Alabama Embryo Ruling

 We are very Pro Life and I’m guessing that almost all my readers are also Pro Life.  So what do we make of this ruling out of Alabama that is declaring embryos sitting in freezers as “children”?  If this holds, this would mean that if a lady and her husband had 6 fertilized eggs sitting in the freezer at an infertility center,  they used 2 and she got pregnant and had a child, they could never discard the other 4 in the freezer.  They would have to sit in the freezer in perpetuity.  Someone (kids, grandkids, great grandkids) would have to pay for the care of those embryos sitting in the freezer forever and ever.

I’d like to hear some of your comments on this because maybe I don’t understand what an embryo in the freezer actually is.  I know an embryo in the womb of a woman is a tiny person who has had the spark of life already activated.  But is an embryo sitting in -65 degree freezer really a “child” that demands protection?  After all, we couldn’t freeze a fetus at -65 for years and then expect it to grow again once we implanted it back into a uterus…could we?

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CNN — 

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, Alabama’s Supreme Court said frozen embryos are children and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death – a decision that puts back into national focus the question of when life begins and one that reproductive rights advocates say could have a chilling effect on infertility treatments and the hundreds of Alabamians who seek them each year.

And, critics say, the ruling could soon have consequences nationally as other states could attempt to define embryos as people. Already, one religious group is using the Alabama ruling as precedent in a Florida abortion rights case.

“This is part of a long and strategic march towards entrenching this ideology of fetal personhood, that is at the heart of controlling pregnant people, their decisions and their birth outcomes,” Dana Sussman, the deputy executive director of legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, told CNN.

The Alabama ruling, which was released Friday, stems from two lawsuits filed by three sets of parents who underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures to have babies and then opted to have the remaining embryos frozen.

The parents allege in December 2020, a patient at the Mobile hospital where the frozen embryos were being stored walked into the fertility clinic through an “unsecured doorway,” and removed several embryos from the cryogenic nursery, the state’s Supreme Court ruling said. The patient’s hand was “freeze-burned” by the extremely low temperatures the embryos were stored in and the patient dropped them on the floor, killing them, according to the ruling.

The parents sued for wrongful death but a trial court dismissed their claims, finding the “cryopreserved, in vitro embryos involved in this case do not fit within the definition of a ‘person’ or ‘child,’” according to the ruling.

But in a stunning reversal last week, the state Supreme Court disagreed, noting “extrauterine children” – or, unborn children “located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed” – are children, and they are covered under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor law.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/20/us/alabama-embryo-law-ruling-supreme-court/index.html