In its decision earlier this month interpreting Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act as conferring personhood upon unfertilized embryos, that state’s high court realized part of the dream of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. What Alito had called “unborn human beings” would inevitably be swept into Alabama’s protections for “extrauterine children.” That should surprise none of us. There’s been a robust and necessary public debate about the ways in which Dobbs v. Jackson very deliberately seeded the ground for jurisdictions seeking to further limit and even criminalize abortion, to ban certain forms of birth control and IVF, and (if everything breaks in their favor) to end surrogacy and even no-fault divorce. But the implications of Alabama’s frozen embryo decision on what it means to be a family post-Dobbs have received less sustained attention.

It’s not merely, as my colleague Mark Joseph Stern pointed out last week, that Dobbs made it more likely that fetal personhood, contraception bans, and other previously unimagined constraints on women’s autonomy and equality would be enacted into law. Sure, in their opinions, Alito pinkie promised us that the holding was limited to abortion, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh wishcast that nobody would dream of restricting interstate travel. But these assurances were instantly undermined by Justice Clarence Thomas’ pledge, in his concurrence, that the court could and should soon come for contraception, marriage equality, and whatever else had been protected under the long line of substantive due process cases. Dobbs was never self-limiting to abortion—it was a save-the-date card for the religious right’s plan to come for the rest of our reproductive freedoms. Republicans similarly assert now that entire legal systems can be organized in reliance on their ever-changing promises about whether they support something or oppose it in the present moment—just consider how many of them were against IVF until they realized they were for it this week. And also how many of them claim they are for it as they vote against it in the days to come.

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