The Real Lessons of the Alabama IVF Ruling
When the Alabama Supreme Court found on February 16 that frozen embryos are protected by the state’s wrongful-death law in the same way that embryos inside a mother’s womb are, it set off one of those depressing and familiar 21st-century political firestorms. The court had heard a complicated civil case touching on questions about the rights of families undergoing in vitro fertilization and the responsibilities of the fertility industry—questions that have long been neglected, to the great detriment of the millions of American families who seek to have children by IVF each year. But just about everyone with anything to say about the Alabama case has evaded these difficult questions and resorted instead to a more familiar framework: the debate over abortion. This is an understandable impulse—both involve human beings before birth. But it’s not so simple. And for decades, the misguided conflation of abortion and reproductive technologies has left the regulation of the fertility industry strangely underdeveloped. Parents, children, clinics, and practitioners have been left, in turn, lacking even basic information, protections, and boundaries. …
