More than a week after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos produced for IVF were people with legal rights, overturning fertility care in the state, the ruling is reverberating nationally, putting Republicans on the defensive.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who supports former President Donald J. Trump, was asked about the implications of the decision — made possible by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. in the 2022 Dobbs decision, which resulted from Mr. Trump’s appointment of three judges.
Mr Abbott tried to make IVF, which has been available for more than 40 years, a new issue for lawmakers to tackle.
“Because this is a relatively new issue, we’re just going to have to find ways to navigate the laws and the facts, situations that are very complicated,” he said.
IVF usually involves creating multiple embryos, but only implanting one at a time to maximize the chances of a healthy pregnancy, meaning the remaining embryos are frozen and some are never used. Mr Abbott admitted he did not know the details, saying: “I have no idea mathematically — the number of frozen embryos, is it one, 10, 100, 1,000? Things like that matter.” (An oft-cited 2011 study found that the ideal number of eggs to retrieve was 15, but numbers vary widely based on age and other factors.)
Mr Abbott also raised questions such as what happens if someone who has frozen embryos dies or gets divorced, which have long been the subject of debate among IVF patients, doctors and lawyers.
“I’m not sure everybody has really thought through what all the potential problems are, and as a result, nobody knows what the potential answers are,” he said when CNN anchor Dana Bash asked if Texas families are pursuing IVF. you should be worried.”
After the Alabama decision rocked the presidential campaigns and Congress last week, Mr. Trump said Friday that he supports IVF and that Alabama lawmakers must act to protect it. And the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Senate campaign arm, said the party’s nominees should “align themselves with the public’s overwhelming support for IVF.”
Asked on CNN if such comments “undercut” Democrats’ criticism of Republicans, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who supports President Biden’s re-election, said: “Hell, no, it doesn’t.”
“We’ve always known that, with the appointments that Donald Trump has made to the Supreme Court of the United States, that IVF, that a woman’s ability to make her own decisions about her body and all the things that come from that were in danger. ,” he said. “And so this decision by the Alabama Supreme Court is a natural extension of that.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose political organization announced a campaign Sunday against a Tennessee bill that would make it a felony for an adult to help a minor get an abortion without parental consent, told NBC News “Meet the Press” that Mr. Trump was “still trying to figure out exactly where he stands because he’s out there celebrating the fact that he created these conditions in the first place.”
That was a reference to Mr. Trump’s boast that, by appointing Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, he had done what Republican presidents before him had failed to do: create a conservative supermajority which overturned Roe. v. Wade. Without it, the language in the Alabama Constitution cited by the state court would not be enforceable.
Many Republicans fought to oppose the outcome of the Alabama decision by supporting the principle behind it. Nikki Haley did so on Wednesday, saying it’s important to let doctors and patients freely navigate the IVF process, also saying embryos are people. he then said that just because he believed that, it didn’t mean everyone had to.
That theme continued on Sunday morning talk shows, where Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Florida, returned previous comments in which he had told a reporter that he agreed that the fetuses were children. Mr. Donalds told NBC on Sunday that he “only heard half of her question, but do I support IVF? One hundred percent I do.” He added that he would be open to federal legislation protecting IVF, depending on the details.
On “This Week” on ABC News, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who had her children through IVF and who has introduced a bill to protect her, said that “not a single Republican” senator had contacted with her to sign her bill. .
“Republicans will say whatever they want to say to try to cover themselves on this, but they’ve been clear,” Ms. Duckworth said. “And Donald Trump was the man who led this effort to eliminate women’s reproductive rights and reproductive choices.”
