The massive legal fallout from Alabama’s IVF ruling is just the beginning

Last Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court became the first in the nation to recognize frozen embryos as legal persons. The court’s decision — in a case in which three couples sued a fertility clinic for wrongful death after a patient destroyed several embryos — has already led the University of Alabama Birmingham, the state’s largest health care system, to pause IVF procedures. But what is happening in Alabama is just the beginning. This decision will affect the millions of people who become pregnant each year, their families, and their health care providers.  

To anyone who closely read Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion almost two years ago, the Alabama decision should not come as a shock. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by most of his conservative colleagues, repeatedly referenced the “unborn human being” — echoing the language of conservative Mississippi lawmakers. Furthermore, the majority declared that the state has a legitimate interest in the “preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development,“ without regard to whether that life exists in utero or not.