Alabama lawmakers in both the state’s House and Senate Feb. 29 passed similar bills to implement legal protections to in vitro fertilization clinics following a ruling by that state’s Supreme Court that frozen embryos qualify as children under the state law’s wrongful death law.
IVF is a form of fertility treatment opposed by the Catholic Church on the grounds that it often involves the destruction of human embryos, among other concerns.
Both chambers passed similar bills, but they must reconcile their pieces of legislation before sending one to the governor’s desk. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has signaled her support for protecting IVF in law.
The ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court found that embryos are children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, a statute that allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for their child’s death. That ruling came in response to appeals brought by couples whose embryos were destroyed in 2020, when a hospital patient improperly removed frozen embryos from storage equipment, which they argued constituted a wrongful death. The judges found that under the law, parents’ ability to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child applies to unborn children, without an exception for “extrauterine children.”
While the ruling itself was limited in scope, it was met with backlash, as it created complex legal questions about what it entailed for IVF treatments in the state. Multiple IVF providers in the state paused treatments in its wake.
Republican lawmakers and candidates for office, most notably former President Donald Trump, frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024, sought to distance themselves from the ruling.
“Under my leadership, the Republican Party will always support the creation of strong, thriving, healthy American families,” Trump said in a Feb. 23 statement. “We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder! That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America.”
Trump added in his statement, “Like the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Americans, including the VAST MAJORITY of Republicans, Conservatives, Christians, and Pro-Life Americans, I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby.”
Trump urged Alabama lawmakers “to act quickly to find an immediate solution to preserve the availability of IVF in Alabama.”
The 1987 document from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith known as “Donum Vitae” or “The Gift of Life,” states the church opposes IVF and related practices, including gestational surrogacy, in part because “the connection between in vitro fertilization and the voluntary destruction of human embryos occurs too often.”
Issued by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, the teaching named the “right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death” and “the child’s right to be conceived, brought into the world and brought up by his parents” as behind the church’s moral objections to those practices.
“The political authority consequently cannot give approval to the calling of human beings into existence through procedures which would expose them to those very grave risks noted previously,” the documents states.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 238,126 patients underwent IVF treatment in 2021, resulting in 112,088 clinical pregnancies and 91,906 live births.
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