(Image via judicial.alabama.gov)
Staff Writer: Maya Arruda
Email: marruda7@umassd.edu
Alabama has always been one of the most iconic jokes online, being associated with a particular form of stereotypically “backwater” behavior, if you catch my drift. If “Sweet Home Alabama” makes you crack up every time you hear it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Well, the running joke of a state called Alabama is at it again, making bizarre life decisions that make us fellow Americans wish we could disown a state.
On February 16th, 2024, The Alabama Supreme Court decided that embryos can legally be declared as children. That’s right, embryos. Specifically, embryos being stored on ice in an IVF clinic that had not yet been implanted into a womb. The full ruling is available here.
In short, this ruling centers around the case of two couples against The Center of Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center. The couples fought to have the legal right to sue the Center of Reproductive Medicine for the wrongful death of a minor child under the correspondingly named state law. The two couples sued the IVF clinic after an accident destroyed four embryos, two for each couple.
The key argument to the court’s ruling is that state law for the wrongful death of a minor also applies to all unborn children. The ruling does not attempt to involve the 14th Amendment or any out-of-state laws in the definition of what constitutes a child.
On the 29th page of the Alabamian Supreme Court ruling, God entered the chat in the context of the Alabama State Constitution and pre-twentieth-century legal philosophers. By the 33rd page, the ruling starts quoting the actual Christian Bible as a valid argumentative point as to why unborn children are covered as children under the Alabamian wrongful death of a minor law.
I wish I were joking.
This ruling made by a bunch of middle-aged white people with an oversharing problem on their official work bios is not their best work, to say the least.
Seriously, Associate Justice Shaw, why do people need to know that you have two sons with degrees in mechanical engineering on the official website for the Supreme Court of Alabama? Who asked? Only the chief justice has an appropriate work covering his education, experience, and nothing more.
But, then again, Chief Justice Tom Parker was the one who thought whipping out Bible quotes to justify his decision was professionally appropriate for his office as a representative of the state.
Important foreshadowing: every single associate justice has their church in their official work bio, which is supposed to represent their professional qualifications as elected officials. Unsurprisingly, the primary form of religious diversity demonstrated is the different subtypes of Christianity they follow.
From a biological or medical perspective, this ruling has several flaws.
For starters, there is no clear-cut consensus in the scientific community about when a fertilized egg becomes an aware child with a myriad of different perspectives and beliefs on the subject.
Moreover, at the time of the embryonic destruction, the embryos (obviously) had not been transferred into a uterus. Most IVF procedures transfer embryos at either the cleavage stage (three days old) or the blastocyst stage (five days old). Both are extremely early stages in embryonic development and can best be described as a clump of undifferentiated cells at that point.
Embryos having more in common with an anaplastic tumor than an actual human being will be the hill I die on.
But hey, according to the Alabamian Supreme Court, God disagrees, and who am I to question God?
Except, God has been banned from entering the chat on state and governmental decisions in the great USA by the US federal Constitution. The Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment to the Bill of Rights explicitly states that there should be a separation between church and state and that the government cannot make legislation that promotes one specific religion over another or atheism.
While the ruling cannot be considered legislation as it only allows people to pursue wrongful death lawsuits in civil court, any legislation based on this ruling may be Unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause because of the religious justifications made within the decision document.
Considering how this ruling leaves IVF clinics wide open for wrongful death lawsuits for accidental losses of embryos or even for getting rid of undesirable embryos, IVF clinics have been spooked by the ruling. Some have suspended IVF operations, while others less daunted by the ruling have simply required different consent forms.
Of course, this had to occur in a post-Roe vs. Wade South where women’s reproductive rights are in constant jeopardy.
I’m sure that the Alabamian Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos count as human children won’t be a legal slipshod into further removal of women’s reproductive rights within the state at all. As we all know, Alabama is notoriously liberal and pro-choice.