There is a growing rift in the decades-old marriage between anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers.
The problem came into view last month, after a bombshell decision from the Alabama supreme court temporarily halted in vitro fertilization (IVF). The ruling, which described frozen embryos as “extrauterine children”, unraveled when the Republican-controlled legislature passed short-term protections for IVF providers.
Under a new law signed last week by Republican governor Kay Ivey, IVF providers are temporarily protected from civil litigation and criminal prosecution in the event of “damage or death of an embryo” during treatment.
“In our state, we work to foster a culture of life,” the governor said in a statement about the court ruling. “This certainly includes some couples hoping and praying to be parents who utilize IVF.”
The move offered a helpful, if limited lifeline, to IVF patients in the state. The new law does not refute the Alabama supreme court’s controversial position that an embryo, stored for the purpose of IVF, is a person. Nor does it permanently shield IVF providers from legal penalties.
Despite its limited scope, the Republican-backed law took a step to align the GOP with US public consensus, which overwhelmingly supports IVF. It also invoked the wrath of rightwing Christian activists.
“Tragically, the Governor of Alabama has given the IVF industry a license to kill,” said Lila Rose, president of Live Action, a non-profit that opposes abortion. “Stripping embryonic human beings of legal protections is also unconstitutional.”
Some anti-abortion groups are even running ads against Alabama Republicans using the same provocative imagery – “blood, babies and scalpels” – that is typically leveraged against Democrats, according to Politico.
The backlash from anti-abortion groups, many of which are hostile to IVF, represents a persistent problem for Republicans in the post-Roe era. The party, once united under the simple goal of repealing Roe v Wade, cannot figure out how to advance the anti-abortion movement’s most hardline policy goals without alienating large swaths of US voters.
In their rush to announce a restrained, politically-safe stance in support of IVF, Alabama Republicans inadvertently angered their own Christian conservative base.
“You have a lot of Christian Right and pro-life groups that think that Alabama’s supreme court decision was good, and – if anything didn’t go far enough,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “For state lawmakers in solidly red districts, where there’s no chance that a Democrat could win, the Christian right could launch a primary challenge against Alabama Republicans who supported the IVF bill.”
It’s not the first time that the rightwing Christian movement has demanded that Republican lawmakers split from public opinion on reproductive healthcare.
In 2022, after the US supreme court repealed the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade, anti-abortion activists rejoiced: the Right to Life lobby had finally won. Uninhibited by Roe, state Republican leaders were free to set their own laws on abortion access – and yet wholly unprepared to answer the thorny legal questions that followed: should abortion bans offer an exception for cases where the life of the mother is jeopardized? What about cases where a rape or incest victim is impregnated by their abuser?
Like IVF, abortion ban exceptions are supported by the majority of US voters.
The GOP’s conservative Christian base, however, argued that exceptions should not exist, or at least be extremely narrow in scope. Rightwing activists believe that a fetus is a “preborn person” entitled to the same rights and protections as any other American citizen.
The concept of fetal personhood, once a fringe ideology that could be mostly ignored by mainstream Republican lawmakers, now underscores much of the modern anti-abortion movement’s work.
Abortion bans in states like Georgia and Alabama, for example, contain language that define a fetus as a person. In 2022, Georgia’s department of revenue announced that “any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat” can be counted as a dependent on tax forms.
The Alabama supreme court ruling itself hinges on the belief that a fetus is a legally-protected person.
Even before Roe’s demise, fetal personhood seeped into the criminal justice system, enabling the prosecution and criminalization of pregnancy complications. In 2020, Oklahoma police arrested a 19-year-old woman who had a miscarriage in her second trimester of pregnancy. Alleging that she had used meth, police charged her with first-degree manslaughter of the fetus (a medical examiner identified five other potential factors that may have led to the miscarriage).
As fetal personhood continues to transform American politics and law, anti-abortion lobbyists have been more willing to turn on Republican allies for failing to champion the ideology.
“Politicians cannot call themselves pro-life, affirm the truth that human life begins at the moment of fertilization, and then enact laws that allow the callous killing of these preborn children simply because they were created through IVF,” said Rose in her statement condemning the Alabama governor’s support of IVF.
Prompted by Alabama’s IVF wars, leading far-right think tanks are also pressuring congressional Republicans to back fetal personhood on the national stage. In a memorandum released late last month, the Heritage Foundation urged conservatives to view the Alabama supreme court decision on embryos as a means of protecting children.
“This ruling merely ensures that parents using the service can rest assured that their children will receive the same legal protections as everyone else’s,” the memo said.
It is unclear if the GOP will ultimately back fetal personhood, or decide that the ideology is too extreme.
In 2023, 124 Republicans co-sponsored the federal Life at Conception Act, which would give embryos the rights of people “at the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment when the individual comes into being”.
A recent attempt by Senate Democrats to advance a bill protecting the procedure failed after a single Republican blocked it.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have repeatedly sidestepped questions about federal protections for IVF, leaving Alabama lawmakers to answer fundamental questions about fetal personhood on their own.
“It’s not my belief that Congress needs to play a role here,” said the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, at a West Virginia press conference on Thursday. “I think this is being handled by the states.”
