Three Alabama clinics pause IVF services after court rules that embryos are children
It's gonna be difficult but totally possible to not make this thread about abortion...but, let's try.
Really simple: What parts of this are a good thing and what parts of it are bad?
My thoughts: ALL bad.
The court rules embryo's are children? So child support? Child benefits?
The impact on families pursuing IVF: Mortifying that they have to be put through this.
And the organizations themselves? Well, they, I think I are taking very reasonable, intelligent steps to ensure they don't break the law. Of course the law is absurd, but they don't want to break it.
Some of these rulings just seem so utterly arbitrary and ill thought out. It seems absurd that people intelligent enough to sit on a Supreme Court could possibly be convinced that this is sensible legislation.
The court had previously ruled that, at least in regards to the specific law in question, the
Wrongful Death of a Minor Act (which authorized people to sue someone if they caused wrongful death of their child), that unborn children qualified as children. The question in this case was whether frozen embryos for in vitro fertilization
also counted as such--basically, an embryo in the womb does, but does an embryo
outside of the womb count?
And... that's all the decision ultimately was. It said that if the embryos were destroyed through negligence, then the hospital could be sued by the donors. In the case in question, the hospital
didn't properly secure the storage room and a patient wandered in and destroyed some of them. As your article says:
However, many questions remain about the ruling's implications. The judges' decision came in response to a unique case in which a person wandered into an unlocked storage area at Mobile Infirmary in Mobile, Alabama, and dropped several frozen embryos on the floor.
The court determined on Feb. 16 that the clinic's failure to secure that storage area violated the state’s Wrongful Death Act — which says an unjustified or negligent act that leads to someone’s death is a civil offense — because the frozen embryos were considered human beings.
So the donors were upset that their embryos got destroyed and were suing over that, which doesn't necessarily seem unreasonable. The court decision actually seems rather minor despite all the attention that it's getting; I guess people latched onto the "embryos are children" idea and didn't look into the details of the decision.
Actually, one of the persons quoted in the article seems to not realize what I noted:
Legal experts worry the ruling could set the stage for harsher abortion restrictions in the future, as well, such as penalties for women who get abortions. (Right now, state law only penalizes providers who administer abortions.)
"The next step will be to say, 'Well, if an embryo is a person [outside the uterus], clearly it's a person in utero," said Priscilla Smith, director of the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School."
Huh? They had
already ruled that the law in question applied to embryos inside the uterus before this case. It's mentioned right at the
beginning of the decision:
"This Court has long held that unborn children are "children" for purposes of Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, § 6-5-391, Ala. Code 1975, a statute that allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for their child's death. The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children -- that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed."
We see two problems with their assessment. First, they say the decision said that the embryos were declared to be a "person", but the decision was actually all about whether it counted as a "child" (and again, only in the narrow context of a particular law). But even if we ignore that distinction, what they claim is the "next step" was already taken before this! One would think that a "legal expert" who is director of a program on reproductive justice would have at least bothered to read the first paragraph--or even the first sentence!--of the opinion they are commenting on, because their comment makes no sense regarding the case.
This decision seems like it should have no impact on abortion laws for the reasons discussed. The one thing it does affect is it could make in vitro fertilization harder to do, because hospitals would have to worry more about legal liability for getting rid of frozen embryos and would also need to be more sure to keep them secured, which could increase costs for them. To be fair, that is what the article--and this topic--is primarily about, which is a more reasonable thing to focus on than nonsense like what the supposed "legal expert" said above. Sadly, most sources seem to be focusing on the nonsense claims.
Then again, if we're just talking about the specific impact of it on IVF, I suppose much of what I just wrote above might be a bit off topic. But it does relate to your question about whether this leads to things like child support or child benefits. As was established, this decision was only in regards to the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act (or to be more specific, Section 6-5-391 of the Alabama Code). But even if the claim is that this ruling could mean re-interpretation of other laws (as I've seen some people, including yourself, claim), no one points to what those laws are. They just refer vaguely to things like "child support" or "child benefits" while pointing to no actual law so that its text could be examined to see if such an re-interpretation
could actually apply to it.
And in regards to the question of harder IVF access, some aren't exactly fond of IVF to begin with for various reasons. But setting that aside, while the article talks about how it would be bad for people who want to use IVF, but seems to ignore (despite this being what the court case was about) the fact that it does not seem unreasonable to me that people who are willing to give their embryos for usage in IVF expect them to be handled properly.
Also, is there anything that prevents people who
would have used IVF from getting kids via adoption instead?
