The Anti-Abortion Movement is Deciding: Hypocritical Misogyny or Abject Cruelty?

IVF may be next on the pro-life chopping block. That's a problem for their movement.

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

Can you spot a person in there?

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This week’s edition of Bloomberg Businessweek is all about American women hitting the breaking point. Pick up a copy if you can, and definitely click over to the site to check out a whole series of crucial stories, from the end of maternity care in rural pro-life America to the mixed outcomes for women working from home. I am really thrilled to have a piece in the issue about IVF in a post-Roe limbo — how providers and patients alike are scared and uncertain about the future, how anti-abortion laws may make it much harder for people to start or expand their families, and how that’s shaping care and reproductive decision-making today.

It is, I believe, a very important story. But every story has space constraints, and so I want to expand on something I touch on in the piece, but didn’t have the ability to get into in-depth: How the anti-abortion movement faces a pretty perilous landscape when it comes to addressing IVF and some other fertility treatments, because the procedure brings into sharp relief the complications and moral vagaries of reproduction, life, and when one becomes a person. Maintain the status quo with IVF and the anti-abortion movement lays bare its hypocrisies and its misogyny. Attempt to regulate IVF in line with anti-abortion ideology and the movement will face backlash from across the political spectrum, including from many of the folks it counts as supporters — not to mention that outlawing or regulating IVF according to anti-abortion ideology would simply make it impossible for millions of people to expand their families, and that’s an awfully hard sell from a movement that has spent decades campaigning on the value of adorable babies.

IVF is currently a dividing line within the anti-abortion movement. I suspect few within the high ranks of the movement support IVF, and I suspect that, in most of their ideal worlds, IVF as it is generally practiced would be largely outlawed. But there does seem to be a divide between those who speak out against IVF — a minority, and largely in the more brash and less sophisticated organizations — and those are the quieter and more likely to deflect questions and refuse to take a stand. This latter group tends to be the more politically connected and sophisticated — National Right to Life and Americans United For Life, for example, which are the groups largely penning anti-abortion legislation for Republican legislators. And while this latter group will not say they support IVF, and while the laws they write would in practice make IVF untenable, they are clearly wary of clearly stating that they oppose the procedure.

The issue is this: The anti-abortion movement has adopted the hardline view that life begins at the moment of fertilization, before a pregnancy is even established, and that a fertilized egg should have full personhood rights: A right to life, but also rights to due process and protection under the law. Anything that results in the death of a fertilized egg would be treated like anything that results in the death of a born person. Do something that causes embryonic demise on purpose, and it’s murder. Do it by accident and it might be manslaughter, and could certainly open you up to a whole host of financially ruinous lawsuits. The anti-abortion movement is writing this personhood ideology into law, but often using language that specifies that an embryo has to be inside a woman’s body for its intentional demise to count as an abortion or, potentially, as murder or another crime.

IVF complicates this. When Alabama passed a law criminalizing abortion and purporting to protect embryos, some objected because of concerns about IVF. If a fertilized egg is a person, the argument went, then IVF as it is currently practiced becomes either illegal or highly legally risky in a state that imbues a fertilized egg with a full set of rights. But Alabama state legislator Clyde Chambliss had an answer: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

In other words, fertilized eggs are only people if they are inside of a woman. Shift their location by a few inches and, suddenly, they are not people, and not subject to the same protections as an egg in a uterus. Women carrying an embryo, though, are subject to far greater state intervention than a glass dish in a lab.

That doesn’t really make sense — unless the whole point is to control women, and not to protect fertilized eggs.

Typical IVF procedures involve the creation of multiple embryos. Embryos that will not turn into a healthy pregnancy are typically screened out and discarded. If a couple has multiple embryos that will turn into a healthy pregnancy, and they are able to have a baby using one of those embryos, they then have to decide what to do with the rest. They can use them to attempt to have more children. They can store them while they decide. They can donate them to another couple, which most people do not want to do, as having someone else birth and raise your genetic child is not most people’s desired outcome. They can donate them to science, which is also uncommon, because laws regulating research on embryos mean there is very little in the way of resources for this kind of research and scientists simply can’t afford to acquire many embryos. They can do what is called a “compassionate transfer,” which is to implant the embryos at a time when pregnancy is unlikely and allow them to be flushed out of the body naturally — this is also uncommon, given the expense and invasiveness, and I would guess is really only used by people who have a deep moral objection to discarding embryos. Or people can discard their unused embryos, at least in most US states (Louisiana, for example, is an exception — that state outlaws discarded embryos it deems viable, regardless of those embryos’ actual chance at creating a healthy pregnancy). Hundreds of thousands of embryos are currently being stored in the US, and more than a million have been discarded over the many years that IVF has been utilized.

