What Happens in Alabama DOES NOT Stay in Alabama
IVF, Abortion rights, and Christian Nationalism
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After a conservative majority of the Supreme Court, half of whom were appointed by Trump while he was president, overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion, activists knew they wouldn’t stop there. And recently a new front opened up in the right wing war on reproductive freedom.
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case involving IVF, or in-vitro fertilization, a process by which an embryo is fertilized in a laboratory and then implanted in a person’s womb. Because collecting a person’s eggs and creating the embryos is expensive, and because of the dangers of implanting more than one embryo at a time, clinics will often fertilize several eggs, and freeze the remaining embryos for a limited time. This case came about because several couples sued a clinic where their frozen embryos had been inadvertently destroyed. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the embryos were considered children and the case could proceed under Alabama’s “wrongful death of a minor” statute, and sent it back to the lower courts for litigation to continue.
So, what does this mean?
Well, first of all, it created a huge headache for clinics that provide IVF and couples who are seeking it in Alabama. After the ruling many clinics, including University of Alabama at Birmingham health system, paused their IVF programs out of fears of prosecution and liability. Couples who are trying to build families, health care providers, and clinicians are all in limbo while the litigation continues and while the state works out what this means for if and how IVF can proceed in the future.
But this ruling also has much broader implications for reproductive freedom and abortion rights. This ruling legitimizes fetal personhood claims, which assert that the moment an egg is fertilized, it’s a full person with the right to life - a fundamental pillar of the anti-abortion movement. As Elie Mystal writes in The Nation: “by giving full personhood rights to a collection of cells, the attack on IVF can almost certainly be used to further restrict abortion rights and reproductive healthcare, even in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.” You can’t abort a fetus if a fetus is a person. And if an embryo is a person, do you have to pay to keep the backup embryos in storage forever? Can they even create backup embryos? There’s a chance this leads to no IVF treatment at all in Alabama. At best it will make the process much more expensive and therefore exclusive. The government in Alabama just gained even greater control over who can get pregnant and how.
Republican officials across the country are trying to distance themselves from this ruling - like Nancy Mace who now claims to want to protect the right to IVF, but who actually co-sponsored the kind of fetal personhood bills that led us here. But, this ruling is unmistakably part of the right wing Christian nationalist movement that is so insidiously interwoven into the Republican party. The Alabama Supreme Court is made up of 9 justices all elected as partisan Republicans or appointed by Republican governors, and the concurring opinion in this case, written by Chief Justice Tom Parker, quite clearly asserted a Christian nationalist foundation for the ruling. As Mystal points out “The word “God” appears 41 times in Parker’s opinion, which also liberally quotes from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis, and theologians like Thomas Aquinus and John Calvin.”
In his opinion, Parker wrote:
“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. [Alabama’s Sanctity of Life statute] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life—that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
This kind of Christian nationalism asserts that our country was founded on Christian values and that Christian values should suffuse our government and inspire its leaders. Though these Christian values are unrecognizable to many practicing Christians, they are part and parcel of the white evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity that has become so endemic to right wing politics. Consider Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who wanted to use government funds to set up a Noah’s Ark theme park and who uses a surveillance app so that he and his seventeen year old son could monitor each other’s phone for porn. Consider also the governor of Tennessee who just signed a bill that would allow public officials to refuse to perform same sex marriages on the grounds of conscience or religion - the same governor who signed laws banning gender affirming care for children and who tried to ban drag before it was overturned by the courts.
This movement uses the guise of Christianity and the power conferred by widely recognized religious authority to legitimize their politics, but whatever they might believe this movement is not about religious beliefs and it is not about protecting children - it is about control. Fetal personhood laws give them the right to decide who has children, and when, and how. Rigid gender roles and racial hierarchies empower and enrich these men, their families and their friends, particularly those already in positions of power. They ban books because they do not want us to have access to stories that show us different ways of being, that might affirm us and inspire us to find new ways of living, ways to empower and uplift each other, to create stronger communities and to dismantle the power structures based on bigotry and oppression. They want to keep us too small and scared to fight back.
This is not a new strain in American politics. In fact, if Christian nationalists are right about one thing, it’s that this kind of oppression was built into our founding. While freedom of religion is a pillar of our Constitution, we can’t ignore that Christianity was often used as a justification for slavery and for the oppression of women, as Heather Cox Richardson talked about in her post on the Alabama ruling. And religious oppression, forced conversion, and missionary violence were key tenets of colonialism, as white Christians attempted to eradicate indigenous culture and religion in the United States and around the world.
This movement seized its moment with Trump’s election, and though he is about as un-Christian as a person can be in any interpretation, they’ve found great success under his leadership. In his first term, he appointed three Supreme Court justices, shifting the balance of the court, allowing SCOTUS to overturn Roe v. Wade and invigorate the fetal personhood movement we see surging in state legislatures and courts across the country. The Trump administration’s attacks on trans people fueled a hateful movement targeting trans kids and trans health care.
And it’s not going to stop there. Last week Politico revealed plans amongst Trump allies to infuse Christian nationalism into Trump’s second term - including a document that literally lists “Christian nationalism” as a bullet point of their plans. And while the documents obtained by Politico don’t list exactly what that would mean, in his post, Dan Pfeiffer noted what public statements by movement leaders suggest this would include: “a national abortion ban; using FDA authority to ban or greatly restrict access to abortion medication (a defacto abortion ban); undermining marriage equality; attacking the rights and freedoms of trans people; ending no-fault divorce; invoking the Insurrection Act to stop protests; making it harder to access contraception; ending surrogacy; and getting rid of sex education in schools.”
Other Trump allies and right wing conservatives have suggested that ending recreational sex should also be on the list.
But we don’t have to elect people who are weirdly obsessed with what happens in our bedrooms, doctor’s offices, and under our clothes. We don’t have to succumb to a movement that wants to control what we read, who we love, when we have kids or how we have sex. We can push back against the racism and bigotry that wants to turn us against our friends and family, that wants us to surveil and attack anyone who might look or think differently about the world. As much as religious justification for violence and discrimination is part of our history, so too are movements for suffrage, abolition, civil rights, and equality. So too are the land back movements, and movements pushing for peace in Palestine and around the world, the movements demanding better access to health care, an actual justice system, and an end to poverty.
It’s not an easy fight. Incompetent and blustering though Trump is, he still may very well win the presidency, and bring along a much more zealous and thorough governmental apparatus. There are, as evidenced by what’s happened just this week, already people in positions of great power trying to remake our reality into their dystopian vision. But we too are powerful. We can keep electing people from the President to the city council who make space for progress. We can keep fighting for better access to books, health care, and the right to thrive. We too are climbing the ranks and fighting back.
And, though it might not always seem like it, there are a hell of a lot more of us. So let’s go.
If you’re ready to get started, check out www.votesaveamerica.com for more ways to get involved, or reach out to me and I can help you figure out your next steps.
Love this Sara.