USA – How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

‘Abolitionists’ have migrated out of the fringes and moved toward the center of movement alongside Republicans’ penchant for punishment

Carter Sherman
Wed 23 Apr 2025

So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.

Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.

Continued; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/23/anti-abortion-fetal-personhood

USA – Anti-abortion groups warn Trump’s row back on position risks losing votes

Republican candidate’s comments seen by Democrats as hypocritical ‘sadden’ anti-abortion activists

Carter Sherman
Fri 30 Aug 2024

Over the last two weeks, Donald Trump has publicly backed away from multiple anti-abortion positions – a move that Democrats see as hypocritical and that, anti-abortion activists warn, risks alienating voters who have long stood by him.

On Thursday, Trump said that, if elected, he would make the government or insurance companies cover in vitro fertilization – a type of fertility assistance that some in the anti-abortion movement want to see curtailed. Trump also seemed to indicate that he planned to vote in favor of a ballot measure to restore abortion access in Florida, which currently bans abortion past six weeks of pregnancy. “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” Trump told NBC News in an interview.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/30/trump-ivf-anti-abortion-groups

USA – Why the rift between anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers is growing

Alabama supreme court’s decision causing a temporary halt in IVF care shines spotlight on problem between two groups

Ava Sasani
Sun 17 Mar 2024

There is a growing rift in the decades-old marriage between anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers.

The problem came into view last month, after a bombshell decision from the Alabama supreme court temporarily halted in vitro fertilization (IVF). The ruling, which described frozen embryos as “extrauterine children”, unraveled when the Republican-controlled legislature passed short-term protections for IVF providers.

Continued; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/17/anti-abortion-activists-republican-lawmakers-ivf-alabama

18.03.2024

News

fetal personhood

Heritage Foundation

in vitro fertilization

IVF

Kay Ivey

Life at Conception Act

After Alabama

Making IVF available won’t stop criminalization

MAR 1, 2024
Lynn M. Paltrow

Shock and outrage have met the recent Alabama Supreme Court IVF decision that frozen embryos are children who “cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” This decision, based on Christian theology, has put all in-vitro fertilization procedures in the state at risk. It should not, however, have come as a surprise given the many Alabama laws and earlier decisions holding that fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses are separate legal persons.

New legislation to ensure that Alabama families have access to this expensive fertility treatment will do nothing to address the other punitive and dehumanizing ways Alabama’s legal personification of the unborn is used to arrest hundreds of mostly poor, rural women. Nor will it do anything to stop the likely, if not inevitable, use of Alabama’s criminal laws to lock up anyone who has an abortion.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/after-alabama

USA – First abortion, then IVF… and now birth control?

The GOP's been suffering on the issue of abortion already — Democrats can now clobber them with Alabama's IVF move

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV, Salon
FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Man, one thing you can depend on Republicans for is that if you give them a shovel, they will just keep on digging. Last week the Alabama Supreme Court did Republicans the favor (not!) of putting in vitro fertilization on the ballot for 2024. Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court did their Republican handlers the favor (not!) of putting abortion on the ballot by overturning of Roe v Wade. Now Democrats will be able to use access to contraception as another issue to pound Republicans with, given the results of a new poll that shows how hugely unpopular Republican opposition to contraception is.

Republicans have been suffering on the issue of abortion already, losing several special elections to Democrats pushing the issue. It’s a no-brainer.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/02/27/first-abortion-then-ivf-and-now-birth-control/

27.02.2024

Opinion

Americans for Contraception

birth control

in vitro fertilization

IVF

Jack Posobiec

Kellyanne Conway

Life at Conception Act

Lucian K. Truscott IV

United States

Contraception

Human Rights

Alabama is using the notion that embryos are people to surveil and harass women

Even before the court ruled in favor of this vulgar fiction, state authorities relied on the concept to intimidate and jail women

Moira Donegan
Mon 26 Feb 2024

Something that’s important to remember about last week’s ruling by the Alabama supreme court, which held that frozen embryos were persons under state law, is that the very absurdity of the claim is itself a demonstration of power. That a frozen embryo – a microscopic bit of biological information that can’t even be called tissue, a flick laden with the hopes of aspiring parents but fulfilling none of them – is equivalent in any way to a child is the sort of thing you can only say if no one has the power to laugh at you. The Alabama supreme court is the final court of review in that state. It cannot be appealed. For the foreseeable future, frozen cells in Alabama have the same legal status there as you or I do. Is this an absurd elevation of the status of an embryo, or an obscene degradation of human beings? The answer, of course, is both.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/26/alabama-ivf-frozen-embryos-surveillance

USA – The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Coming for Fertility Treatments

An Alabama court may have just ended IVF in the state—opening up the whole IVF process to politically-motivated legal scrutiny and penalty.

2/20/2024
by JILL FILIPOVIC

The availability of in-vitro fertilization in Alabama may now be in question after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that embryos kept in clinic freezers are considered persons under the law, and protected by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. It’s a shocking and jarring decision that radically extends the bounds of legal personhood, tosses any claims to originalism aside, and seems primed to make a variety of fertility treatments either extremely costly for patients, or extremely legally risky for clinicians.

If you want a sense of just how overtly theocratic the opposition to abortion and IVF are, I invite you to read the dissent in the Alabama decision, which was penned by the court’s chief justice and is a really really long argument that can be basically summed up as: “God said so.” So that’s who’s leading the court in Alabama.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/02/20/fertility-ivf-alabama-supreme-court-anti-abortion/

Roe v Wade: ‘Could abortion bans put my IVF at risk?’

Aug 9, 2023
By Lebo Diseko, Global Religion Correspondent

One year after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade - a landmark ruling on abortion rights - some IVF patients are worried that potential new laws could jeopardise their fertility treatment. Some women are even considering moving their frozen embryos across state lines.

Julie Eshelman has had a long and difficult journey trying to build her family. "My husband and I were married in 2015," she tells me. "We naively decided that we wanted to wait a year before we started having kids. In 2016, we started trying and after six months, I was like: 'This isn't working, maybe there's something wrong.'"

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66438294

09.08.2023