Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos frozen in in vitro fertilization procedures are “children” under state law, and that a person responsible for their destruction can be held liable. The opinion is a staggering attack on every facet of reproductive health, including the freedom of people experiencing infertility who use assisted reproductive technologies. It represents the culmination of a movement to enshrine into law the unscientific and purely religious claim that life begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg, supplanting secular laws with supposedly “biblical” beliefs.
This theocratic dystopia is not an outlier, confined to a single state, but rather a roadmap should Donald Trump return to the White House. Recent reporting in Politico and The New York Times exposes further expansions of plans by Trump allies to Christianize the federal government, including the restriction and even criminalization of abortion.
There could scarcely be a better encapsulation of Christian nationalist jurisprudence.
At issue in the Alabama case was an 1872 state law allowing civil lawsuits for wrongful death of children and, more crucially, a 2018 anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution. The amendment, approved in a referendum, made it state law to “recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life.” In last week’s case, the court’s majority reasoned that Alabama law equally protects “children” and “unborn children,” including frozen fertilized eggs, which the court referred to as “extrauterine children.”
Even more astonishing than the majority opinion, though, was the concurring opinion of the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, a longtime proponent of citing biblical law to undergird his jurisprudence. Parker is a protegé of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who first rose to national prominence for his unsuccessful battle in the early 2000s to install a
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