Late last month, U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) introduced a bill to establish federal protections for in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments. It was pure political theatre.
The scare tactics are snowballing in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court's February 16 decision that three couples could use the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act to seek justice after their fertility clinic negligently allowed for the death of their embryos.
This decision seems like a win for would-be parents and for appropriate regulation of a health care industry—something Democrats typically favor.
Apparently not when it comes to babies.
As constitutional scholar Ed Whelan put it in an article explaining that the Alabama decision had nothing to do with the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision, there is a "rush to conclude that this victory for parents using IVF is a defeat for parents who want to use IVF."
But Senate Democrats seized their chance, ignoring basic embryology and denying the humanity of children prior to full gestational age. Senators and scholars said the vindication of IVF parents' rights was actually a frontal assault on abortion. California Governor Gavin Newsom called the Alabama decision part of a "war on women."
Apparently the parents should have just put in a claim for lost property.
That's how we got to Senator Duckworth's fast-tracked bill, introduced using a procedure that allows any single senator to stop it. The move was strategic, designed to dare Republicans to stand in its way.
Here's the problem: it's a terrible bill. It legalizes human cloning and hybrids, allows for buying embryos, and denies parents legal recourse if embryos are negligently destroyed, as many thousands have been. Those parents had rights; under this bill, future parents wouldn't.
Opposing Duckworth's bill doesn't make senators anti-IVF; it makes them pro-accountability, pro-regulation, and pro-parent. Sometimes an industry needs some tough love to clean up its act.
No one has tried to ban IVF since the Alabama decision. Instead, some lawmakers are working overtime to strip away the few regulations that actually apply to fertility clinics.
Just days after the ruling, both the Alabama House and Senate voted to shield IVF clinics from liability when embryos are damaged or destroyed. An amendment that simply allowed liability for intentional destruction lost in the Alabama House 65-26.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra hosted listening sessions with IVF providers and Planned Parenthood Birmingham in a show of support.
Meanwhile, Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, launched a campaign to shield the IVF industry from accountability in even the most egregious of circumstances.
That's interesting because, outside of selective reductions, we don't usually associate the abortion rights movement with the nearly $20 billion—and growing—industry of assisting reproduction. Usually, they're rather the opposite.
Just take a step back and look at some of the most popular pro-choice mantras.
Remember the 1970s Planned Parenthood posters proclaiming, "Every child a wanted child?"
The medical standard, as defined in embryology textbooks, is that zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses are human beings. The pro-choice standard is that it's only a human being if it is wanted; if not, then it's a clump of cells or a blob of tissue. The mother's feelings define what she carries.
The parents in Alabama desperately wanted their embryos. They dreamed of transferring them, birthing them, and building their family. They went to extraordinary expense and effort to create them (some prospective parents have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars), and planned to sacrifice even more in the hopes of watching them take their first steps, braiding their hair for the first day of kindergarten, and holding them tight when they failed a math test. These human beings were wanted, loved.
The Alabama parents were devastated when their embryos died.
But for Democrats and abortion advocacy groups, wantedness doesn't matter anymore. They will sacrifice even wanted children to the altar of elective abortion, to protect the so-called right of women to abort inconvenient children.
And what about the "my body, my choice" rallying cry we hear so often?
The Alabama embryos' mothers chose what to do with their bodies. They chose to retrieve eggs, fertilize them, and freeze them. They planned to use their bodies to carry their offspring. That choice was taken from them when the fertility clinic negligently failed to keep the embryos safe. Where is the pro-choice cry for justice for a woman whose choice was taken away?
After the Alabama decision, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) went on offense: "Women aren't just going to forget who is responsible for this—who ripped away their dreams of building their families.... Republican politicians take away women's power over their own bodies."
That's the problem. Sometimes prospective IVF parents lose that choice. Sometimes they lose the children they worked so hard to create. And now, they're losing any hope of justice, too.
Catherine Glenn Foster, M.A., J.D., @cateici, is a constitutional attorney and President and CEO of First Rights Global, a position she assumed after a six-year tenure leading Americans United for Life, the country's oldest pro-life organization, and a storied legal career on the issues of life, liberty, and human rights.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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