A Key Voting Bloc Is Backing the GOP Into a Corner

Listen to What Next:

Last week, Megan Messerly ended up somewhere a little strange for a health care policy reporter: a religious convention. It was the Southern Baptists’ annual gathering, this year, in Indianapolis. It’s a “politically powerful denomination,” she said. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Johnson are all Southern Baptists.

Messerly reports for Politico, so you can see why she wanted to show up. She was particularly interested in a resolution church leaders were bringing forward opposing in vitro fertilization. And last Wednesday, thousands of church representatives—they call themselves messengers—put reproductive technology up to a vote. Picture a huge convention hall, filled with people with little cards in their hands that they use to vote yay or nay. And anyone can get up and speak. “It was pretty emotional. There was one man who came forward, he was from an Ohio church, and he had actually had a son through IVF,” Messerly said.

After listening to a couple of these stories, each messenger had a choice to make. The vote was overwhelmingly in support of the resolution opposing IVF, but there was some hesitation among the crowd. The people behind this resolution had anticipated a certain ambivalence. The text of this resolution builds a step-by-step case for why IVF is biblically wrong. That argument is that embryos are human beings from the moment of fertilization. Some people call this an argument for “fetal personhood.” The resolution is also nonbinding—basically, a conversation starter for Southern Baptist churches all over the country.

The expectation is that now the work of changing minds will begin. “A lot of the folks that I talked to who do have concerns about IVF see this as the beginning of another decadeslong push like there was on abortion,” Messerly said. “This is a long campaign to change hearts and minds.

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke about how—and why—evangelicals are beginning to make the case against IVF. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: The Southern Baptist Convention has not had a clear stance on IVF before now, has it?

Megan Messerly: No, they haven’t. They’ve spoken out, obviously, a lot on the abortion issue. They’ve spoken out previously on other reproductive technologies, but this is the first time they explicitly spoke out on IVF directly.

It’s interesting because I read that the theologian who proposed this statement published an anti-IVF argument in a church publication a few years back and got a lot of criticism for it.

Yeah. Both of the resolution sponsors, Albert Mohler and Andrew Walker, had been writing on IVF for quite some time. But it really is the Alabama Supreme Court decision that they said created the space for this conversation.

That Alabama Supreme Court decision took me by surprise, and right away Alabama’s Legislature was getting involved. They were intervening to offer civil and criminal immunity to IVF service providers to avoid the fertility industry........

© Slate