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.
Pro-life extremists need to stop trying to impose state violence on my family’s reproductive decisions. The author is very skilled at making their extreme views seem reasonable but it is clear that’s what they’re really after. Stop. Your irrational ideology has caused enough harm already.
I think the author is not trying to to make pro-life extremist views seem reasonable. They seem to be reporting on the fact that framing this particular case within the abortion debate has missed important issues, resulting in legal confusion and further deregulating an already under-regulated industry.
The pro-life agenda - imho - caused this very situation by altering the outcome of the case. The clinic may well have been negligent, but the crux of the lawsuit was that an in vitro embryo is indistinguishable from an in vivo embryo. Of course they are different. You do not have to be a scientist to understand that - it requires a pedantic failure of logic that leapfrogs common sense.
I disagree with your take of the article. The author clearly states they agree with the ruling. They agree with what you say you don’t have to be a scientist to understand. The author blames Biden for politicizing the ruling and blames democrats for that as well. The author doesn’t even fault the judge for using the bible as part of the justification for the ruling.
Fair enough.
I think you’re being taken for a ride here. If there is a need for regulation of this industry, there needs to be a more rigorous demonstration of what harms we are seeking to avoid. The author is (intentionally?) vague about what exactly they are advocating here but reading between the lines it seems to be some kind of mandated reporting of private medical information to the government and restrictions on the handling of embryos. I don’t see a need for these rules and I suspect their purpose is not to protect families but rather to enforce the author’s strict religious views onto everyone else. We’ve already seen several examples of prosecutions targeting mothers and doctors with murder charges in cases of the destruction of embryos. I suspect any reporting requirements would be abused to further this purpose.
If i’m reading it right, the author is supporting the ruling based on . . . agreeing with it?
They’re arguing it has nothing to do with abortion law, and that IVF embryos should be protected, and . . tbh I didn’t make it much farther than that.
Yeah the article is a load of crap from someone trying to justify the insanely bad ruling.
One of the authors is from the American Enterprise Institute, which wikipedia tells me is a “center-right” think tank. And that probably means we’re done here.
