The IVF Backlash Shows Almost No One Believes an Embryo Is a Person

Also: Fertility treatments aren't the opposite of abortion. They're both about having children when one is ready.

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

Late last month, the Alabama Supreme Court effectively ended IVF in the state by holding that frozen embryos (and all embryos) are considered children under Alabama law, and their demises therefore covered under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Child Act. Alabama fertility clinics have largely stopped any procedure that involves creating, storing, moving, or implanting embryos, keeping the embryos they do have in storage, and not even letting Alabamans take their embryos out of state — there is risk of something going wrong in the transport process, and the Alabama court’s decision makes potential liability too high. It’s a heartbreaking moment for the women and families whose hopes have been, at best, put on pause — and who very well may miss out on their chance to have children because of “pro-life” politics.

It’s also been a revealing one, with many Republican voters and conservatives outraged that IVF is now under threat, but the GOP itself flailing. Conservative Christian women who were happy to take away other women’s rights are now shocked that the leopards ate their face. Anti-abortion groups are either openly celebrating or staying strategically silent; as Students for Life leader Kristan Hawkins put it, “I can't name one pro-life group that I know of that would say that they are OK with the IVF procedure.” And Republican politicians are voicing their support of IVF while blocking bills to protect it.

The right-wing chaos is caused by one big problem: The anti-abortion (and anti-contraception and anti-IVF — the term “anti-abortion” doesn’t really cover it) movement has a stranglehold on the Republican Party, and their hardest of hard lines is not just that life begins at conception, but that a fertilized egg should be imbued with the same rights as a born human from the moment of conception. This, Students for Life president Hawkins says, is “the fundamental premise of our entire movement.”

A great many Republican voters have internalized this line without, I suspect, really thinking it through. And IVF — the procedure and the debate around this latest case — shows the degree to which some combination of ignorance about reproductive processes, misogyny, and magical thinking nearly entirely shape the “pro-life” dogma embraced by much of the GOP, and many of their voters, virtually none of whom actually believe a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a three-year-old, or should be legally treated as one.

While many Republicans support abortion rights, most do not. And most dedicated “pro-life” voters, as well as many Republican ones, say an embryo should be considered a person under the law. But this is little more than slogan-repeating. Scratch the surface and you’ll see that this view — a fertilized egg or embryo should be considered a legal person — does not at all hold up.

Voters, including Republicans, overwhelmingly support IVF and want it to remain legal. Republicans say IVF should be legal by a margin of 58-13. But when you ask if embryos are children and whether someone who destroys them should be in legal trouble, Republicans are evenly divided. This only makes sense when you realize that many of these voters have no idea how IVF actually works. It also only makes sense when you realize that the “embryo is a person” position is a purely theoretical one, not even truly held by those who claim to hold it.

After all, if an embryo is a person, global death rates just skyrocketed (roughly half of fertilized eggs naturally don’t implant and are flushed out, usually without anyone noticing). If all of these embryos really were people, you’d think the “pro-life” movement would be demanding research into these billions and billions of child deaths, the same way we’ve researched other “natural” causes of infant mortality and radically reduced rates. And yet… silence.

If embryos really are people, then no “pro-life” Republican politician should hesitate to condemn IVF, and no “pro-life” voter should undergo it or support its legality. And yet a great many conservative, religious, pro-life women make use of IVF to start or grow their families. If a round doesn’t work — if an embryo doesn’t stick — that is often cause for grief and sadness. But let’s be real: Is it grief and sadness of the magnitude of a mother or father who loses a five-year-old? Whose infant dies in her crib? I don’t mean to sound callous. Failed implantations are of course devastating for people who really want to be pregnant. But as human beings, we understand that there are different levels of devastation. I don’t think any reasonable person believes a failed implantation — an embryo that does not implant and dies — is on the same level as a child who dies.

Which suggests that, while many (arguably most) people believe embryos are a form of human life and have value, we are also able to understand that an early form of human life is not the same thing as a human being who should be vested with a full set of legal rights.

One thing I’ve heard over and over since the Alabama decision, most recently on an excellent episode of the Daily that you should listen to, is that the “pro-life” opposition to IVF is ironic because, unlike abortion, IVF helps you to have children. I’d like to challenge that narrative. Every decision we make in life has downstream consequences; every one was predated by a series of others that set us on a particular course. Today, roughly 2% of American children are born thanks to IVF. Many of these children are born not to mothers with life-long fertility problems, but to women who intentionally delayed childbearing, perhaps because they were focused on other aspects of their lives, perhaps because they had not yet met a person they wanted to have children with, often a combination of those factors. The woman who uses IVF to have a baby is often the same woman who used contraception for years to not have a baby, and who may have utilized or trusted she could utilize abortion as a backup if she became pregnant when she did not want to be. For many, many women who have children through IVF, it’s not just IVF that allowed them to have their children — it’s also contraception and abortion that allowed them to have those particular children at that particularly right time.

We know that most women who have abortions are already mothers; many are having abortions to better care for the children they have, a life-affirming decision if I’ve ever heard one. What you might not know, though, is that women who are able to get abortions when they need them are almost twice as likely as women who are denied abortions to go on to have a planned and wanted pregnancies later on — and, compared to children of women denied abortions, the planned children of women who were able to have abortions earlier in their lives are significantly less likely to grow up in poverty, enjoy stronger maternal bonds, are more likely to meet developmental milestones, and are less likely to live in a household where their mother cannot afford the very basics like food.

In other words, many women who choose to have abortions are, just like women who have IVF, choosing to plan their families in a way that maximizes their readiness for parenthood. While some women have abortions because they never want children (and good for them, truly), most women who have abortions already have or want to have children — and if given the opportunity, many will choose to have children when they’re ready. If women are forced into motherhood before they’re ready and against their will, they are significantly less likely to choose to have subsequent children — and simply may never find themselves in a position where they feel stable enough to do so. The children they are forced to have will suffer for it. And the children they would have had when they were better able to parent never come into being.

So I would love it we could break this habit of arguing that IVF is about wanting children while abortion is about not wanting them. Yes, of course both are about reproductive choice. Yes, one ends a pregnancy and one attempts to start one. But these are both procedures women undergo with the same aim: to have children when one is ready, when one desires them (if one desires them). Both are decisions often born from a search for stability and readiness, just on different parts of that timeline. Both often enable a woman to have future children.

And both are under attack from politicians and activists who don’t even believe their own “pro-life” claims.

xx Jill