Pro-Lifers Are Up Against a Real-Life Crisis
By Judith Levine,
The Intercept
| 04. 04. 2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos in an accident at a fertility clinic, heightened the conflict between ideology and electability, already about as high as it could get after June 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization freed the states to snub overwhelming public opinion, enact radical abortion bans — and then lose badly in the midterms. But now the ideologues have more than a political problem. They have a moral one too.
When most of Alabama’s fertility clinics suspended operations in fear that dropping a vial might be prosecuted as manslaughter and patients were left anguished in the middle of time-sensitive treatments, the GOP faced the present, palpable harms inflicted on real people by its abstract religious pieties. And these harmed parties were not baby killers. They were among the 1 in 7 women afflicted by infertility, and they were desperate to have babies...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...