Those crazy Bammers gone done did it again!
In an unprecedented step and Bible-heavy opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine that even one-celled fertilized eggs are legally people. Don’t call them eggs any more, that’s insulting! The proper terms are embryonic children and extrauterine children. And a fertility clinic nitrogen tank is now to be known as a “cryogenic nursery.”
Yes, it’s batshit. Alabama already bans abortion, at any point, even in cases of rape or incest, so this was the logical next step to protect the state’s right to do whatever the hell it wants to girls and women.
Not to be outdone, lawyers with Liberty Counsel in Florida immediately filed a supplemental authority brief based on this ruling. You see, Florida’s state senate is on its way to passing SB 476, which would also establish “fetal personhood” in civil liability cases, defining “unborn child” as “a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.” (Florida already has a six-week abortion ban.)
In other words, hey y’all! Alabama did it! That means it’s good and proper lawmakin’.
The Alabama case comes from three couples who sued under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, after a hospital patient wandered into a fertility clinic’s “cryogenic nursery,” helped himself to some of the contents of the freezer with his bare hands, grabbed the plaintiff’s IVF embryos and quickly dropped and shattered the childsicles on the floor when the -240°F temperature was hurty on his hand.
But this case is now a warm and hearty blastocyst, drifting down the legal fallopian tube for the fertile endometrium of the post-Dobbs Supreme Court, where certain extremists have been taking their vitamins and praying with their hips propped on a pillow, awaiting the blessed day that “fetal personhood” can fully gestate to become the law of the land. Because if a fertilized egg is a people, it has 14th Amendment equal-protection rights as a US citizen, too!
Like everything else SCOTUS is into these days, “fetal personhood” has some seriously dystopian implications. If it’s a child, it’s subject to child endangerment laws. If it’s subject to child endangerment laws, then the state can take custody of it against its parents’ wishes, whether it’s an embryo in a freezer, a toddler locked in a basement, or four cells doing mitosis inside the uterus of a living adult host. And if an adult host endangers it, by, say, trying to get an abortion or drink a beer, then the state is obliged to treat that exactly like attempted murder.
By this logic, Butterfingers who dropped the embryo ice cube trays is just as legally culpable as if he’d kidnapped kindergartners and run them over with his car. Will this departure from “originalism” be too crazy for SCOTUS, when/if it gets there? We’ll see!
In the meantime the ruling will have some pressing implications for IVF clinics in the state, because any contract that would involve destroying fertilized eggs is seemingly now the same thing as a contract for murder, so just as invalid.
What will happen when fertility clinics go out of business, then, and the eggs’ parents don’t show up to pick up their “children” from daycare? Will Alabama child protective services get frozen tanks of eggs rolled into their offices, be responsible for babysitting them, and be charged with mass murder if they unplug them? Could the state then “adopt” out the “abandoned” fertilized eggs to approved prospective parents who can offer them a good home, like when Sofia Vergara’s ex-husband wanted to put the eggs they’d fertilized together into his new wife?
But this dipped-Baptist court could not be bothered with mulling the potential implications! They were feeling like St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion by Ambrose of Milan:
“In application to these cases, the contentions of the defendants and their amicus are not sustainable in light of the Sanctity of Unborn Life. The Legislature should also take note of § 36.06 if it considers other ethical issues related to reproduction if they arise.
The People of Alabama have declared the public policy of this State to be that unborn human life is sacred. We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982)
Evangelizing is very important to certain Christian sects, you know.
And it’s not just kooky Florida and ‘Bama, either. Post-Dobbs, 11 states have “fetal personhood” language in their laws, and fine states like South Carolina and Oklahoma are already been using their personhood definitions to do things like jail women for endangerment for drug use during pregnancy, or as in the since-dropped case from Ohio, charge a woman who had a miscarriage with “abuse of a corpse.”
Republicans who have succeeded in bans in their states are now all about expanding them, dialing the time frame back from 15 weeks to six, or to when you first lock eyes at a bar, as New Hampshire Republicans hoped to do.
Scary? Dystopian? Dehumanizing? why yes, yes it is.
"But this dipped-Baptist court could not be bothered with mulling the potential implications! "
What Molly Ivins said about Texas goes for Alabama as well:
"The only problem with Texas Baptists is that they aren't held under the water long enough."
Thought experiment for the day:
An IVF clinic is on fire. You rush inside to see if you can help anyone who is trapped to get out safely. Entering the lab room, you see a tray full of 100 petri dishes containing frozen embryos and a four year old child cowering in the corner.
You only have time to rescue the child or the tray of frozen embryos. Who do you rescue?