Republicans’ Absurdist Ideas About Reproduction Are Coming for Us All

Nearly two years ago, late into the night on a Monday, I had the terrifying realization that I needed to move my embryos. Immediately.

A few hours earlier—just as I was starting to wrap up work for the day—my phone had lit up in what felt like one long, continuous stream of alerts. Politico had just obtained a leaked copy of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. As a reproductive rights attorney leading a Supreme Court reform organization, I knew my immediate next steps. Conference call. Media statement. Email to our supporters. I’d been preparing for this moment since Donald Trump was elected.

But what I had spent less time thinking about was how this would affect me personally. I wasn’t at all prepared for what to do about my embryos. After years of miscarriages and egg retrievals, I did not have a baby. But I had my embryos. Sitting in nitrogen tanks. In a red state—a red state that had recently passed a draconian anti-abortion bill that, among other things, granted “an unborn child at every stage of development, all rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons.”

That legislation was being challenged in federal court, but now Roe would be gone by the end of June. Amid a swirl of unknowns (What would happen with the litigation? How would that law impact IVF? Would I somehow be prohibited from moving my embryos in the future?) I knew one thing with absolute certainty: If I wanted to control what happened to my embryos, I had to get them the heck out of Arizona, and fast.

Unfortunately, the clinics I called in my attempt to find a new home for the embryos didn’t seem to match my urgency. They couldn’t understand why we would move the embryos at all. Their pace and paperwork was business as usual. Even some of my like-minded friends understood my concern, but not my level of panic, and action. I’ll admit, I had momentary doubts about whether my alarm was misplaced.

Needless to say, the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision—effectively outlawing IVF by declaring that embryos are, legally speaking, children—put to rest any lingering questions about whether I was right to be concerned. As Mark Joseph Stern reported, embryo shipping services have already said they will no longer ship to or from Alabama.

And isn’t that the story of reproductive freedom in America in a nutshell? Time and again, advocates sound the alarm only to be told that we are being hysterical. Then we watch in horror as our worst fears materialize.

Rife with biblical references and issued on the same day we learned that Trump’s advisers are preparing a full-scale policy effort to impose Christian nationalism on the American public, the Alabama decision sent shock waves through the national political discourse.

In a piece published on MSNBC, the brilliant Sarah Posner made a devastatingly convincing case that Alabama offers “a terrifying preview of another Trump presidency.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee scrambled to advise candidates to “reject government efforts to restrict IVF,” even though its own chairman co-sponsored legislation to give embryos “equal protection under the 14^th Amendment.”

The White House condemned the ruling, and even issued a statement from President Biden himself. But I can’t shake the feeling that leading Democrats are still missing the dire urgency of the situation. The march toward Christian nationalism as law of the land is well underway—and while it would be aided by a second Trump administration, it will continue regardless because of the right-wing Supreme Court majority he cemented. We’ll be living with these fears for quite some time.

Here’s what was going through my mind the first time I typed “how to move frozen embryos” into Google: Dobbs was not the culmination of the Christian right’s legal crusade; it was instead just the start of a new, more intensive phase. In less than two years since overturning Roe, the court has obliterated the separation of church and state and greenlit anti-LGBTQ discrimination, with an eye toward reversing gay marriage or even criminalizing consensual sex between same-gender adults. Lest you think a national IVF ban is out of the question, Justice Clarence Thomas has endorsed the fetal personhood theory at the heart of the Alabama case, while Justice Amy Coney Barrett refused to rule out criminalizing IVF at her 2020 confirmation hearing. Access to the widely used abortion medication mifepristone and to lifesaving emergency abortion care are both up for review this court term. The latter is being litigated on behalf of the state of Idaho by the hard-right “Christian law firm” Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is also behind the mifepristone case.

Our only hope of stopping ideas like this from seeping deeper into our legal system is to substantially reform the Supreme Court itself. And yet the majority of Democratic leaders seem to be unable to grasp the situation we find ourselves in—one of a captured Supreme Court that needs reforming. Once again, they seem to be hoping our warnings are mere hysterics.

In his response to Alabama’s attempt to label embryos as people, Biden promised to “restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law.” But he made no mention of rebalancing a Supreme Court that has proved all too happy to overturn any law it finds distasteful. Plenty of Democratic senators issued statements condemning the decision, but none joined the three lonely co-sponsors of the Judiciary Act of 2023, which aims to restore balance to the Supreme Court by adding four new justices.

If our leaders don’t start to take advocates’ warnings seriously, there will be no “safe blue states” left to protect us from living in a right-wing fever dream. The backlash to Alabama’s assault on IVF has been swift and widespread. Republican elected officials have practically tripped over themselves trying to escape blame for the ruling. But the judges who issued it were putting into effect a position that has been at the heart of the anti-abortion movement for decades. Hundreds of elected Republicans have sponsored legislation that would have the same effect, regardless of what they’re saying now that the outcry is so apparent.

The conservative legal activists who drive appointments to the federal bench have been aiming for exactly this outcome, and they’re already talking about restricting access to birth control and even ending “recreational” sex. The people who believe their religion should trump everyone else’s freedom were never going to stop at ​​returning abortion laws to the states, or shelving mifepristone, or IVF, or surrogacy. They want us all to live in their image, and they have commandeered enough legal infrastructure to achieve that goal unless we get serious about stopping them. In watching the response from vulnerable would-be parents as they realize that this assault will affect them too, regardless of their own self-conception that they might never have an abortion—I can only hope that more and more people are realizing what living under these kinds of policies will be like.

I was lucky. I had the resources to move embryos across the country shortly after the Dobbs decision—and the professional expertise to know I should. And by the end of the next Supreme Court term, with the help of an incredible gestational carrier, caring doctors, and countless others, I was analyzing Supreme Court decisions with my baby on my lap.

Today, women just like me in Alabama—who spent years, drew down their savings, and endured endless procedures trying to have a successful pregnancy—are asking the same questions I was a year and a half ago. They’re wondering whether it’s already too late. It’s heartbreaking, enraging, and it’s happening now. It’s not impossible to turn the tide, but doing so will take a more cleareyed response than we have seen to date.