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On Feb 16, 2024, the Alabama Supreme ruled that embryos in petri dishes are "extrauterine children -- that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus" and are thus are afforded all the rights and protections granted to born minor children.
The ruling must be true, as it invoked "God" 41 times. Apparently 40 references to God would have been insufficient and 42 would have been overkill.
On page 37, the ruling states that "God made every person in his image", consistent with Genesis scripture "God created mankind in his own image". By transitive logic, then God must be the image of mankind. And thanks to the Alabama Supreme Court, I now understand that God must have the appearance of embryos in a petri dish. Oh silly me, as a child I had seen him much more like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments movie. Maybe both are true - like God is the most amazing shapeshifter of all time.
And, if every child has a "soul", then what becomes of the soul of a destroyed embryo? Do they torment in hell forever, as they have not been cleansed of original sin in the sacrament of baptism? Are they condemned, as they have not accepted Jesus as their personal lord and savior? Are they judged according to their deeds -- that is were they good or evil embryos in the few days before they were frozen? Or are they lesser souls -- bound to wander aimlessly for eternity, not worthy of a judgment from an omniscient and omnipotent God?
Actually, none of this makes sense to me. Please feel free to add your wisdom regarding the image of god, the plight of extrauterine embyonic souls, or anything else related to the ruling.
I'm trying really hard to understand this. The scenario in my head is that a couple goes to an IVF clinic. They do whatever medical procedure it is to get 10 eggs to fertilize. They do 10 because they don't know in advance how many "will take". Then they put 4 or 5 of those into the womb of the woman.
Now...what do they do with the other 5? There seem to be only 2 choices:
A) freeze them for a later attempt if this one fails
B) destroy them
But the supreme court in AL says that these are extrauterine humans??? I'm just really confused at how they arrived at their conclusion that destroying them is murder.
There's a supremely good segment on "On The Media" this week that talks about the rise of this ultra extreme Christian viewpoint. It's about 20 minutes long and it's the first thing that they talked about this week.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-christian-nationalism-fertility-books-oscars
Andy, thank you for your comments, which more seriously think through the logistics of the IVF process.
In the court ruling, Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker writes, “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself... Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
My earlier posting (and its attempt at humor) is intended to show the folly of foundationally relying on the religous musings of a priestly caste of a particular tribe 2500 years ago to form the basis of legal reasoning on a modern technology to assist infertile couples to have children.
In fact, the embryos for several couples were destroyed when a hospital patient entered an unlocked door to the room containing frozen embryos and accidentally dropped them on the floor. The news must have been tragic to the couples for whom those embyos embodied their hopes for future offspring. The lax security must have added to the despair.
Ultimately, these acts were accidental, not malicious, and far from morally equivalent to the mass killing of minor children. I would argue that the legal recourse for the loss of the embryos should rather be based upon legal precedence of incurred cost (for the embryos in this case), plus pain and suffering (for which there is a wide latitude in awards).
The message for the IVF industry would have been to beef up protocols and security to prevent future occurrences of similar tragedies. With the actual AL Supreme Court ruling, the message to the IVF industry is that we cannot take the legal and financial risk to operate in Alabama, thus depriving Alabama couples the benefit of in-state IVF care.
The legislature is trying to address to these legal concerns, but it is not clear if any law passed by the legislature will overule the AL Supreme Court's ruling that they claim is based upon both the US and the AL constitutions. And ultimately, it is up to the same AL Supreme Court to make that decision.
I'm no lawyer, but one would think that this obvious violation of the US Constitution would be overturned on Federal appeal. The wording of the ruling makes abundantly clear that it was based solely in religion. That cannot be disputed.
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