Alabama IVF ruling opens new front in election year abortion battles

An Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos should be considered children has created a new political nightmare for Republicans nationally, who distanced themselves from a fringe view on reproductive health that threatened to drive voters away in November.

Several Republican governors and lawmakers quickly rejected the decision by a Republican-majority court and expressed support for in vitro fertilization treatments. Some spoke about their personal experiences with infertility. Others stated that they would not support federal restrictions on IVF, drawing a distinction between their support for widely popular fertility treatments and their opposition to abortion.

“The concern for years has been that IVF would be taken away from women around the world,” Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview Thursday. “We must do everything we can to protect women’s access to IVF in every state”

But even as some Republicans pushed back on the court’s ruling, Republican lawmakers in conservative states were planning efforts to introduce bills that would declare life begins at conception — a policy that could have serious consequences for fertility treatments.

Others acted to protect IVF treatments. So said Tim Melson, a Republican senator in Alabama he planned to introduce legislation clarifying that embryos are not viable until they are implanted in a woman’s uterus.

The division was a new twist on a familiar problem for the party. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, have tried to avoid the issue of abortion and reframe their proposals—such as a 15-week federal ban—as commonsense policies that could be appealed to go. to moderate voters.

But such efforts have been repeatedly undermined by their conservative Christian allies in statehouses, who saw the fall of federal abortion rights as the beginning of efforts to ban the procedure and related reproductive medical care.

Despite the party’s efforts to control its message, that dynamic is likely to repeat itself. The elimination of federal abortion rights returned abortion policy to the states, empowering a broad collection of state legislatures and judges to answer thorny questions about the intimate details of conception, pregnancy, and birth.

An Alabama court ruled last week that embryos created through fertility treatments and stored in a medical facility should be considered children under the state law governing harmful deaths. The decision was relatively limited and applied to a specific case in which three couples sued a clinic for accidentally dropping and destroying their embryos.

But anti-abortion activists, who have pushed for years for a fertilized egg to be considered a human person, saw the decision as progress toward accepting the personality of the fetus and even granting equal rights to an embryo under the 14th Amendment.

Jason Rapert, a Republican former state lawmaker in Arkansas and president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, said his group planned to discuss potential IVF model legislation at its upcoming meeting in June. They are already working on bills in state legislatures that would declare that life begins at conception.

“We are very happy,” said Mr. Rapert, whose organization actively promotes what it calls “Biblical principles” through model legislation. “This decision is really big. It further affirms that life begins at conception.”

Democrats have seized on Republican divisions to fuel their electoral efforts, hoping the restrictions passed by states will mobilize their voters and turn moderates and independents against Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning in Michigan on Thursday, called the court’s decision “shocking” but “not surprising” given the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“This is part of their suicide pact,” Governor Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York, said of the Alabama ruling. “This is happening in a Republican state with Republican judges. It’s now being baked as part of the Republican narrative. It’s definitely fried. They can’t run away from this.”

Nikki Haley, who regularly calls on Republicans to ‘find agreementabout abortion while campaigning for president, struggled to address the ruling. On Wednesday, Ms Haley said she believed embryos created through IVF “are babies”, citing her own experience of conceiving her son through artificial insemination – a process in which no embryos are created outside a woman’s body .

After facing backlash, Ms. Haley clarified her comments hours later, saying she did not express support for the Alabama ruling.

“Alabama needs to go back and look at the law,” she said in an interview with CNN, portraying the case as a matter of parental rights, not when life begins. “We don’t want fertility treatments to be stopped.”

Ms. Haley was not the only one to cite her own experience with fertility treatments when discussing the ruling. Rep. Michelle Steel, a Republican running for re-election in a swing district in suburban Southern California, said she had had trouble getting pregnant.

“IVF allowed me, like so many others, to start my family,” said Ms. Steel, who co-sponsored a national abortion ban this Congress. “I believe there is nothing more pro-life than helping families have children, and I do not support federal restrictions on IVF”

At a forum Thursday sponsored by Politico, three Republican governors also defended the medical treatment.

“There are a lot of people in this country who wouldn’t have children without it,” said Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed a law banning abortion after six weeks.

Other Republicans tried to avoid the topic altogether. On Thursday, many declined to comment on the ruling, including Chairman Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who has placed his faith at the forefront of his politics throughout his career and has called abortion “an American holocaust.” His home state, Louisiana, has a law banning the intentional destruction of embryos.

Republican strategists have advised candidates to shy away from the most aggressive abortion restrictions and avoid longstanding labels like “pro-life,” which they say have become synonymous with banning abortion. They also urged candidates to proactively show their support for other areas of reproductive health care, including fertility treatments and contraception.

“If we have learned anything from the 2022 election, it is that Republican candidates must clearly articulate their position to voters and not let Democrats define them first,” said Steven Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that funnels millions of people. dollars in Republican campaigns.

Dan Conston, chairman of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House of Representatives’ main Republican super PAC, said it was “useful and important for swing Republicans to show empathy and sympathy and clearly express their support for consensus positions like IVF .”

Yet a small group of far-right members in Congress continue to push for anti-abortion measures that their colleagues in competitive districts want to distance themselves from.

Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida, told reporters Thursday at CPAC, a conference of conservative activists, that he believed embryos were children because “embryos grow into adults, just like us.” But he also said there are “women who have decided to seek that process,” referring to IVF, adding, “and that’s a good thing.”

Although polls show broad support for the right to abortion, less data is available on American views on fertility treatments. The Pew Research Center found in September that 61 percent of Americans and 54 percent of Republicans believe health insurance should cover the cost of fertility treatments. The services are widely used: Forty-two percent of Americans said they or someone they know had used some form of fertility treatment to have a baby.

Kellyanne Conway, a former top aide to Mr. Trump, distributed her company’s surveys to lawmakers from a conservative women’s organization in December that showed a large majority of Americans support IVF. According to a memo summarizing its findings, 85 percent of all respondents supported increasing access to IVF. Seventy-eight percent of self-identified “pro-life” voters and 83 percent of evangelicals also held that position.

Mike Pence, the former vice president and one of the anti-abortion movement’s strongest allies, and his wife Karen have publicly discussed their use of IVF treatments. “I fully support fertility treatments and I believe they deserve the protection of the law,” he says told CBS in 2022 after Roe was overturned.

But for some abortion opponents, all fertility treatments that involve creating and discarding embryos should be banned.

“I can’t name a single pro-life group that I know of that would say they agree with the IVF procedure,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life.

Some Democrats saw in the ruling the possibility of a clarifying moment for voters. One of them, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said that when she raised concerns about the future of fertility treatments immediately after Roe was rejected, some of her Republican colleagues dismissed them.

“I said once you take away the protections of Roe, the courts in the United States are going to go in a lot of different directions,” she said, “and that’s exactly what happened.”

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Grand Rapids, Michigan.