Today, roughly two in every 100 babies born in the US was conceived with the aid of reproductive technology. Those numbers are higher in areas where women have higher levels of education and have children later.

I’ve written before about how virtually no one — not even self-identified pro-lifers — actually believes that a fertilized egg is a person. The lack of broad, public, loud “pro-life” opposition to IVF, and the anti-abortion movements squeamishness in addressing IVF directly, makes that abundantly clear: People distinguish between a fertilized egg that is a few days old and an infant. People distinguish between a fertilized egg that is a few days old and a viable fetus.

This is obvious when you look at how people behave — even those who believe what they are doing is morally licit according to anti-abortion ideology. A great many self-identified pro-life people keep embryos in storage indefinitely, but would not do the same to a three-year-old. Even the typically religious pro-life folks who opt for a “compassionate transfer” — who transfer an embryo into a woman’s uterus without fertility-enhancing drugs and at a time in her fertility cycle when it is highly unlikely to create a pregnancy, allowing it to flush out of her body naturally — would never intentionally put their infant in a situation where it is maximally likely to die of technically natural causes (neglect, for example), and would likely think that any parent who does so should get into some kind of trouble.

Virtually no one actually believes that a fertilized egg is a person. That includes most of the people who want to extend personhood rights to fertilized eggs.

And so the anti-abortion movement has a choice. It can double down on its insistence that a fertilized egg be treated as a legal person, which runs the risk of radically curtailing infertility treatments including IVF, and on top of that could make the whole house of cards fall down — get people thinking too hard about whether or not they actually believe a fertilized egg is a person, and whether this belief is sincere enough to limit their options or potentially criminalize expanding their families, and the “pro-life” movement is going to find itself even further in the political minority. It may even find its most fundamental claim — that life begins at conception, and that means that every fertilized egg is a person deserving of rights even beyond those of a woman — begins to fall apart. Plus, most people, including most pro-life people, have no issue with the utilization of reproductive technology, including IVF. Many people are ok with punishing women who have abortions, and a troubling number are even ok with making pregnant women suffer — what is motherhood, after all, if not sacrificing everything for your child? But I suspect that most Americans, including most religious and pro-life Americans, will find it intolerably cruel to make it impossible for people who desperately want children to take advantage of safe, long-standing procedures to have a baby.

Alternately, the anti-abortion movement can lean into misogynist hypocrisy and say, as Chambliss did, that a fertilized egg is not a person when it’s in a petri dish, but it is one when it’s in a woman’s body — and so a person in a lab coat may discard it, but a pregnant woman cannot. This is the current strategy the movement is largely (although not universally) leaning into. They are betting, I think correctly, that misogyny is the primary motivator for abortion opponents, and so their base is entirely comfortable with the idea that a woman’s uterus should be regulated by the state and she should be forced to have an embryo grow inside of her until it becomes a baby, but a petri dish in a lab should be granted far greater freedoms.

That said, there are aggressive factions of the anti-abortion movement that are not in fact content to accept this hypocritical stance; they want IVF outlawed, or at least regulated to the point where it becomes impossible to practice. The leaders of the anti-abortion movement, even those who are currently quiet on IVF, align with them ideologically. And they are betting that Americans will simply become accustomed to a series of ever-more-radical abortion restrictions; that our shock today at the stripping out of rape, incest, and health exceptions or at women nearly dying because of lack of miscarriage care will eventually turn into resignation, at which point they can move forward and perhaps curtail access to contraception, or infertility treatments.

We will see. But right now, we are watching the anti-abortion movement look at IVF and determine whether they want to move forward with a policy of hypocritical misogyny or consistent but abject cruelty.

At least for now, they’re choosing hypocritical misogyny.

xx Jill

This is the free weekly edition of this newsletter. This project is 100% supported by readers like you. If you’re enjoying it or learning from it or just want to support progressive feminist-minded journalism, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And of course I always appreciate it when folks share or comment if they find this work valuable. Thank you as always for reading, and for your support.