I.V.F., the state abortion law, and the embryoic dignity issue: a critical reaction to the Alabama Senate, which has come out against the anti-abortion movement

Before November’s elections, there is a question about how the anti-abortion movement reacts to Republican efforts to sideline it. One of the candidates running for Senate in Arizona who once labeled abortion a sin, now supports both a federal ban on abortion and a state abortion ban that is being tied up in court.

Leading figures from the movement signed a letter to the Governor of Alabama urging her to veto the bill. “Both science and logic have made it clear that embryos must be accorded the same human rights and level of dignity that all other human beings — at every developmental stage of life — are granted,” they wrote.

The Republicans would prefer you to believe there is no dispute within the ranks of the party. A party leader came forward to praise I.V.F. after Alabama’s Supreme Court took the logic of fetal personhood laws seriously and issued a ruling that ruined infertility care in the state.

The bill’s sponsors in the Alabama House and Senate claim this immunity bill is just a stop-gap measure to allow fertility treatments to resume while lawmakers address the remaining questions raised by the court ruling, which could take a while to work out.

Many clinics paused IVF services last month after the procedure was thrown into uncertain legal territory by the state Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are “children” with a constitutional right to life.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham, one of the largest IVF providers in the state, released a statement that the law will allow them to restart in-vivo fertilization treatments.

The immunity law will be in effect on Thursday, and one IVF provider told NPR they would have patients waiting for embryo transfers on that day.

A State Senator’s Perspective on the Alabama Immunity Law and its Implications for Embryo Detection, Treatment and Personhood

Corinn O’Brien with the Fight for Alabama Families Coalition said that they were hearing loud and clear that this affects Alabama families. She’s one of hundreds of advocates who have been lobbying at the statehouse, and says that effort- plus over 20 thousand emails- ramped up pressure on Alabama lawmakers to take action.

“The last couple of weeks have been devastating for people and they’ve been left in the lurch of what’s going to happen, so I sympathize with them,” says O’Brien, who is pregnant with her second child through in-vivo fertilization.

Tim Melson, the doctor who sponsored the legislation, said that there was too much difference of opinion on when life began.

During the floor debate, Melson admitted the legislation leaves many unanswered questions, like whether an embryo frozen for three decades before implantation would be considered 30 years old at birth.

Melson told NPR that he originally intended his bill to define personhood, but removed that language in order to smooth the bill’s passage. Still, he argued, his immunity bill accomplishes the short term goal of allowing people to resume treatment without fear that another change to state law could lead to future prosecution.

Rep. Terri Collins, whose identical House immunity bill made it through a vote just three days after being introduced, stressed to her colleagues that the bill is a necessary legislative Band-Aid.

“We are providing with this legislation a pretty broad immunity at this moment in time which to me gives us the impetus to continue to work on this issue for a long term fix,” she said.

Democratic state Rep. Chris England worried that once an immunity bill is signed, lawmakers will lose their sense of urgency and fail to revisit the question of embryonic personhood.

England said during the debate that there’s an issue with pausing the clinics and he thinks immunity will shield them from being sued. Even so, he urged his colleagues to add personhood language to the existing bill.

The immunity bill does nothing to address a quagmire of remaining legal questions like whether doctors who destroy an embryo outside of int’l therapy could face homicide charges.

Republican state Rep. Ernie Yarbrough likened clinics’ routine destruction of embryos to a “holocaust”, and advocated to keep the pause on IVF in order to “make sure we are not endorsing the destruction of lives of children.”

In a speech that included quotes from the Bible, the TV show Reacher, and the lyrics of 90’s rapper Vanilla Ice, Yarbrough introduced an amendment to the bill to add that “immunity will not be provided to a person who intentionally causes the death of an unborn child.”

The immunity bill made it through as a simple, two paragraph piece of legislation because of the amendment that would have wiped out the entire intent of the bill.