Republicans in the US were this month delivered an inadvertent setback in their continued insistence that embryos and fetuses are ‘people’ with ‘rights’ that mean abortion should be illegal.
Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed with the party’s evangelical and Catholic Christians that the collection of cells that make up human embryos are ‘babies’ – ruling that several couples who were undergoing IVF (in vitro fertilisation) and who lost frozen embryos due to alleged negligence could sue under the state’s wrongful death law.
Because the ruling went well beyond the specific issue in question to declare embryos people in no uncertain terms, it led several of the state’s hospitals and clinics to suddenly and disruptively cease providing fertility treatments to avoid legal trouble.
This caused the US news cycle to last week be dominated by discussions of ‘fetal personhood’ – the idea that a fetus should have the same legal rights as a child – which have left the Republican Party divided and confused.
Though they mostly refrain from condemning the procedure outright, many of GOP’s elite evangelicals believe IVF is acceptable only for married couples and only if no embryos are destroyed. This makes the premise untenable, as although an individual doctor may occasionally agree to the extremely non-standard practice of implanting every embryo created in the process, this can be dangerous to the mother and falls afoul of well established medical best practices.
Establishment Republicans, meanwhile, seem shocked and concerned at the consequences of the politics they have pursued for decades. Texas’s Catholic governor, Greg Abbott has scrambled to express support for IVF, while Donald Trump has called for the Alabama state legislature to find a workaround to protect it.
Make no mistake: things are only going to get weirder and more dangerous from here.
As someone who grew up evangelical in America’s Bible Belt in the 1980s and 1990s, it was drilled into my head that ‘life begins at conception’ and that abortion ‘kills babies’ from as far back as I can remember.
Over the decades, I’ve watched mostly white, right-wing Christians push state-level fetal personhood bills and constitutional amendments across the country – most of which always seemed doomed to fail.
But as I noted in a previous column, “the point of introducing outrageous legislation isn’t always to pass it”. Sometimes, I explained, it is “to throw fuel on the fire of moral panic and/or to push the envelope on some political matter.”
And sometimes, I’ll add now, continually hammering away at an extremist policy that initially seems politically impossible makes the thing less and less impossible until it becomes, well, possible.
So while those Christian politicians’ early efforts to push fetal personhood might have seemed Quixotic to those who even bothered to take notice of them, in recent years, some have begun to pass.
It was the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in June 2022, which overturned the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade precedent that legalised abortion, that opened the floodgates to horrors like the recent ruling from Alabama’s state supreme court.
Indeed, the Alabama ruling not only cited Dobbs but also came with a concurrence by the state’s chief justice, Tom Parker, that is worth quoting at some length here for its unapologetic theocratic language:
the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.
The concurrence continues to explicitly invoke God, the Bible, various theologians and divine punishment for ‘sinful’ policies (such as not considering embryos to be persons).
Its language and content resemble the Christian nationalism I was taught in the evangelical schools I attended as a child, right down to the insistence that God’s pronouns – always he/him, obviously – must be capitalised.
Since 2016, when Trump was elected president (though he lost the popular vote) with the robust backing of white evangelical Protestants, it has felt to me like the US itself is turning into a Christian school.
That trend continues to accelerate, both via state legislation and state and federal court decisions, despite the Democrats’ control of both the presidency and the Senate. Individual moral and specifically bodily autonomy is under relentless attack, which should be gravely concerning to any American who is queer and/or possesses a uterus.
IVF may ultimately become the exception that proves the rule here. Wealthy Republicans and even wealthy evangelicals specifically are emotionally invested in access to fertility treatments – that much has become clear over the last week.
No strangers to hypocrisy, they may square the circle and come up with a way to protect access to these treatments by somehow arguing that embryos and fetuses are people with rights in most instances, just not when it comes to IVF.
But even if they manage to do so, we cannot expect the same for issues of bodily autonomy in which these elite Republicans and right-wing Christians are not invested, or are outright hostile to, such as abortion care and LGBTQ+ rights.
This should not be surprising; American right-wingers love to police and control other people’s bodies, so long as they themselves are not affected. For that reason, it seems to me that this country’s parade of authoritarian horrors has only just begun.
No women or LGBTQ Americans will be truly safe, even in states controlled by Democrats, so long as the U.S. Supreme Court remains stacked with the right-wing Christians who brought us Dobbs.
