The Alabama court ruling granting rights to “extrauterine children” (aka embryos) could not have come at a better time for Republicans searching for ways to distance themselves from the increasingly toxic post-Dobbs political fallout. As abortion access has proven to be a winning issue at the ballot box, many of those who abetted the forced-birth movement’s decadeslong project to overturn Roe are scrambling to assure voters that their desire to limit women’s bodily autonomy wasn’t supposed to go this far.
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., for example, has proposed a nonbinding House resolution that “calls on elected officials at all levels of government to pass legislation to protect access to fertility care proactively.” I support Mace’s resolution myself because (as is evident to many, although perhaps not to Mace) contraception and abortion are themselves “fertility care.”
The Republican commitment to preserving even narrowly defined ‘fertility care’ defies polling averages.
The Republican commitment to preserving even narrowly defined “fertility care” defies polling averages. This week, Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth (who conceived her children via IVF) brought forward legislation that would create a federal right to “assisted reproductive technology” — and Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked it. She claimed to “support the ability for mothers and fathers to have total access to IVF and bringing new life into the world.” But, she added, “I also believe human life should be protected.”
Hyde-Smith’s cognitive dissonance is shared by numerous senators, including Texas’ Ted Cruz, Alabama’s Katie Britt and fellow Mississippian Roger Marshall, who similarly claimed their anti-abortion stand was congruent with their support of IVF.
“Defending life and ensuring continued access to IVF services for loving parents are not mutually exclusive,” said Britt. Cruz called IVF “entirely life-affirming.” And Marshall opined, “We are the pro-family party, and there’s nothing more pro-family than helping couples have a baby.” Donald Trump continued in this vein, posting on Truth Social, “The Republican Party should always be on the side of the Miracle of Life — and the side of Mothers, Fathers, and their Beautiful Babies.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, including how these statements echo the natalist movement’s mania for a crop of American babies as a hedge against “great replacement” paranoia.
I do not doubt that these Republican lawmakers, as well as the president, want American “mothers and fathers” (and that pairing specifically) to have more babies. However, laws banning abortion are not and have never been about encouraging women to have more children. They are about keeping women from deciding for themselves whether or not they will have a child. The conservative movement has elevated embryos to “personhood” in pursuit of that prohibitive goal.
The argument that women and their fetuses have “equal” rights under the Constitution came as a result of the right’s push to overturn Roe; what started as a fringe legal theory has now trapped Republican politicians in a moral vise. Because once you grant that a fetus has rights independent of the body carrying it — which many of those saying they want to protect IVF have claimed — you will have to defend those rights wherever the fetus happens to be, or however it came to be.
Exhortations by some Republicans to “safeguard” IVF even as they proclaim themselves anti-abortion aren’t calibrations to a hypothetical middle ground. They are, at best, banal confessions of self-interest and lack of self-awareness. Like similarly hypocritical carveouts for rape and incest in abortion bans, the existence of conservatives who want to be pro-IVF and anti-abortion only shows how much the anti-abortion movement depends on people ignoring the consequences of its policies.
The “anti-abortion but also pro-IVF” position emerges from the same panic that the right felt when, post-Dobbs, Ohio’s newly constitutional six-week abortion ban compelled a 10-year-old to travel to Indiana to get reproductive care. You might recall the reaction of many abortion foes — including the state attorney general — to deny that the case was genuine. And if it was, well, the law wasn’t supposed to work that way, i.e., in a way that made them look bad: “This young girl — if she exists and if this horrible thing actually happened to her, it breaks my heart to think about it,” mewled Attorney General Dave Yost on Fox News. “She did not have to leave Ohio to find treatment.”
As doctors at the time pointed out, yes, she did. Authors of the exceptions built into abortion bans do not intend to create medical carveouts for doctors and patients or provide relief for survivors of trauma; those exceptions simply provide political cover and moral relief for the people passing the law.
Abortion exceptions for rape and incest are particularly cruel in their illusion of grace. A research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that rape exceptions are “functionally meaningless” because of reporting requirements. Incest exceptions have reporting requirements as well. Someone like the Ohio attorney general would want to do a cross-examination, just to be sure. Medical exceptions, which might seem to have less gray area, are either too vague or too specific to give meaningful guidance. No matter what exceptions exist on paper, most care providers will choose to withhold treatment rather than risk a run-in with law enforcement.
And that, of course, is the situation that fertility clinics in Alabama — and those in any state considering a “fetal personhood bill” — now find themselves.
We don’t have to prove anti-abortion politicians are hypocrites or insincere; inconsistency in championing fetuses while, say, extolling the death penalty is one reason why so many of us now refuse to use the term “pro-life” in describing anti-abortion proponents. But in the heavily charged post-Dobbs atmosphere, clarity about who is on what side is more important than ever. Saying, “We put in exceptions for [blank]” or “But IVF is OK” may make a politician sound less extreme, but once you declare the fetus has the same rights as a person, there is no such thing as a moderate anti-abortion advocate. You must either be against any procedure that destroys a fetus or admit that fetuses are not people. Or you can lie to everyone, including yourself, about what you really believe.
Ana Marie Cox
Ana Marie Cox is a political journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Beast and The Washington Post, among other places.