In fact, the case had essentially nothing to do with abortion. Three families pursuing IVF sued their clinic after another patient apparently wandered into the facility’s freezers without the staff realizing it and picked up a container of embryos. The extreme cold burned that person’s hand, causing them to drop the container onto the floor, which killed all of the embryos it held.
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The result was perverse but painfully familiar: Policy makers, practitioners, and political activists purporting (and in many cases genuinely intending) to act in the name of vulnerable parents and children instead only advanced the interests of an already-sheltered industry, and left a fraught and sensitive domain of our society even more exposed and unprotected.
This article misses an important fact about the ruling. It totally omits all the blatant religious content of the ruling.
The legal heart of it might have been the notion that if we protect malfeasance against unborn children in the womb, we ought to do the same with unborn children outside of it. However, the language was taken directly from the Fetal Personhood movement, and is written with reference to particular religious beliefs.
That’s why IVF providers in Alabama got so panicked. It’s not necessarily that they were held liable for this accident. It was the Alabama Supreme Court signaling that they will look favorably at future challenges in other cases based on the same religious grounds. All the Fetal Personhood advocates just got told to file all the lawsuits they can afford, because the SC will have their back.