No. of Recommendations: 6
After the Alabama case, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has apparently advised its candidates to make sure that their positions on the matter "align with" the public's overwhelming support for IVF treatments being available. More broadly, the NRSC wants their folks to make it clear that Republicans don't want to get in the way of people's access to IVF services:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/23...Which certainly
seems like good politics. IVF
is popular, a lot of people don't view it as having the same moral dimensions as abortion (though more below), and at first blush it seems like this is a way to try to stem the bleeding without paying a big political cost.
There is a problem with that, though. The thing about
Dobbs, and the abortion restrictions passed after it, is that they didn't reduce the number of abortions in the U.S. Even though 14 states banned them outright, and seven adopted tighter restrictions,
the number of abortions in the U.S. went up. Because abortion is widely available in most blue states, and people can (and will) travel out of state.
This is a problem for the serious pro-life faction. They wanted abortion to go down. They expected that overturning
Roe would move things in that direction. But it didn't. They've more or less done all that they can do at the state level. They can't materially reduce abortion without stopping them in blue states. And they have to be pessimistic about a national abortion ban getting through Congress
ever.
That leaves the fetal personhood effort - trying to get the SCOTUS to rule that a fetus is a "person" within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. And the legal strategy for doing that has a proven record, drawn from the incredibly successful effort to get SCOTUS to recognize a right to gay marriage. With the fetal personhood effort, you try to get enough states to treat fetuses exactly the same way as human babies (just as states started treating gay civil unions identically to straight marriages), and build up a
factual record for why the term "person" should include both fetuses and babies.
So that's the problem with being pro-IVF, or supporting things like a recently-filed Alabama bill that would exempt frozen embryos from being considered unborn children. It undermines the most plausible avenue for stopping abortions in blue states.
Albaby
P.S. Turning back to that moral dimension...while it's possible to make some arguments allowing for some abortion exceptions in the incredibly painful situations of raped minor children or fetuses that will die in pain immediately after birth, none of those countervailing moral dimensions are really present when you're talking about healthy frozen embryos. It's hard to be okay with destroying a perfectly healthy embryo after conception simply because it's no longer wanted or needed in situations where there wasn't sex involved or any perceived lack of responsibility, and not when those factors are present, and still argue that it's all about human life and not because you are looking at the moral rectitude of the woman involved. Most people won't really look at it that way, but for those who really live and breath fights over abortion (on both sides of the issue), that type of distinction is going to make it harder for the pro-life folks to make their moral arguments, if they sign on to it. 