As I am sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by my mother and three of my sisters, I can’t help but feel defeated. I fear their future lies in the hands of people who don’t even know them. If you aren’t quite sure where my fear is stemming from, allow me to get you caught up.
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are considered children under state law. IVF is a medical procedure in which a female’s eggs are retrieved from the ovaries and are combined in a lab with male sperm. The egg, once fertilized, is now an embryo and is transferred to the uterus. Sometimes this procedure can lead to pregnancy, but oftentimes one has to endure multiple rounds of IVF in order to get pregnant.
The Alabama case stemmed from a wrongful death lawsuit in which three couples filed suit after their embryos were accidentally destroyed. IVF is an incredibly expensive, time-consuming and invasive journey, and I feel deeply for the couples who may have lost their chance at creating a baby.
However, there are other ways to get justice. Putting the rest of the country at risk for an unfortunate mistake will not bring back the embryos they lost.
But why is it dangerous to start protecting embryos as children? If we begin protecting “life” at such an early stage, the IVF procedure itself will become almost unattainable to the average American. It also raises a lot of unanswerable questions that many clinics won’t risk a lawsuit for.
Let’s say a woman gets pregnant after her first round of IVF, therefore she is no longer in need of any other embryos created in the process. This woman, under the new ruling, could be brought to court if she decided to destroy the embryos she is no longer in need of.
But if she doesn’t use or destroy the embryos, who is responsible for them? How long do they need to be stored? Who is paying for the cost of storage?
IVF already costs tens of thousands of dollars, and this ruling will only amplify the cost and the risk. Clinics in Alabama have already halted IVF operations out of fear of repercussions, and, for some couples, this is their only chance to get pregnant.
This ruling is exactly what people feared would happen after the overturning of Roe V. Wade. So many people are obsessed with the potential of life, but time and time again, our courts fail to defend women who are already very much alive.
In an article from the BBC, a quote from Alabama’s Chief Justice Tom Parker reads, “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
This is the same man who attended a birthday celebration in honor of Nathan Bedford Forrest—a founder of the Ku Klux Klan—and who condemned his colleagues in an op-ed for voting to reverse a 17-year-old’s death sentence.
He is supposedly against “effacing God’s glory,” yet he outwardly supported a hateful and racist man and was spiteful when a 17-year-old wasn’t murdered.
For men like Parker, it is all about how much of a woman’s life they can control. They want to tell us how to get pregnant when we have to be pregnant, how they can punish us if we decide not to be, and they strike fear in anyone who aids or supports a woman’s right to choose so we are left with no options.
What happened to the couples who lost their embryos is devastating, but the state of Alabama is punishing all women with their new ruling. And who’s to say this is where it stops?
The right-wing obsession with potential life could very well extend to outlawing birth control and contraceptives next. If we give them this inch, they will take more than a mile.
It’s baffling to me how quickly action was taken when mere embryos were destroyed, but when an unarmed Black man is murdered, or when the homeless population is on the rise, or when our opioid epidemic is at its worst, our lawmakers are nowhere to be seen.
It’s not about protecting life—it is about how much of a woman’s body can be controlled through bible quotes and bullshit votes.
