Sen. Steve Daines (R) of Montana heads the Senate Republican campaign committee, which today sent out a memo to all its candidates instructing them to vigorously defend IVF fertility treatments which the Alabama Supreme Court just effectively outlawed in the state. Donald Trump put out a statement so wildly endorsing IVF that he appears all but ready to undergo IVF himself just to make the point. But Sen. Daines himself recently cosponsored (along with numerous Senate colleagues) a law based on precisely the same theory used by the Alabama court.
Senate bill S.99, introduced in early 2021 and cosponsored by Daines, claims that all homo sapiens, born and unborn are entitled to the full protections of the 14th amendment. While the bill states that law does not “require” the “prohibition” of IVF it states very clearly that it requires the full panoply of constitutional rights for embryos. To quote the law, it holds that the term “human person” applies to “each member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including [from] the moment of fertilization.”
This is, again, identical to the Alabama court’s reasoning. It similarly did not explicitly prohibit in vitro fertilization. It rules that every embryo produced as part of IVF treatment is a human being with full constitutional rights. So in practice this does make IVF unworkable, despite not “requiring” outlawing it, since IVF produces embryos which are never implanted. When they are discarded they are presumably killed. That’s why Alabama IVF clinics are currently ceasing operations.
