Frozen embryos are people, according to the Supreme Court of Alabama (United States). The decision of this court, which one of its judges has defended by referring to God, threatens to harm the in vitro fertilization clinics in that State and the hundreds of thousands of people a year who depend on this method to procreate.
The ruling, issued Friday with the support of seven of the nine justices of the state Supreme Court, was adopted in response to two cases in which the frozen embryos of several couples were accidentally destroyed when a person dropped them on the ground in a clinic in the city of Mobile. The consultation with the State Supreme Court, one of the cases raised in the States after the Federal Supreme Court overturned in 2022 the Roe v. Wade ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion throughout the United States, asked whether it was legal to file lawsuits for negligence derived from death.
The Supreme Court cited the conservative Alabama Constitution and its anti-abortion language, which since 2018 has recognized “the rights of unborn children” to declare that an 1872 law that allows parents to sue for the death of a child “ “It applies to all unborn children, regardless of where they are.”
“Under this law all unborn children are children, without exceptions based on their state of development, physical location or other secondary characteristics,” noted one of the court's judges, Jay Mitchell, in the majority decision. The judge recalled that on previous occasions the court had already found that fetuses killed during pregnancy are also protected by the Law against Death by Neglect of Minors, and nothing excludes “extrauterine children.”
With this measure, the state Supreme Court overturns the decision of a lower court, which had decided that the plaintiffs could not sue as parents because the destroyed embryos had not been implanted in a uterus.
In a brief supporting the ruling, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited the Bible and his own religious beliefs to maintain that “even before birth all human beings are made in the likeness of God, and their lives cannot be destroy without diminishing its glory.” “Human life cannot be negligently destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who perceives any harm to his image and likeness as an affront against him.”
Justice Greg Cook, one of two who dissented from the majority opinion, pointed out that the 1872 law does not define who a “child” is and that the justices were forcing the original concept of the measure to include embryos. frozen. Cook warns that no other of the country's 50 states have reached the same conclusion as this court, and that the ruling “will almost certainly put an end to the creation of embryos through the in vitro fertilization process in Alabama.”
The organization Resolve: The National Infertility Association has warned, for its part, that the ruling in that State will have “devastating consequences” for people with fertility problems, one in six in the United States, and who resort to the IVF system. vitro to create a family. For its part, the Alabama College of Physicians had warned in a report to the court while the case was being heard that, if judges declared frozen embryos to be persons, “the increased risk of lawsuits may result in fertility clinics (five statewide) in Alabama close and fertility specialists move to other states.”
For the parents themselves, the court's decision can lead to important complications: given how complicated it can be to achieve implantation of an embryo in the uterus, clinics specialized in this method usually extract and fertilize as many eggs as possible. Once a pregnancy is achieved, the rest of the embryos are frozen. Destroying them, after the judges' decision, may constitute a crime. In this regard, the opinion argues that deciding the effect that granting the status of a person to a frozen embryo may have on in vitro fertilization treatments “is a matter for parliamentarians,” not judges.
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