Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill on Wednesday designed to restore IVF access following the state Supreme Court’s disastrous decision last month holding that embryos are legally “children.” Republican legislators rushed the measure through in the face of a nationwide outcry over the sudden halt in fertility services caused by the court’s shocking ruling. It is unclear, however, whether the new law will solve the problem the court created—or whether the court, which seems committed to embryonic personhood under the Alabama Constitution, will even uphold the measure in the first place.

On a new episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the stopgap legislation and the looming legal battle over its constitutionality. Their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Dahlia Lithwick: Let’s talk about Alabama Legislature believing they solved the problem created by their state Supreme Court by enacting new legislation that hives off IVF and thus satisfies neither side. I think this just continued a roiling and fractious debate in which only one side can possibly be telling scientifically true facts.

Mark Joseph Stern: This new bill in Alabama sailed through the Legislature, and as you said, it creates special immunity from liability for IVF providers and patients. Remember, the Alabama Supreme Court said that embryos are children under the state’s wrongful death statute, opening up clinics and perhaps even patients to massive punitive damages for the destruction of an embryo. This bill shuts that down in theory by offering a super sweeping shield from liability that attaches to IVF clinics, and that even though there are all these fetal personhood statutes that say life begins at the moment of fertilization, none of that applies to IVF. The bill was designed to let IVF clinics resume treatment as quickly as possible by telling them, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to get hit with millions and millions of........

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