The Shockingly Arrogant, Careless, and Pernicious Attitude of the Alabama Supreme Court opinion conferring personality on newly formed embryos vividly illustrates the consequences of another reckless decision: the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court.
The Alabama court held last week that cryogenically preserved fertilized eggs for couples having difficulty conceiving are legally and morally equivalent to newborn babies and, for that matter, to adults in their 20s. According to the court, they are all human beings protected by Alabama law to exactly the same extent.
The decision paves the way for wrongful death lawsuits filed by couples whose embryos were destroyed by a patient who entered an in vitro fertilization clinic through an unsecured entrance, collected several frozen fertilized eggs and, surprised by their cryogenic temperature , he dropped them immediately. floor. Reversing the trial court's ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court held that this conduct could be subject to a wrongful death claim, making it indistinguishable from, say, the death of a 2-year-old child negligently abandoned in a sweltering car.
Surprisingly, the sole focus of the court's analysis was whether Alabama's wrongful death law covers “extrauterine children, that is, unborn children who are outside a biological womb at the time they are killed.” The court did not even attempt to debate the distinction between a newly fertilized egg (what biologists call a blastocyst, a ball of up to a few hundred cells that measures a fraction of a millimeter in diameter) and a fully formed child born at term. .
It is customary to observe the parade of horrors that such an extreme decision could cause. But here the parade has already begun.
Alabama's largest hospital announced Wednesday that it would no longer offer expectant parents in vitro fertilization procedures due to the substantial threat of criminal liability for mishandling fertilized eggs. Other providers followed suit Thursday. Medical staff trying to help couples conceive have suddenly been deemed potential murderers by the courts.
The immediate consequences do not end there. Women who use intrauterine devices or morning-after pills, which can affect fertilized eggs, are, in the eyes of Alabama law, baby killers.
The court's supposed legal opinion, in fact, is based on the principle that life begins at conception, a matter of religious faith to which only a small minority of the country subscribes.
Chief Justice Tom Parker's concurring opinion employs quotations and teachings from Scripture as if they had the legal force of the Bill of Rights. Passages from Genesis and Exodus, various theological treatises, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards take their place alongside the writings of United States Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Neil M. Gorsuch. All rally in support of the view that “God made every person in his image…and human life cannot be unjustly destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who regards the destruction of his image as an affront to itself”.
But apart from the wrath of God, there is no attempt to rationalize the legal equation of a collection of frozen, formless cells with a living person. The court simply dismisses it with the syllogistic reasoning that Alabama statutory law specifies that human life includes “unborn” life.
This clumsiness undermines the entire opinion. The critical question for the state is not whether an embryo of a given age can be said to be, in some sense, alive; it's about whether he is a human being deserving of the rights and protections afforded to all of us, which is a much broader and more complicated designation.
A stadium full of theologians, philosophers, ethicists and politicians could not give an authoritative answer to that question. And in the absence of such a response, how can the State so profoundly affect the freedom of women and aspiring parents?
It is in that sense that the Alabama Supreme Court's opinion goes directly back to the United States Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The idea of shoving this biased religious treatise down Americans' throats would have been a failure in Roe v. Wade, who affirmed the constitutional interests of women's freedom in the face of a moralistic and overreaching State.
After Dobbs, those rights are featherweight. The outrage is due to the poor reasoning and grotesque overreach of the United States Supreme Court.
Alabama is also not the only state that seeks to enshrine in law the fundamentally religious position that human life begins at the moment of conception. Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma issued similar proclamations in the wake of Dobbs.
The Alabama Supreme Court takes this evil presumption to its logical end, stripping every American under its jurisdiction of the right to make his or her own decisions on a matter of the highest moral and practical importance. That is the antithesis of freedom.
Harry Litman is the host of Podcast “Talking about federals”. @harrylitman
