When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the floodgate was opened for the largest rollback of women’s reproductive rights in the history of the United States. For the first time since 1973, states began restricting access to reproductive healthcare.
Generations later, the Alabama Supreme Court took reproductive rights restrictions a step further in a ruling last month that declared frozen embryos were to be considered children under Alabama state law. The consequences of this ruling have extreme and potentially disastrous consequences for women in Alabama and the future of fertility options in the U.S. broadly.
The ruling stemmed from a wrongful death suit filed by three couples whose embryos were accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic in 2020. While frozen embryos are critical to help couples struggling to create a family and should be protected, the claim that these embryos are children has serious implications for all future in vitro fertilization patients.
Attaching legal personhood to embryos could lead to the downfall of IVF and other fertility practices, as it would theoretically criminalize embryos going unused. It is well-known in the fertility and reproductive health professions that not all embryos are viable. As such, medical associations around the world are speaking out against the state court’s classification, claiming that giving frozen embryos personhood has no basis in medical fact.
While I respect the fact that people of different religious beliefs and moral codes have different ethical stances on when life begins, it is ridiculous that we as a nation still struggle to implement the principle of separation of church and state set out by the founding fathers.
Religious justification from Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker is a prime example of the bias present in the justice system.
“Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Parker wrote in his concurring opinion.
Christianity may be the most prevalent religion in the U.S., but it is certainly not the only one. Around 37% of Americans do not share the Christian belief system, which is exactly why the separation of church and state is essential and must be observed. Creating laws that affect the entire population based on religious beliefs that the entire population does not share is unethical and fundamentally corrupt.
Allowing Christianity to be the guiding moral framework of the American legal system also calls into question which sect of the religion is “correct” and which denomination gets to decide what is the truly righteous thing to do.
The people who wrote the Bible knew nothing about fertilization or embryos, as this was a science discovered much later in history. So, who exactly gets to decide that God would not want families to have access to fertility care or control over their own embryos?
I consider myself a Christian, but the religious conservative movements currently attacking reproductive rights are simultaneously attacking personal freedom and gender equality under the guise of possessing the moral high ground.
IVF is a valuable, scientific tool to help people start a family, and so the ruling in Alabama threatens the future of thousands of families across the country. For a party who is supposedly so worried about the declining birth rate, it feels somewhat ironic to focus this heavily on restricting access to fertility care.
A frozen embryo is not the same as a baby, and we should trust the opinions of scientists and doctors, not a few state Supreme Court justices who are incapable of separating their personal religious views from their decision making, which affects millions of people.
We must start enforcing a real separation of church and state and deny those in positions of power the ability to justify their biased rulings with their belief in a higher power. The American legal system is not the Christian church, and it is high time that people respected the difference.
Liv Briley is a senior integrated marketing communications major from Lemont, Ill.
