Trump Admin Rebrands Frozen Embryos As 'Children Who Already Exist'
And we're back to the 'fetal personhood' nonsense.
Despite the creeping right-wing obsession with “pronatalism,” demands that people have “more babies than they can afford” (weird sentiment for those who complain about that exact thing when people have to go on public assistance to take care of their children, but okay), and Donald Trump’s pledge to make in-vitro fertilization free for anyone who wants it, Republicans have been surreptitiously going after IVF, likely in an effort to appease anti-abortion-rights activists.
This past weekend, with very little fanfare, the Texas Republican Party voted to add a plank to their platform citing their desire to “protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy” — even though 65 percent of actual Texas Republican voters support keeping it legal and accessible.
Then, this week, also with very little fanfare, the Trump administration changed the language on its page promoting the Department of Health and Human Services Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program to replace the word “embryos” in several sections with the words “child,” “children” and “children who already exist.” The EAA program is a relatively obscure program that provides grants to organizations that facilitate the adoption of unused embryos created during the IVF process, usually by couples struggling with infertility or same sex couples.
The summary now includes 37 instances of the words child or children, including:
OPA's Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program recognizes embryo adoption first and foremost as a response to the needs of children who already exist and are in need of a family […]
The program places the best interests of the child at the center of all activities, encompassing the child's right to know their biological origins and medical history, the child's right to be placed with adoptive parents who have undergone rigorous screening […]
Rather than addressing the reproductive needs of prospective parents, it serves the needs of a child already in existence, offering that child the opportunity for life within a stable and loving family. This distinction is fundamental to the design and purpose of this program.
The language change is something of a way for the administration to have their cake and eat it, too, because while the vast majority of the country supports IVF, anti-abortion-rights activists oppose it due to the creation of these excess embryos, which they like to pretend are fully formed humans. Basically, the logic there is that if they can get those embryos classified as human beings with a right to be gestated and born into existence, the easier it will be to institute a national abortion ban on the same grounds.
Naturally, reproductive rights experts are a tad concerned.
Via HuffPost:
“This is essentially a Trojan horse,” said Dorianne Mason, [the National Women’s Law Center's] senior director of health equity and contraceptive access. “It’s this program that on the surface feels like a non-problematic program, but inside of it, the administration has now inserted something that is incredibly harmful.” […]
“Inserting this sort of language — referring to an embryo as a person or child — is all part of their long-term plan to eventually ban abortion,” Heather Shumaker, NWLC’s senior director of state abortion access and current lead on fetal personhood work, told HuffPost. […]
“Any effort to introduce personhood concepts into government programs is alarming because of the potential impact on IVF and other fertility treatments,” [Danielle Melfi, president and CEO of RESOLVE, a national fertility advocacy group] told HuffPost. “Policymakers should be working to protect and expand access to care, not revising federal grants in ways that raise new concerns for patients and their families.”
The language change also feels as though it is meant to exclude LGBTQ+ parents, with mentions of faith-based services and all of the language about “the best interests of the child.” Those who oppose same-sex couples adopting or using surrogates to have children have recently been trying to reframe these practices as selfish and against “the best interests of the child” and trying to suggest that there is something untoward about using a surrogate to have a child and derisively referring to it as “renting a womb” and comparing it to slavery. You know, because these people don’t generally get how consent works.
Earlier this year, Live Action’s Lila Rose and The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, along with a coalition of 47 anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, launched their “Greater Than” campaign to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and end same sex marriage, the crux of which is their claim that a child’s “right” to be raised by a mother and a father is “greater than adult desires” to be able to have and raise children. There has been a concerted effort on the Right recently to frame same-sex couples who adopt children as “groomers” who only adopt children for the purpose of sexually abusing them or using them as status symbols of some kind.
Want to donate to us but not to Substack? Click here or join our Patreon!
Previous efforts to label embryos as “children” have not gone over especially well. Two years ago, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualified as “children” for the purposes of the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act — a move that briefly forced IVF clinics in the state to close. The implications of the ruling were so incredibly unpopular that the state’s Republican supermajority Legislature immediately went ahead and passed a law exempting IVF clinics from liability under the law. Trump and other prominent Republicans also sought to distance themselves from it and to assert that they support keeping IVF legal.
All of this factors in, however, with plans to ban abortion, ban same-sex adoption/surrogacy and marriage, and generally create the kind of horrible dystopian nightmare society that so many Republicans seem to crave. Hopefully, however, this will all go over about as well as the Alabama ruling and they will be forced to distance themselves from it all over again.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Remember when the US was a hub of cutting edge science instead of a hub of religious superstition and tabloid crackpottery and quackery? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Who is going to take care of the children growing in the Reflecting Pool? Those little green children need to grow up to become mats and stromatolites.