Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled last week that, under state law, embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children. This decision is correct, as embryos are in fact children. Embryos have the unique DNA of an individual person and, given the right conditions, will grow into adults. The fact that an embryo is not within his or her mother does not negate his or her personhood.
Following the ruling, several providers of IVF in Alabama, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham, announced that they will be ceasing those services, as they are unable to provide them without accidentally and purposefully killing embryos.
In the opinion, Associate Justice Jay Mitchell explained that Alabama’s Supreme Court has long held that unborn children are recognized as children for purposes of the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which was at issue in the case. For example, when a child is killed in utero by the “wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person,” the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is applicable. Mitchell explained that the only unique factor here is the location of the unborn child, and that this is not differentiated in the law at issue.
Several conservative leaders have responded to the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision by denouncing it. Georgia Gov. Brain Kemp, for instance, came out to defend IVF as a great good that must be preserved. “You have a lot of people out there in this country that they wouldn’t have children if it weren’t for [IVF],” he said. And Nikki Haley, though she first came out to affirm the humanity of embryos — saying: “Embryos, to me, are babies. When you talk about an embryo … to me, that’s a life” — later seemed to backtrack and offer support for IVF. “Be very careful how you do this because number one, you don’t want to take those fertility treatments away from women,” Haley said. “It is very important that women like me have the ability to have that blessing of a baby.”
Conservatives need to wake up to reality: In vitro fertilization is an ugly, evil practice that not only kills millions of children but also has led to a society in which we commodify children as assets to be bought and sold and women as bodies that can be purchased. This is an industry that ought to be destroyed. Conservatives should pursue the end of IVF just as adamantly as abortion because IVF entails killing or freezing many children to create just one. This is because each in vitro treatment typically produces 12–15 children of a particular set of parents.
Parents who decide to purchase a baby through IVF must perform a whole host of evil acts. The most evil of those acts is that parents must sacrifice the lives of some of their children in order to attain the child they want. Indeed, almost every child born by IVF in the United States has siblings who were either killed or frozen so that they could be born. E. Christian Brugger of the National Catholic Register estimated that “more than two and a half million human beings” were killed or frozen in America in 2021 alone to fuel this baby-selling industry. Moreover, parents who use a “surrogate” to bear their child treat a woman’s life-giving capacity as something they can buy. And when a child is produced by “donor” eggs or sperm, he or she is created with the explicit plan of denying him or her a biological mother and/or father.
The value of the global IVF industry is expected to reach $51.73 billion by 2032. Thus, there has been a major effort on the part of these companies to conceal the twisted nature of their baby-selling and baby-killing enterprise. Evidently, that effort has been extraordinarily successful. It has ensnared a majority of American conservatives, as, according to Kellyanne Conway, 86 percent of Americans support in vitro fertilization.
Nikki Haley’s response to the Alabama Supreme Court decision suggests that some support for IVF is due to ignorance of its evil. Haley correctly maintains that embryos are human persons and rightly denounces the evil of murder. Yet she somehow misses the fact that there is no IVF without murder.
We can get a better glimpse at the inherent evil of the IVF process through some of the injustices committed to the children born through it. For example, Khloé Kardashian created a child via IVF and surrogacy with her serial cheater boyfriend, who promptly cheated again before the birth of the child, causing them to break up; Anderson Cooper paid for the creation of two children with his ex-boyfriend, who was his ex-boyfriend at the time the children were produced, thus depriving the children of their biological mother; and Amber Heard used IVF and surrogacy to create a child “on her own,” thus depriving her daughter of her father. Of course, the worst part of all this is the fact that millions of children are sacrificed on the altar of the IVF industry, but these examples of deprivation and loss should ignite concern among even those who support the killing of unborn children.
Other states have laws similar to Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. They, too, should recognize that those laws apply to embryos produced through IVF. It is the fastest way to slow the mass slaughter of innocents.
