Alabama Places IVF Treatment In The National Spotlight With New State Supreme Court Ruling

Alabama is in the news again, and we're afraid that it's not a lighthearted Alabama Man story this time. In 2018, we Alabamians voted to change the language of our state constitution to extend legal personhood and its protections to preborn humans. Alabama Amendment 2, State Abortion policy (2018) made it state policy to 'recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life' and to state that no provisions of the constitution provide a right to an abortion or require funding of abortions. On May 15, 2019, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed a bill into law prohibiting all abortions in the state except those necessary to prevent a serious health risk to the woman. It also made an exception for any "act to terminate the pregnancy of a woman when the unborn child has a lethal anomaly." House Bill 314, called the Human Life Protection Act, reclassifies performing an abortion as a felony punishable with up to 99 years in prison for doctors performing it.

This vote and ruling has now been used to classify frozen embryos in IVF clinics as persons and extend to them the same protections as any other citizen of the state. Here is our Vice President on this decision: “This decision is outrageous—and it is already robbing women of the freedom to decide when and how to build a family.” We can't merely ignore that her language here is precisely the same language used when abortion access is restricted. The glaring difference is that IVF respects unborn life (for the most part) and abortion treats human life as disposable. Alabamians passed Amendment 2 with 59% of the vote. This is the democracy that Democrats and leftists are always screeching at us about. They don't like it when they're not in the majority. Now, full disclosure, this topic is difficult for this writer to write. There is no easy answer or solution here, but we can't just treat human children as if they don't matter and can be simply tossed away. Responses were obviously mixed:

“Democrats still want humans to be property instead of people.” - “The Alabama embryo decision is also robbing same-sex couples of possibly the only avenue they have to have a family.” -- Now, IVF is not the only avenue available to same-sex couples to have a family. Adoption is still usually their go-to, and surrogacy for them is on the rise. Neither of which *requires* IVF. “Welcome to Theocracy in Alabama. They'll on their way to an Iranian system of governing.” -- Laughable, but leftists dearly love their hysterical hyperbole. -- “Women have the freedom to decide when and how to build a family. BEFORE there's a baby.” -- Correct, and the issue that pro-life/anti-abortion folks have with IVF is that multiple children are created with IVF to increase a woman's chances of implantation, but the ones not placed into the uterus are simply … tossed away. “Oh, boo hoo, Alabama is recognizing the right of human beings to live. How sad for you.”

“It is outrageous to treat human beings at any developmental stage, like disposable trash. No one is robbing women by protecting little human beings.🤦🏻‍♀️” - “So they should have ruled that frozen embryos are property? Yeah, y'all did that once before. We fought a war over it.” - “Hypocrisy is when you advocate killing of babies in abortion on one hand and talk about building families on the other.” -- Joanne Schroeder @JoanneS12906859: “So the GOP wants every woman to have babies whether they want to or not AND they want to stop people who want to have a baby to have one. Which is it?” -- Well, Joanne? The GOP is not demanding or legislating that women MUST have babies. Just that they shouldn't be permitted to kill the ones that they do create, intentionally or not.

'Here is a deep thought that of course would never occur to you. Let’s say tomorrow an advanced race of extraterrestrial aliens landed in front of the Lincoln monument and asked to meet our leader. Just as the leader of the aliens is reaching out its hand in friendship to the president of the United States, some random citizen pulls out a gun and shoots it to death. Is that murder? Absolutely not. This alien race is not human and our murder laws only cover humans. At worst it might be some form of animal cruelty. And maybe reckless discharge of firearm or something like that. So one of the first things we would have to do if we suddenly discovered extraterrestrial being of high intelligence is we’d have to revise our laws to say that you can’t just murder them— if we want to have even slightly decent relations with them. Indeed we would probably want to extend all “human rights“ to apply to them such as freedom of speech The larger point I am making is that there is nothing in the constitution that prevents the states or the federal government from declaring things that you normally don’t think of as people to be people. And the notion that it is wrong for the Alabama Supreme Court to follow Alabama law and declaring a fetus a person flies in the face of that reality.'

• More at: Twitchy - Alabama Places IVF Treatment in the National Spotlight With New State Supreme Court Ruling
https://twitchy.com/laura-w/2024/02/21/alabama-ivf-controversy-n2393171