The role of fetal personhood in the anti-abortion movement and legislation

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• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  Last month, the all Republican Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created using in vitro fertilization are legally children and have what's known as personhood. The decision caused clinics across the state to halt all services, fearing potential prosecution for destroyed embryos.

  After weeks of backlash, Republican Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed a bill on Wednesday that gives IVF providers and patients immunity from criminal charges, but the new legislation did not clarify whether frozen embryos will still have the same rights as people. Recently John Yang spoke to Julie F. Kay, a human rights attorney who defends reproductive rights in cases around the world.

• John Yang:

  Julie, this ruling in Alabama was hailed by many in the anti-abortion movement, but then it was quickly followed by lawmakers in Alabama, many of them opponents of abortion pressing for legislation that would protect in vitro fertilization from the effects of this ruling.

  What does that say about the approach or the attitude of the anti-abortion movement toward this issue?

• Julie F. Kay, Human Rights Attorney:

  Well, what it says is this is an election year and they realize that an anti-abortion position is wildly unpopular with voters about 70 percent of the country right now supports the Roe vs. Wade framework. And as we've seen in individual lives, abortion is a key health care issue for many women and families.

  So some of these legislators are trying to kind of peel off, you know, who's deserving of reproductive health care by saying that IVF yes, that's a good thing. But if you're going to make decisions about abortion or contraception or even miscarriage management, we're going to take that decision away from you and put it in the hands of anti-abortion folks and politicians.

• John Yang:

  To make sure that everyone understands this issue. Explain how fetal personhood affects in vitro fertilization and other reproductive health treatments.

• Julie F. Kay:

  Fetal personhood is kind of what we've seen in other countries such as Ireland that had a constitutional provision that equated the unborn with the mother or pregnant person. And really what it does is try to hold a person's life at the same level as something that is either a fertilized egg or even before implantation and an embryo.

  And this is really about control. It's about who gets to decide whether when and with whom somebody gets to have a child or not. So what we're seeing here is really an attempt to broaden the anti-abortion position to control not just abortion, but also contraception IVF, and a whole host of some of the most fundamental human rights decisions that women make.

• John Yang:

  These other states that we mentioned that have similar laws, do they have protections or carve outs for IVF and other reproductive health issues?

• Julie F. Kay:

  The issue of whether IVF is banned or not is really new. It's not something that is that unexpected to those of us who have been working in the field for a long time, but it's kind of come upon us like gangbusters in the Roe landscape.

  And you know how different states handle this, both in the legislative arena as well as what public officials are saying as far as aiding and abetting of abortion and criminalization, how women get treated in fertility clinics or in emergency rooms or in reproductive health care generally is really unknown right now.

  What we are seeing is that more and more women are choosing to have medication abortions and ever before right now, that's the most popular method of abortion in this country and telemedicine virtual visits with your provider are up to about 1/5 of the abortions in this country.

  So we're seeing this real uptick in people taking charge of their own medical decision making and abortion rights through this new and safe method of abortion. At the same time as anti-abortion state officials are really expanding more and more every day, what they're trying to do to control reproductive rights in this country.

• John Yang:

  You're talking about those efforts. You say this has come on like gangbusters since Roe was overturned? What do you think the effect is going to be in other states that tend to not favor abortion to oppose abortion rights?

• Julie F. Kay:

  Well, I think we're going to see some copycats of anti-abortion politicians and state officials really fervently trying to either a race to access to IVF stem cell research contraceptives, a whole host of things, while at the same time the anti-abortion movement is split because some opponents of abortion wouldn't go that far. Or if they would go that far. They're not going to do it in an election year.

  We've seen states trying to criminalize misoprostol, which is the abortion and miscarriage management medication. And overall it's become a political football because they don't have the majority of Americans who want to ban abortion rights. So they're doing what they can through conservative courts through judicial maneuvers and through messing with ballot initiatives to really take away the rights that people want.

• John Yang:

  Julie F. Kay, human rights attorney, thank you very much.

• Julie F. Kay:

  Thank you.