An Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos should be considered children has created a new political nightmare for Republicans nationwide, who have moved away from a fringe view on reproductive health that threatened to drive voters away in November.
Several Republican governors and lawmakers immediately rejected the ruling, handed down by a Republican-majority court, expressing their support for IVF treatments. Some talked about their personal experiences with infertility. Others said they would not support federal restrictions on IVF, drawing a distinction between their support for widely popular fertility treatments and their opposition to abortion.
“The concern for years has been that IVF will be taken away from women everywhere,” Representative Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina, said in an interview Thursday. “We must do everything we can to protect women’s access to IVF in every state.”
But even as some Republicans pushed back on the court ruling, Republican lawmakers in conservative states were planning efforts to advance bills that would declare life begins at conception — a policy that could have serious consequences for fertility treatments.
Others acted to protect IVF treatments. Tim Melson, a Republican senator in Alabama, said he plans to introduce legislation that would clarify that embryos are not viable until they are implanted in a woman’s uterus.
The split was a new twist to a familiar problem for the party. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, have tried to sidestep the abortion issue and reframe their proposals — such as a 15-week federal ban — as common-sense policies that they can appeal to moderate voters.
But such efforts have been repeatedly undermined by their conservative, Christian allies in the states, who have seen the collapse of federal abortion rights as the start of efforts to ban the procedure and related reproductive medical care.
Despite the party’s attempt to control its message, this dynamic is likely to repeat itself. The repeal of federal abortion rights returned abortion politics to the states, enabling a broad collection of state legislators and judges to grapple with thorny questions about the privacy of conception, pregnancy and birth.
An Alabama court ruled last week that embryos produced through fertility treatments and stored in medical facilities must be considered children under the state’s wrongful-death law. The ruling was relatively narrow in that it applied to a specific case in which three couples sued a clinic for accidentally dropping and destroying their embryos.
But anti-abortion activists, who have long pushed for a fertilized egg to be considered a human person, saw the decision as a step toward accepting the personhood of a fetus and even granting a fetus equal rights under the 14th Amendment.
Jason Ruppert, a Republican former Arkansas state lawmaker and president of the National Association of Christian Legislators, said his group planned to discuss legislation on the potential IVF model at its upcoming meeting in June. They are already advancing bills in state legislatures that would declare life begins at conception.
“We are very happy,” said Mr. Rapert, whose organization is actively promoting what it calls “Biblical principles” through the model legislation. “This decision is really big. It further confirms that life begins at conception.”
Democrats have taken advantage of the Republican divide to fuel their election efforts, hoping that statewide restrictions will mobilize their voters and turn moderates and independents against Republicans. On the campaign trail in Michigan on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris called the court’s decision “shocking” but “not surprising” given the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
“This is part of their suicide pact,” Gov. Kathy Hotchul, D-New York, said of the Alabama decision. “This is happening in a Republican state with Republican judges. It is now being made as part of the Republican narrative. It’s absolutely baked. They can’t get away from it.”
Nikki Haley, who often called on Republicans to “find consensus” on abortion as she campaigned for the presidency, struggled to deal with the decision. On Wednesday, Ms Haley said she believed embryos created through IVF “are babies”, citing her own experience of conceiving her son through artificial insemination – a procedure that does not involve creating embryos outside of the womb. a woman’s body.
After being confronted, Ms. Haley clarified her comments hours later, saying she was not expressing support for Alabama’s decision.
“Alabama needs to go back and look at the law,” she said in an interview with CNN, referring to the case as a matter of parental rights rather than a question of when life begins. “We don’t want fertility treatments to stop.”
Ms Haley was not the only one to refer to her own experience with fertility treatments when discussing the decision. Rep. Michelle Steel, a Republican running for re-election in a suburban Southern California district, said she had a hard time getting pregnant.
“IVF allowed me, like so many others, to create my family,” said Ms. Steele, who has supported a national abortion ban in this Congress. “I believe there is nothing more pro-life than helping families have children, and I do not support federal restrictions on IVF”
At a Politico-sponsored forum Thursday, three Republican governors also defended Medicare.
“You have a lot of people out there in this country who wouldn’t be having children if it weren’t for this,” said Gov. Brian Kemp, of Georgia, who signed a law banning abortions starting at six weeks.
Other Republicans tried to avoid the issue altogether. On Thursday, many declined to comment on the decision, including Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who has put his faith at the forefront of his politics throughout his career and called abortion an “American holocaust.” His home state of Louisiana has a law preventing the intentional destruction of embryos.
Republican strategists have advised candidates to steer clear of more aggressive abortion restrictions and avoid long-standing labels like “pro-life,” which they say have become synonymous with abortion bans. They have also urged candidates to proactively declare their support for other areas of reproductive health care, including fertility treatments and contraception.
“If we’ve learned anything from the 2022 election, it’s that Republican candidates need to clearly articulate their position to voters and not let Democrats define them first,” said Stephen Law, the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that pours millions of dollars into Republican campaigns.
Dan Conston, president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, said it was “helpful and important for swing district Republicans to show empathy, sympathy and clear support for consensus positions like IVF.” .
But in Congress, a small group of far-right members continue to push for anti-abortion measures that their colleagues in competitive districts want to distance themselves from.
Representative Byron Donalds, R-Florida, told reporters Thursday at CPAC, a conservative activist conference, that he believed the fetuses were children because “fetuses become adults, just like us.” But he also said there are “women who have decided to seek this procedure,” referring to IVF, adding, “and that’s a good thing.”
While polls have shown widespread support for abortion rights, there is less data available on Americans’ views on fertility treatments. The Pew Research Center found in September that 61 percent of Americans and 54 percent of Republicans believe health insurance should cover the cost of fertility treatments. The services are widely used: Forty-two percent of Americans said they or someone they know had used some form of fertility treatment to have a baby.
Kellyanne Conway, a former top aide to Mr. Trump, in December released a poll her company conducted of lawmakers for a conservative women’s group that showed a large majority of Americans support IVF. According to a memo summarizing her findings, 85 percent of all respondents supported increasing access to IVF Seventy-eight percent of self-identified “pro-life” voters and 83 percent of evangelicals held this position as well.
Mike Pence, the former vice president and one of the staunchest allies of the anti-abortion movement, and his wife, Karen, have publicly discussed the use of IVF treatments. “I fully support fertility treatments and believe they deserve the protection of the law,” he told CBS in 2022 after Roe was overturned.
But for some abortion opponents, any fertility treatments that create and discard embryos should be off limits.
“I can’t name one pro-life group that I know of that would say they’re OK with the IVF process,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life.
Some Democrats saw in the decision the possibility of a clarifying moment for voters. One of them, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said that when she raised concerns about the future of fertility treatments soon after Roe was overturned, some of her Republican colleagues dismissed them.
“I said, once you take away the protections of Roe, the courts are going to go in a lot of different directions in the states,” he said, “and that’s exactly what happened.”
Nikolaos Nehamas contributed reporting from Grand Rapids, Mich.
