bill that would have created federal protections for IVF and other fertility treatments.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, had reintroduced the bill to protect IVF — and to call the GOP’s bluff. Duckworth, who had two daughters with the help of IVF, used a legislative procedure “that allows any one senator to object and stop it in its tracks,” the New York Times reported, and Hyde-Smith took the bait. (She also blocked the bill in 2022, when Duckworth first introduced it after Dobbs.) The bill was full of “poison pills,” the senator from Mississippi said, because it went beyond ensuring access to IVF and allegedly lacked restrictions on surrogacy and human cloning. Tony Perkins, who heads the far-right Family Research Council, called the bill “deceptive” and claimed, falsely, that the bill would “legalize” cloning, gene-edited designer babies, and the creation of human-animal hybrids, or “chimeras.” Hyde-Smith later appeared on his broadcast program, Washington Watch, where she accused Democrats of trying to “exploit emotions.”
Duckworth’s bill does not legalize “chimeras.” The senator has said it does “three things and three things only”: It protects women from prosecution for pursuing IVF and doctors for performing it, and it further allows insurance companies to cover the procedure. In response, Republicans can only dissemble. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Thursday that he supports IVF and that it must be done “ethically,” whatever that means. Johnson, too, cosponsored the Life at Conception Act and believes in fetal personhood — an overtly religious notion that the fetus is a person from the time of its conception. He is hardly alone. For many on the right, fetal personhood has long been the basis of their opposition to abortion. In 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, a Maryland congressman proposed the first Human Life Amendment, which said the U.S. should not deprive any human being, “from the moment of conception,” of life without due process. Lawmakers would introduce 330 versions of the bill over the next 40 years, ProPublica reported.
Jeannie Suk Gersen observed in a 2019 piece for the New Yorker that “the abortion fight we are gearing up for departs from the realm of uneasy compromise and re-engages the clash of absolutes.” Now we live with the consequences, and so must the GOP. If an embryo is a person, the conventional IVF process is murderous. Republicans haven’t squared their professed support for IVF with their opposition to abortion because they can’t. For the same reason, they can’t be relied on to protect IVF. They’re bound by their own logic, as Duckworth found out. “If this is urgent and you care deeply about this as you say you do — like you’ve been saying in the last 72-plus hours since the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — then don’t object,” she said on Wednesday. “Let this bill pass.” They didn’t, because they couldn’t. Republicans can’t escape the personhood problem. Though Republican lawmakers in Alabama have introduced some early proposals meant to protect IVF, Democrats say they’re still dodging the question of personhood, which threatens the entire endeavor.
Compromise is neither possible nor advisable. Let us remember the two absolutes at work. One holds that a woman has the right to her own body. The other grants rights to embryos, which transforms women into non-human vessels. The first view is compatible with modern notions of equality and citizenship, and the other is not. Only one view should prevail — and if it does, it will do so without any help from the right.
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Republicans Won’t Protect IVF
10
3
01.03.2024
When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, it threatened hopeful parents across the state. Several clinics have now paused IVF treatments while they consider the legal implications of the ruling. “We were at the doctor’s office when the doctors and the clinics said they would close down. The very next day, I got progesterone shots delivered. It’s just been gut punch after gut punch for us,” one Alabama woman told The 19th. Most Americans support the legality of IVF, and as outrage grows, Republicans struggle in a trap of their own making. This isn’t what they wanted, they insist: They support IVF. In Congress, Nancy Mace of South Carolina said in a statement she would “stop any and all efforts to ban IVF,” and Byron Donalds of Florida expressed support for the procedure on Meet the Press. “We really want the Alabama legislature to make sure that that procedure is protected for families who do struggle with having children, that helps them actually create great families, which is what our country desperately needs,” he said.
But did he tell the truth?
Donalds, like Mace, co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act in 2021. The bill defined a human being as a “member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization or cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being,” the........
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