Babies in test tubes or frozen biological material? Good news from Alabama.
In Italy, according to ISTAT, as many as 5% of babies that are born (and fewer and fewer) are the result of in vitro fertilization, implanting embryos kept in the freezer into the uterus.
In mid-February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are not biological material, but human beings, rights holders. A straight-legged entry that threatens to blow up the business of IVF clinics in the United States. An outrage to those who, like the Assemblée Nationale Française, would like to make abortion a constitutionally guaranteed right.
“My friend lost the baby she was carrying.” This is the phrase we normally hear when someone tells us about a miscarriage.
The “child” itself is downgraded to a “product of conception” when it comes to voluntary termination of pregnancy.
When it comes to in vitro fertilization, the product of conception simply becomes a “frozen embryo”.
But what is the substantial (we might say ontological) difference between the three different conditions? None. It is always a human being at a very early stage of development.
Is there really a substantial difference between this same “human being at a very early stage of development” and a child already born, a young person, an adult, an old man or even a dying child? The answer is once again: none! To the judge in Maryville, Tennessee who questioned him during a trial on frozen embryos, the great French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune said: “I see no difference between the little being that you have been and the mature one that you are now” (L’enceinte concentrationnaire : d’après les minutes du procès de Maryville, Kindle Edition, 1989; In Italy, L’embrione segno di contraddizione, Ed. Orizzonte Medico, 1992).
And to those who pretended that human embryos were not human persons, bearers of rights. Lejeune repeated the slogan of the abolitionist slavery movement in the United States: “A man is a man, is a man.” So he’s one of us! Natura non facit saltus!
Alabama has had a law since 1872, the “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act,” which allows the parents of a child who died before birth to sue for damages to the person who caused the death.
By an 8-1 majority, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that damages can also be claimed for the death of a frozen embryo.
According to the Court, the “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of where they are,” i.e., even outside the mother’s womb.
The central question under discussion is “whether there can be an exception to the protections provided by the 1872 Act for the killing of babies in utero for babies outside the womb (“babies,” the court writes). The state Supreme Court has written in black and white that the answer to that fundamental question is no!
If the frozen embryos are children, they can no longer be considered the object of property, as is generally held in court disputes.
Bad news for the lucrative business of the reproduction industry. In fact, the IVF center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham immediately started a pause for reflection, to avoid possible indictments.
Bad news also for President Biden’s spokesman (but also according to Trump).
This is good news, however, for those who believe that the right to life is the first of human rights (St. John Paul II) and for those who think that the throwaway culture begins with abortion (Pope Francis).
Gian Luigi Gigli, Past President FIAMC
