Alabama’s IVF Dilemma  

I t is one of life’s great mysteries that good can come from evil. Take the young man and woman from different European countries who, having survived Nazi persecution, meet in a Jewish refugee camp in the aftermath of the Second World War and go on to have a lifelong, devoted marriage. This is the true story of my friend’s grandparents, and no doubt countless others like them. Of course, my friend has never argued that his existence — dependent on his grandparents’ meeting — justifies the Holocaust. And neither, surely, would anyone argue that because there should not be such a thing as genocide, his family “should not exist.”  

Never mind how, the fact is they’re here, and the world is better for it.  

That means and ends can be judged independent of one another is obvious to most people, most of the time. And yet, for some reason, many claim not to understand this principle when it applies to pro-life opposition to in vitro fertilization — an industry that uses methods contrary to human dignity, relies on the routine creation and destruction of embryos for profit, and from which, nevertheless, come healthy babies and happy families whose existence is undeniably a good thing.  

Here we turn to Alabama where last month, the Republican state legislature faced a dilemma following the state supreme court’s clarification that “extrauterine children” are covered under the state’s long-standing wrongful-death statute.  

As NR summarized in our editorial, the plaintiffs in the suit were not “pro-life activists hostile to IVF,” but rather three couples who “wanted to have children via IVF. But a patient wandered into the facility where the clinic stored embryos and dropped several of them,” ending their lives.  

As we noted then, the ruling, while consistent with both existing Alabama law and the observation that human life begins at conception, was perceived as a political liability by Republicans, whose leaders began falling over themselves to say how wonderful the IVF industry is and how it deserves free rein.  

The political strategy is obvious. With abortion, the only children are dead ones. With IVF, the dark side is obscured in that for every dozen or so embryos killed or frozen, there is often at least one who makes it to birth. Focusing on him, instead of his destroyed or abandoned siblings, is not only politically palatable but seems — if you ignore the million or so embryos on ice, the millions more thrown in medical waste bins, as well as the argument that life is a gift to be received not a product to be manufactured — sort of “pro-life.”  

Panicked by the state supreme court decision, which resulted in an immediate pause on in-state fertility clinics’ activities, and responding to political pressure nationwide, Alabama’s Republican-led legislature passed measures in both chambers that granted legal immunity to IVF providers “for death or damage to an embryo.”  

State representative Terri Collins, a Republican who sponsored the house version of the bill, cast it as a mere stopgap. The legislation would “open our clinics for these families,” which would be followed by a “longer discussion” starting this week that will explore, according to Politico, options such as “a Louisiana law that has since the 1980s barred embryos from being discarded, or changes to the state’s constitution, which emphasizes the rights of ‘unborn children.’” 

One IVF advocate, speaking to Politico on behalf of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, was pleased to see legislators protecting IVF but suggested that “without a more permanent and thorough fix, it will be difficult to recruit new physicians to the state and build their practices so they can continue to provide the best possible care to Alabamians.”  

In a sense, this ambiguity is the best defense available for pro-life lawmakers who voted for this legislation — it’s an emergency and time-limited measure that still deters the expansion of IVF facilities.  

Still, that doesn’t suffice. Alabama bans abortion in all stages of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Administering an abortion is punishable by up to twelve months in jail. Why, then, should there be an exception for children conceived via IVF? Say abortion were legal in the first trimester in Alabama but was suddenly challenged. How many Republicans would rush to grant immunity to abortionists?  

State senator Bobby Singleton, the Democratic minority leader and an ardent supporter of “abortion rights,” taunted his Republican colleagues on this point: “What happens to those children that are left in that cold freezer, those babies?” He pointed out Republicans’ “hypocrisy.” When GOP state senator Timothy Melson, a retired medical doctor who sponsored the bill, noted that IVF providers “frequently eliminate the ones that aren’t optimal,” Singleton chimed in, “That’s abortion now!”  

The difference between advancing less restrictive bans — say, prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks as opposed to entirely — is that it can be framed as a step in the right direction. Even if in truth its proponents have no intention of pursuing further restrictions, they can still maintain their credibility.  

GOP state representative Arnold Mooney, who abstained from voting, said, “I don’t know the right answer to where we are.” He added: “I hate the fact that we have been put in a position to have to deal with something that wasn’t a problem. Things were working fine.”  

That about sums it up. The pro-life issue is one on which many Republicans exhibit the sensibilities of their European counterparts, who settle for the public’s popular compromise regardless of its moral coherence.  

If the argument is one of political prudence, Republicans should say so: making clear they wish to prevent abortions that occur in the IVF industry and will at least try (as does Louisiana) to regulate the industry to ensure it’s consistent with the state’s respect for unborn life.  

If they fail to do so, they deserve to be attacked as hypocrites. Most abortions occur in the first trimester, when unborn children are younger than twelve weeks old — if they deserve Alabama’s protection, why not those in IVF facilities?