WASHINGTON — Some Republicans joined Democrats in expressing concern about an Alabama Supreme Court ruling this week that jeopardized future access to in vitro fertilization, giving allies of President Joe Biden new fuel in their efforts to expand access putting abortion at the center of the presidential election.
“We need to make sure that we don’t take away women’s rights to IVF, women who are of childbearing age and want to bear children,” said Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who campaigned for the former president this week. Donald Trump in South Carolina. She added: “I will work very hard to ensure this does not happen.”
Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups view abortion rights as a key motivator for voters in the upcoming presidential elections and are fighting for control of Congress. They believe abortion could be a winning issue as the debate broadens to include growing concerns about miscarriage care, access to medications, access to emergency care and now IVF treatments.
The Republican Party has struggled to talk about the issue, while abortion rights advocates have won races even in conservative-leaning states. Reproductive rights groups on Thursday compared the Alabama ruling to the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade and nullified a federally guaranteed right to abortion.
“This has struck a chord in a way I haven’t seen since Dobbs,” said Mini Timmaraju, head of the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All. “And that’s because people didn’t believe this could happen, but it does happen.”
Biden issued a statement Thursday calling the Alabama decision a “direct result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.” And Vice President Kamala Harris accused Republicans of hypocrisy in the middle of her ‘Fight for Reproductive Freedoms’ tour.
“On the one hand, the proponents say that an individual does not have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and on the other hand, the individual does not have the right to start a family,” she told an audience in Grand Rapids , Michigan.
Alabama’s all-Republican Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that frozen embryos created through IVF are considered children under state law, potentially exposing families and clinics to criminal prosecution or damages. In response, the state’s largest hospital and at least two other providers halted IVF treatments as they rushed to assess the ruling’s impact.
Trump did not speak publicly about the ruling and his campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primaries, has for months resisted calls from anti-abortion advocates to support a national ban, saying it would be unpopular with the general public. The Biden campaign and abortion rights advocates seized on a news report last week that Trump had privately proposed support for a 16-week ban.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump’s last major challenger, sided with the Alabama Supreme Court in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, saying, “Embryos to me are babies.” A day later, she told CNN that she did not want to stop IVF treatments and that “Alabama needs to go back and look at the law.”
“First, you want to make sure that embryos are protected and respected in the way they should be,” Haley said. “Second, you want to make sure that parents have the right to make these decisions with their doctor as they go about what they’re going to do.”
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, called the ruling “scary” during his speech at the POLITICO Governors Summit on Thursday. Alabama Sen. Tim Melson, also a Republican, said he plans to introduce legislation to protect IVF services in the state.
But other Republicans supported the Alabama court ruling, suggesting they would encourage women not to use IVF.
Catalina Stubbe, the national director of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit that advocates for parental rights in education and has led focused discussions about race and LGBTQ identity in schools, said she empathized with women who want to become birth mothers by through in vitro fertilization, but felt she should adopt it instead.
“There are many other options that mothers can certainly consider instead of IVF,” said Stubbe, who emphasized that she was describing her position and not that of her group. “It’s sad to create a life that ends up as an experiment for a laboratory.”
IVF is a common process in which people try to conceive, especially among couples who have difficulty conceiving, LGBTQ couples, and people trying to avoid passing on terminal genetic diseases or a high risk of cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is responsible for approximately 84,000 babies born each year.
Legislation and court decisions that define life as beginning at fertilization or that give embryos legal rights can restrict parts of the IVF process, including the removal of embryos that cannot be implanted in the uterus or the disposal of unused embryos.
Fertility doctors have been raising alarm bells about the risks of losing IVF access since Roe v. Wade was overturned, as many patients frantically moved frozen embryos to states with more permissive abortion laws — a process that comes with higher costs, complexity and risk of harm to embryos.
Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who has had two daughters through IVF, urged Congress to pass a bill introduced last month that aims to protect access to IVF.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee encouraged Alabamians to vote for Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands in a special election for a state legislative seat next month.
“This could be a deciding factor in who is elected president and could have a major impact on who sits in Congress,” said Kathleen Sebelius, a Democratic former governor of Kansas and secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services.
At the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Lala Mooney of Charles Town, West Virginia, said she “absolutely” agrees with the Alabama ruling.
“Embryos are a potential child,” said Mooney, whose son is Republican U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney. “And the moment they are fertilized, I think they become human beings.”
But Pat Parsley, a 76-year-old from Georgetown, South Carolina, who was waiting to hear from Haley at a campaign event Thursday afternoon, said she wants the former South Carolina governor to win the nomination but condemned the ruling in Alabama.
“I find that really frightening. It’s scary for women. It’s scary for families,” said Parsley, who also believes abortion should be a women’s issue. “I’m glad I’m not a young woman right now. I hate to say that. I mean, what young women are dealing with, we’ve gone backwards.”
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Associated Press reporters Adriana Gomez Licon, Colleen Long, Michelle L. Price, Amanda Seitz and Ali Swenson contributed to this report.
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