Embryos are people in Alabama, but women aren’t

It was never going to end with the fall of Roe.

The Christian right’s goal was never just to ban abortion. That was only the first step in a bigger plan.

They believe life should be a rigid hierarchy, where everyone’s role is assigned at birth and unchangeable. Specifically, they believe men are meant to rule and women to obey. Their goal, as atheists and feminists have been warning for decades, is to turn that medieval fantasy into reality by making it the law of the land. They want to give men all the power and return women to a state of subordination, reversing all the moral progress of the last hundred years.

They hate abortion not out of any deep concern for life, but because it gives women the power to avoid what they see as “the consequences” of sex. For similar reasons, they want to ban birth control, erase LGBTQ people, and outlaw sex outside of heterosexual marriage. In their puritanical theology, sex is only for procreation, not pleasure, and women should be barefoot-and-pregnant helpmeets.

In Alabama, that worldview has just erupted like Mount Vesuvius.

A blast of theocracy

The origin of this story centers around a strange lawsuit against the Center for Reproductive Medicine, an Alabama fertility clinic.

The lawsuit alleges that a patient wandered into a secure area of the clinic and removed a tray of IVF embryos from cryonic storage. When the intense cold burned their hand, they dropped it on the floor, killing the embryos.

The biological parents of these embryos sued under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The Alabama Supreme Court endorsed their argument and went well beyond it, ruling that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” who possess the same rights as any other child, “without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.”

READ: Abortion travel bans: Coming soon to a red state near you?

The most appalling part of the opinion comes from the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker. Parker is a professed adherent of “seven mountains” dominionism, a Christian supremacist doctrine that should disqualify him from the judiciary.

Parker’s opinion sounds more like a sermon from the pulpit of a church, quoting the Bible and making assertions about God’s will. It’s a blast of theocracy straight from the Dark Ages, in which this Christian mullah asserts that his interpretation of ancient dogma governs everyone else’s lives:

In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.

…The People of Alabama have declared the public policy of this State to be that unborn human life is sacred. We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.”

A wild array of absurdities

Microscopic cells with no brains or bodies, frozen in liquid nitrogen, treated as if they were children! It would be ludicrous if it weren’t so deadly serious.

Labeling single-celled embryos as human beings creates a wild array of legal absurdities. If you have dozens of embryos in storage, can you put them as dependents on your taxes, or claim benefits on their behalf? Can they inherit property, enter into contracts? If an embryo is frozen for years, does it “age” and gain the rights and responsibilities as a person of that age?

This ruling, strictly speaking, was only in a civil case. However, the plain implication is that destruction of an embryo should be prosecuted the same way as killing a human being.

The immediate consequence is to end IVF in the state of Alabama. IVF entails fertilizing multiple eggs to get at least one viable embryo. It’s too risky for a clinic to create these embryos or keep them in cold storage, knowing they’d be liable if any were lost. Indeed, IVF facilities in Alabama are already shutting down.

For the same reason, it’s also now dangerous for aspiring parents in Alabama to turn to IVF. If you create multiple embryos, you’d better keep them forever. If you don’t, it’s a very small step from this ruling to a crusading DA filing murder charges.

This is another step down a dark and frightening path. The religious right has long sought to label fertilized embryos as people. and to define their destruction, for any reason, as “wrongful death”. They’ve twisted this concept into a vehicle to control women’s bodies.

Under laws like Texas’ bounty law, the abortion of a fetus is a “wrongful” act that anyone can sue over. Anyone: a controlling spouse, an angry ex, an abusive parent, a nosy neighbor, an anti-choice vigilante, a rapist. Everyone has jurisdiction over a woman’s body, except the woman herself. The Alabama ruling fits neatly into this framework.

Shutting down IVF could be seen as a casualty of the anti-abortion argument. On the other hand, some religious fundamentalists hate IVF specifically. They see it as a way for single women, same-sex couples, and older women with careers to have babies in defiance of a supposed natural order.

What the Bible really says about abortion

Whatever dominionists like Judge Parker claim, the Bible doesn’t support the anti-choice position. As atheists have often observed, the Bible contains no teaching against abortion, neither in the Old Testament nor in the New. In fact, there are biblical verses that point the opposite way.

One such passage is the “ordeal of bitter water” in Numbers chapter 5. If an Israelite man suspects his wife has been unfaithful, he can bring her to the priests and force her to drink a magical potion. If she’s been loyal, this witch’s brew will do no harm. However, if she’s cheated on her husband, “her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry” (5:27). It’s biblically sanctioned abortion for affair babies!

Another relevant biblical law is Exodus chapter 21. It says that if a man injures or kills another man, he should suffer the same thing, eye-for-an-eye fashion. However, if he injures a pregnant woman and causes her to miscarry, he only pays a fine:

“When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”

Exodus 21:22-25 (RSV)

Ending recreational sex

It’s not an accident that abortion isn’t forbidden in the Bible. Nor is it a coincidence that the modern anti-choice movement arose when it did, in the backlash to the second wave of feminism.

In a society where male headship is secure, abortion is less of a big deal. It’s only when women started to rebel against patriarchy—getting educated, getting jobs, pursuing independence, defining a meaningful life for themselves free from the demands of tradition—that conservatives started to panic. They want to roll back these steps toward equality by any means necessary. Keeping women burdened by mandatory childbearing is a big part of that plan.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. The architects of this plan are open about their intent. The Heritage Foundation, for example, has called for “ending recreational sex [and] senseless use of birth control pills“. They’ve said that they want to return “consequentiality” to sex.

In other words, religious conservatives are mad that people can have sex for pleasure without consequences. They view that as a violation of God’s order, and they want to outlaw everything that makes it possible—birth control, abortion, and more. This is in accordance with their primitive worldview, in which people who commit acts that they view as sin deserve to suffer.

The fundamentalists have made their goal very clear. Wherever they have power, they’re trying to put it into practice. The only question is whether the rest of us are paying attention.

If voters are asleep at their posts, the U.S. will continue its descent into the abyss of theocracy. However, if people of good will—especially women, secularists, and lovers of freedom—treat this as the clarion call it is, there’s still time to stop them. We outnumber these power-hungry puritans, and we can make them pay for their presumption. If we rise up, we can overthrow them in catastrophic defeat.