Christian nationalist Republicans, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson under the thrall of Donald Trump, plan to impose their version of Christianity on America.
What that will look like just came into focus in Alabama where its Supreme Court decided 8-1 that frozen embryos were “little children” with full personhood rights who could not be damaged or destroyed without incurring criminal liability.
The Alabama IVF (in vitro fertilization) ruling has all the trappings of a legal decision – citations to cases and statutes – but it is an almost purely religious document, not a legal opinion.
The Court’s analysis begins by assuming the conclusion: “All parties and every member of this court agrees” that the life of “an unborn child . . . begins at fertilization” and that an unborn child is a “person.” Thus, a frozen embryo is a child with full personhood rights. QED. The remainder of the opinion does nothing but illogically squeeze the foregone conclusion under the Alabama Wrongful Death Act.
Chief Judge Tom Parker’s concurrence proclaims the religious underpinnings. The Alabama Constitution recognizes “the sanctity of unborn life,” which is the text Parker takes for his sermon/concurrence. He quotes Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and the Bible to show that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
Human life, Parker preaches, “cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”
The Alabama IVF ruling is a theocratic pronouncement, an autocratic fiat based on the Christian Bible, not on law. It displays to America the type of laws and legal rulings we will see if Christian nationalists gain power, as they have in several states, including West Virginia.
Theocracy is an authoritarian system that imposes arbitrary and cruel rules on the personal and private parts of people’s lives (unlike Jesus). The right exhibits a disturbing fascination with people’s intimate concerns – gender choices, sex acts, contraception, childbearing. There can be no live-and-let-live because in the Christian nationalists’ world view, everyone who does not believe as they do is morally wrong, even evil. Political opponents become existential enemies.
There are no religious autocracies in the world where women have equal rights. The Christian right wants an American social order where women are second class citizens. Women are not mentioned in the Alabama ruling, except as uteruses.
When laws are interpreted using Christian doctrine, there can be no separation of Church and State because the Church is the State. A foundation of our democracy is destroyed. The Constitution loses its power to protect minorities (atheists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists) from the tyranny of the majority – even if Christian nationalists were the majority – and they are not.
The Alabama IVF decision reveals two big problems for the theocratic right-wing moralists’ planned takeover: 1 - their views are absurd and 2 – a huge majority of Americans oppose their theological conclusions.
IVF requires that more embryos be created than are needed. Some do not develop, some exhibit genetic problems, and some are not needed once a viable pregnancy results. The unused embryos are discarded or maintained in a “cryogenic nursery.”
Once one accepts that human life begins at fertilization and that, as 12 states have already legislated, unborn children have full personhood rights, the IVF ruling is logically inescapable.
Logical arguments can be proven false if their premises lead to an absurd conclusion – reductio ad absurdum. The Alabama IVF argument that a child is created at the moment of fertilization and unborn children have full personhood rights leads to the absurd conclusion that IVF cannot proceed because embryos are destroyed.
How do we know that the conclusion “IVF cannot proceed if embryos are destroyed” is absurd? Because Republicans now say so.
Republicans are in a frenzy because, once again, they find themselves on the wrong side of national popular opinion about reproductive rights.
Public support for IVF is overwhelming. Even 83% of evangelical Christians support it, despite their purported belief that life begins at conception. Only Catholic doctrine is consistent – Catholics teaching rejects IVF.
Speaking for most Republican politicians, Nikki Haley contradicts herself: “Embryos are babies” and “I completely support IVF.” IVF must proceed, Republican politicians now say, for the couples for whom IVF was the last hope to have children. (Somehow IVF is a couple’s problem, while abortion is a “women’s issue,” although both unavoidably require a sperm donor.)
Republicans’ feigned horror at the IVF ruling would be laughable if it weren’t so disgustingly hypocritical because their proposed Life at Conception Act, which they seek to impose nationally, has 125 Republican co-sponsors and no carve-out for IVF.
Alabama legislators are rushing to pass a bill that says “Embryos are not children,” which is correct as a matter of fact. (John Oliver explained that embryos and children cannot be the same because you can freeze an embryo, but you can’t freeze a child.) This legislative “fix” however, reopens the huge question the right thought they had foreclosed – the timing of their abortion bans.
The IVF decision also clearly reveals that Roe was a wall protecting not just abortion rights, but all of women’s (and men’s) reproductive rights. The Dobbs decision tore down that wall so that Republican-led states can now legislate not just against abortion, but against all reproductive freedom - contraception (IUDs prevent embryos from implanting), morning-after pills, IVF and any “unnatural” practices, like surrogacy.
The IVF decision brings Republican’s Christian nationalism and anti-woman agenda back to the forefront of the 2024 election up and down the ballot.
If you reject theocracy and believe that citizens’ religious beliefs should be as private as their sex lives, neither dictated by the State, vote Biden for president and vote Blue for every other office. The IVF decision shows we must reject the Christian mullahs’ attempt to rule our country and our lives - now.
