Unfortunate for anyone trying to get pregnant with help in AL, but honestly, I was pretty happy to hear this. Trumpistas are a real threat to normal life, and having that spelled out in headlines that affect suburban voters is the way he will lose.
Least harm I guess if IVF clinics all close. Rich fence-sitters might get mad, plus if they try to keep operating it seems a matter of time before some DA tries to make an example of a poor employee.
The delightful consequence here would be an entirely new district for the Alabama legislature whose population consists of about 20 medical and ancillary staff and a freezer full of several thousand embryonic Alabamans.
If you already have a bunch of embryos in the freezer in Alabama, do you just have to keep paying for the freezer? Or does the clinic have to keep paying if you don't? Presumably, even if you maintain the freezer, at a certain point there's freezer burn.
Does this mean that cryogenics finally works?
If they're people, women have a duty to rescue. This is going to get ugly.
But what if they're "illegal alien" embryos?
Is there fertilizationright citizenship?
The biblical language quoted in the opinion is just so, so fucked up.
4: My guess is the lab has no recourse if you stop paying your freezer rent.
Is there fertilizationright citizenship?
I don't think that matters because apportionment is done by the number of inhabitants in an area, not by the number of citizens or eligible voters.
Though checking the Alabama constitution, "number of inhabitants" is as determined by the US census, which presumably wouldn't count frozen zygotes. Damn.
What if a guy just mailed a bunch of embryos to some random guy in Alabama?
Assume the embryos were fertilized by a violinist.
I did no work at all to be uninformed about this and I'm keeping it that way.
If Alabama had a fetal personhood amendment, they could probably say that that overrode the apportionment clause of the state constitution at least for state legislative apportionment (and the final arbiter would be the state SC). But it appears they don't.
I'm glad that soon the census will just have to start counting fertilized embryos. I've got one weird trick to solve our electoral college problems!
Isn't getting eggs kind of painful?
4, 11 We'll have to see how the various defenses play out on remand. This was review of an order granting a 12(b)(6) motion, and the lower court ruled only on the one issue, so there's more to come.
The parents wouldn't have any obligation, I wouldn't think -- no one has standing to sue them for wrongful death.
But IVF is probably dead in Alabama for a while.
21 No, the parents wanted a payout for the mishandling of the frozen embryos. The wrongful death statute is a way to get punitive damages.
And I suppose Chief Justice Parker has been waiting for a chance to wax eloquent on what "sanctity" means now that it's in the state constitution.
If you make a bunch of embryos do you rack up the dependent deductions on your taxes? If a woman has a miscarriage does she get a deduction for the year the child was in utero?
Should go to the logical extreme, millions in tax credits every time you jerk off. Women only get about 12 credits per year though.
I think Monty Python already did the extreme case.
They covered the theological aspects but didn't consider the financial implications.
Maybe they aren't good at finances and that's why they keep going broke?
Apparently frozen embryos can last a number of decades. So they could totally reach voting age.
Let's not give pedophiles a new idea.
The inestimable Tommy Tuberville on th IVF ruling: I was all for it ... we need to have more kids."
We have kids at home in the freezer.
I THOUGHT I THAWED A PUDDYTAT!
My guess is the lab has no recourse if you stop paying your freezer rent.
It can get a court order compelling you to pay child support.
Theologians have struggled with that question, but the Alabama Supreme Court has finally answered it: If you thaw an embryo, you go straight to hell.
What if a mad scientist fertilizes (hundreds of) thousands of embryos, freezes them, plugs them into a power outlet in the state capitol (or the state supreme court building, or the republican party headquarters), then absconds beyond the reach of the state?
The state will have to set up a hospice to let the embryos die a natural death.
Can we get headline writers to use the phrase "embryo embroglio"?
41: You might, but the copyeditors might object.
Most of the mainstream reporting on the frantic Republican backpedaling/distancing on the IVF thing is about as credulous and uninformative as you would sadly expect. And iwrt Trump it builds on recent savvy insidery reporting on Trump's "moderation" on abortion following a Haberman/Swan NYT piece a while back. Haberman is quick to scold others we they do not acknowledge the purely transactional nature of Trump's words and positions but proves herself to be useful mule for his BS when it gets her a big scoop.
Commentary from other other place notes that the AL AG promising not to prosecute anyone for killing a snowflake is part of the overall Republican/segregationist playbook- make everything illegal and then they can choose which people to prosecute based on their duskiness morality.
Plus, you can always get another attorney general.
45: Yep.
44: To be 'fair' there are often mentions of Republican hypocrisy, but as with many things R (and Trump in particular) hypocrisy is the wrong framing; They are just saying things instrumentally, hypocrisy implies a betrayal of a core belief. Maybe Lindsay Graham is being hypocritical on Ukraine, but given his entire genre of himself I think that is a somewhat misleading characterization.
The weird thing that happens on abortion and abortion-related topics is that Republicans steadfastly refuse to write detailed workable bills. Instead it's always just some blanket bill and then some weird sentence like "nothing in this bill should be construed to ban IVF" in a way that totally misses that the law doesn't work that way. If you have a law that makes it impossible to run an IVF clinic then you can't just add a sentence to take it all back. The exact same thing happens with the dead or dying fetus scenario, where Republicans just want to say "oopsie, we never meant for 'abortion' to mean that scenario, can we just take it back?" and never leads to actually rewriting the bill in a way that gives a workable legal regime.
Of course the cynic would say that they actually want to ban IVF, but I actually don't think that's true. I think they don't want to ban IVF, but something weirder is happening where they just can't bring themselves to think about how they want the law to work.
A workable law would require acknowledging that there is an unknowable point somewhere between day 0 and week 32 before which a lump of cells is not "a baby" which would up-end the entire logic of the pro-life movement. A 6-week limit would be both draconian and more than enough to protect IVF, but isn't acceptable to them.