By declaring that a couple could sue a hospital for wrongful death for accidentally destroying their frozen embryos, the Alabama Supreme Court defined an embryo as a child — a person who can die. This goes farther than a fetal personhood, since a fetus is an embryo that has managed to be implanted itself in the uterus, and has undergone seven weeks of development. Anything before then, it’s an embryo. However, the Alabama ruling means that a frozen embryo, which means an egg that’s been fertilized by sperm but not yet successfully implanted in the uterus can still be considered a human person. In short, this ruling cements into case law what the proponents of “Life Begins at Conception” have been proclaiming.

This ruling, on top of the Supreme Court overturning Roe Vs. Wade in 2022, represents a huge swing of the pendulum on the subject of abortion that couldn’t have been imagined in 1973 when the judgment was first handed down, enshrining women’s right to abortion as an inferred right in the constitution. Even then, the justices struck a compromise between the mother’s right to abortion and the fetus’ right to life by dividing the pregnancy into a trimester that acted as a sliding scale in which the mother’s right slowly gave way to the fetus’s right as the pregnancy matured.

While this judgment was based on........

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