Dear John,
An Alabama court has opened the door to a new realm of legal jeopardy by ruling that embryos kept in freezers for in-vitro fertilization are considered to be people under the law, and protected by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
In Ms., Jill Fillipovic calls it a “shocking and jarring decision that radically extends the bounds of legal personhood, tosses any claims to originalism aside, and seems primed to make a variety of fertility treatments either extremely costly for patients, or extremely legally risky for clinicians.” The decision, she notes, puts the anti-abortion movement one step closer to their ultimate goal of having full control over reproduction—and women’s autonomy.
And what’s more, the theocrats in the Alabama state Supreme Court aren’t even trying to hide the religious beliefs behind the decision: in a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote that the decision was grounded in the "theologically based view of the sanctity of life."
“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,” he wrote. I don’t think I need to say any more to convey how alarming it is to see these words openly expressed in a judicial ruling.
In the face of rulings like this one, as well as the ever-mounting damages caused by state-level abortion bans, I’m certain of the crucial role that the Equal Rights Amendment could play in securing the full range of reproductive rights, including abortion access—if only Congress would act to place the already-ratified ERA into the U.S. Constitution. “If equality and the Equal Rights Amendment, in particular, weren’t so important, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep it from us,” said Zakiya Thomas, president and CEO of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality at the Radical Optimism Conference late last month. I urge you to join the movement, and sign the national ERA petition at Sign4ERA.org.
Discriminatory legislation has real-world impacts—from the women across the country who have died or come near death after being denied medically necessary abortions, to the case of the nonbinary Oklahoma teenager who died after being beaten by classmates in a bathroom at their high school. Just last year, Oklahoma passed a bill forbidding public school students from using any bathroom other than the one associated with the gender they were assigned at birth.
We must remain in this fight—because the stakes are life-or-death.
Onward,
