Why ‘fetal personality’ moves right
As IVF grew in popularity, so did the concerns of its opponents. The standard practice involves creating multiple embryos, which are screened for genetic abnormalities, and the embryos that appear healthiest can be transferred. Extra embryos are often frozen; at one countthere are one and a half million frozen embryos in the United States. After a certain period of time, they can be donated to science or destroyed, just as the Catholic Church feared.
The anti-abortion movement won a partial victory in 2001 for protecting life at conception President George W. Bush banned using federal funds for embryonic stem cell research, but President Barack Obama reversed the policy eight years later.
Beginning in the late 2000s, voters in at least five states rejected ballot initiatives to enshrine fetal personhood. Voters in deep-red Mississippi seemed likely to do so pass a personality measure in 2011. But in the weeks before the election, doctors and abortion rights groups warned of the threat to IVF and contraception, and the initiative failed, 58 percent to 42 percent.
However, fetal personality became enshrined in criminal law. In 1986, Minnesota passed a law that considered the death of a fetus to be murder under certain circumstances. More than 30 states now ‘give full recognition to unborn victims of violence’ in the words of the National Committee for the Right to Life, by applying fetal murder laws at every point of development in the womb. Some states have similarly extended child abuse laws to a fetus. Hundreds of women have been continued on the basis of these statutes, often occurs using drugs during pregnancy, or, in some cases, after having had a miscarriage.
Politically, it is much easier to crack down on these women, who may be struggling with poverty or addiction, than to target the often affluent, middle-class couples who turn to IVF (the procedure costs between $12,000 and $30,000). . IVF includes former Vice President Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian who opposes abortion. Pence and his wife Karen used IVF, he revealed in 2022. Fertility treatments “deserve the protection of the law,” he says. said Than. “They gave us great comfort during those long and challenging years of struggling with infertility in our marriage.”