Even before the court ruled in favor of this vulgar fiction, state authorities relied on the concept to intimidate and jail women
Something that’s important to remember about last week’s ruling by the Alabama supreme court, which held that frozen embryos were persons under state law, is that the very absurdity of the claim is itself a demonstration of power. That a frozen embryo – a microscopic bit of biological information that can’t even be called tissue, a flick laden with the hopes of aspiring parents but fulfilling none of them – is equivalent in any way to a child is the sort of thing you can only say if no one has the power to laugh at you. The Alabama supreme court is the final court of review in that state. It cannot be appealed. For the foreseeable future, frozen cells in Alabama have the same legal status there as you or I do. Is this an absurd elevation of the status of an embryo, or an obscene degradation of human beings? The answer, of course, is both.
It is humiliating to even have to say this: that women matter more than fetuses or embryos, that a frozen cell in a petri dish is not a human being, but we are. It is an absurdity to make this argument, an exhausting waste of our time, a degradation. That, too, is part of the point.
That conclusion seems like something a modern European would write, but the situation in the US is different. The problem is that there is a significant minority of people here whose religious views state precisely the opposite: that the fetus has a right to life that is equal to their mothers’. Perhaps even more so, since the mother has already lived a significant portion of their life, while new life deserves the same chance. This has been a part of Catholic doctrine forever, and we have a large minority of Catholics here. (Catholics who, as far as I can tell, are much, much more conservative than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.)
Protestants, historically, didn’t agree with Catholics on this point. Until recently when Evangelical Protestants (a uniquely American phenomenon, as far as I can tell) realized how much money they could fundraise on it, and how it could lead to winning elections. So, combined, these two groups wield outsized political power. They are still a minority overall, but they have managed to mobilize their respective voting blocs and exert their political will in a manner that would have made the Pharisees that their Savior fought against proud. I don’t think these groups realize whose side they are really on.
The US is supposed to be a country with inherent freedom of religious beliefs, so those deeply-held convictions can’t simply be dismissed in the fashion the author does above. However, they are pushing the issue because it wins them political influence. And that’s why it’s so hard to counteract. Since it’s, at its core, a religious belief, logical arguments can’t be used against it.
