Religious right continues its war on women’s rights
For the religious right, erasing the constitutional right to abortion was just the beginning. They are coming after all our reproductive rights and freedoms, every single one of them, and the only way to stop them is with our votes.
Last Wednesday, the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant denomination in the country, with 13 million members – adopted a resolution denouncing in vitro fertilization (IVF). The measure calls on Southern Baptists to pressure government officials to “restrain” IVF, which often can be a couple’s last hope of conceiving a child.
For women who battle infertility at some point in their childbearing years – and who can afford the expensive procedure – IVF is nothing short of a miracle. According to a report issued in March by the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 2 percent of U.S. infants born in 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available, were conceived through IVF. That equals 86,149 toddlers who otherwise would not be here to scamper around the house and test their loving parents’ patience.
How can the religious right, a movement that calls itself pro-life, take a stance against a procedure that creates life? The answer lies in the concept of fetal personhood – in this case, embryonic personhood. That is clearly where the zealots who seek “The Handmaid’s Tale” control over women’s bodies are headed, now that the obstacle of Roe v. Wade no longer stands in their way.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the frozen embryos created during the IVF process are “children,” and that the embryos are therefore protected under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Because an IVF attempt often does not result in a pregnancy and must be tried again, more embryos are created than used in the end. Doctors who intentionally or accidentally destroyed even one of those surplus embryos were suddenly vulnerable to being charged with killing a child, so Alabama’s IVF clinics quickly shut down.
Alabama’s Republican-controlled state legislature and Republican governor quickly enacted legislation to shield IVF doctors from legal liability. But the court’s ruling stands – and was hailed Monday at the Southern Baptist Convention’s meeting as the “catalyst” for the new anti-IVF policy.
The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the denomination’s flagship Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, urged passage of the anti-IVF resolution by telling Baptists in a speech that a human life begins “when the sperm and the egg meet and God says, ‘Let there be life.’ ” He went on to criticize Alabama’s elected leadership for its “lack of political will to stand behind what was the correct ruling and judgment by the Alabama Supreme Court.”
Mohler said that IVF “is not only the alienation of reproduction from the conjugal setting, it is also an engineered system whereby multiple embryos are created only for most of them assuredly to be destroyed.” And he claimed, without evidence, that “much of the market for this is actually not even found among heterosexual married couples, but the redefinition of marriage, the redefinition of gender, the redefinition of all things in light of the LGBTQ movement.”
In his majority opinion overturning Roe, Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was leaving the question of abortion to state legislatures and perhaps, ultimately, to Congress. Since then, voters across the country, even in bright-red states such as Kansas, Ohio and Kentucky, have amended their state constitutions to give back to women what the Supreme Court took away: the fundamental right to control their bodies.
Most Americans, by a decisive margin, believe a woman should have the intrinsic right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy. Similarly, polls tell us that Americans, by an overwhelming margin, believe IVF is morally acceptable and a godsend. Most of us believe these are private decisions to be made by individuals, not legislators or judges.
This is clearly a majority view but not a consensus view. Mohler speaks for a minority that believes all abortion, from the moment of conception, is murder. And the Republican Party fights, sometimes nervously, as this uncompromising minority’s champion.
So, with public opinion against them, antiabortion activists are already waging the next battle: to give embryos full personhood rights and protections. They are coming hard after IVF. They failed Thursday to get the high court to restrict safe and legal abortion drugs but they surely will try again. They might even attempt an assault on contraception.
This is, simply, a forever war. Remain vigilant because there is no end in sight.
Eugene Robinson is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group.