Richard Drew/AP Photo
An embryologist uses a microscope to view an embryo, October 3, 2013, in New York.
The Republicans have dug themselves an exquisite hole on the question of fetal personhood. Last week’s ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court held that under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act a frozen embryo is a person. That in turn led the court to uphold a case in which a lab that accidentally destroyed frozen embryos was found liable for damages; the court also opened the door to manslaughter charges.
This is the logical conclusion of right-wing dogma on when life begins. The chief justice, Tom Parker, in a concurring opinion added a nice theocratic touch: “All human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
But even in Alabama, the absurdity was immediately apparent. The risks of other such prosecutions led at least three providers of in vitro fertilization to suspend Alabama operations. The Alabama legislature scrambled for some kind of a fix. One Republican politician after another seemed on both sides of the issue.
“Embryos, to me, are babies,” Nikki Haley said when asked about the decision, but then tried to hedge by adding that “we need to be incredibly respectful and sensitive” about IVF situations. Donald Trump, whose three Supreme Court nominees made possible the overturning of Roe v. Wade and made possible the Alabama ruling, had a better nose for public opinion. “We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder! That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America,” Trump said on his social media website.
Contradictions like this are going to continue to haunt Republicans throughout the campaign. In vitro fertilization now accounts for about 2 percent of all births. Polls cited by a panicky National Republican Senatorial Committee show that about 80 percent of Americans support the IVF option, including a majority of right-to-lifers and evangelicals.
It is not just the sheer extremism of the claim that an embryo is a person that frightens normal voters, but the lust for criminal prosecution. That is of a piece with Republican efforts to prosecute women who have abortions as well as their doctors, and the efforts to chase women and providers who travel to states where abortion is legal.
This is the logical conclusion of a doctrine that claims to cherish the personhood of the unborn but denies the rights of personhood to adult women. No amount of tactical backtracking by Republican candidates will save them from the more fundamentalist allies in their own camp. The right-to-life dogma is all of a piece, and badly at odds with what most Americans believe about life.
