The IVF Ruling Is About Who Gets to Raise Your Children
SlateIn its decision earlier this month interpreting Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act as conferring personhood upon embryos, that state’s high court realized part of the dream of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe v. * What Alito had called “unborn human beings” would inevitably be swept into Alabama’s protections for “extrauterine children.” That should surprise none of us. This isn’t just about forcing pregnant people to carry babies; it’s also about the “domestic supply of infants” problem that the 14th Amendment was expressly crafted to redress: a sordid history of power and money and ownership of children, still baked so deeply into adoption and foster care that you almost don’t notice when the state coolly lays claim to the entire contents of a “cryogenic nursery.” Nothing about this should shock you, at least not if you’ve been reading Dorothy Roberts. Related From Slate Republicans’ Absurdist Ideas About Reproduction Are Coming for Us All When Republicans insist that life begins at conception, and also that seven cell clusters constitute “life,” what they are saying—what they were always saying—is that we as a society need babies so badly that somebody should always be entitled to take control and custody over somebody else’s baby, and indeed of every potential baby. It’s part of a long-standing tradition of denying autonomy and support to parents and caregivers, blaming them for being unable to raise children, and making alternate plans for their babies.