Alabama Court’s Inhuman Ruling

In a thoroughly inhuman decision, an Alabama Supreme Court ruling has equated children to mere embryos. Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff reports:

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people and someone can be held liable for destroying them, a decision that reproductive rights advocates say could imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) and affect the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on treatments like it each year.

The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could, writing that it had long held that “unborn children are ‘children’” and that that was also true for frozen embryos, affording the fertilized eggs the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

An embryo is obviously not a person. An embryo is a POTENTIAL person, not an ACTUAL person. Persons are actual human entities you can see walking, talking, working, and generally going about the activity of living a life.  The embryo-as-a-person claim is a religious view, not a rational, observable, fact-based view. This law will saddle the IVF industry with unwarranted, potentially crippling liability, preventing countless potential human beings from being brought into existence for people desperate to become parents. It will literally turn innocent people into outlaws, ruin people financially—and ultimately landing innocent people in jail for non-murders, if the principle is developed to its logical end. This law is unConstitutional. It is also a moral abomination. It dehumanizes actual people. If the lives and properties of living human beings can be subordinated and sacrificed to potential human beings, it's the end of freedom and flourishing.

IVF is a crucial human value, and the embryo is crucially important because it is central to that end. But no value can ever be put above the value of an actual, individual, living human being—not the state, not society, not the race, not future generations, not God . . . and not the unborn, including embryos. That is the very definition of evil. This law is based on a thoroughly anti-human premise.

Related Reading:

Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos By Tim Craig and Sabrina Malhi

What to know about the Alabama embryo ruling and its IVF implications By Maham Javaid and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

Alabama ushers in the theocracy by Ruth Marcus

My Facebook Post on the Subject