Alabama’s Hastily Enacted IVF Providers Protection Act Is Unconstitutional

 The Alabama Constitution’s 2022 Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment “acknowledges, declares, and affirms that it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate.”

IVF contracts, including those of the LePage plaintiffs whose case led to the new IVF statute, typically call for the disposal of non-implanted embryos, with or without their prior use for experimentation. Ensuring the protection of the supposed rights of these frozen embryos would naturally involve both civil and criminal measures to save them from being subject to disposal. So, granting statutory protection to those involved in such disposal is facially in conflict with the Alabama Constitution.

Perhaps the statute will go unchallenged because to do so would only highlight the conceptual incoherence of the personhood at conception theory. IVF as now done is inconsistent with that theory. Most of the “pro-life” dogmatists do not want to say out loud that those who procure or provide IVF services are “murdering babies.”