Alabama's IVF Ruling Comes Amid A Self-Proclaimed "Christian Nationalist" Plot From Trump's Allies
Alabama's IVF Ruling Comes Amid A Self-Proclaimed "Christian Nationalist" Plot From Trump's Allies
The Alabama Supreme Court's IVF ruling cited God and the Bible. This comes amid a push from Trump's Project 2025 allies seeking to infuse "Christian Nationalism" in his potential second term.
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Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen, fertilized embryos are legally children under state law. The 131-page ruling included a concurring opinion from Chief Justice Tom Parker that cited God and the Bible as a basis for the decision.
This ruling already has broad ramifications for women in Alabama and could also impact other states if courts and legislatures follow this precedent. Women seeking in vitro fertilization (IVF) could have that option stripped away, and the cost could drastically increase elsewhere. In some cases, it’s a woman’s only option.
Reading the ruling is jarring, containing language you would expect coming from a preacher at a pulpit, not a judge in a court of law:
“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself… Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."
This same judge recently appeared on a QAnon conspiracy theorist’s show and expressed support for the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” a Christian Nationalist doctrine.
This development comes amid a push by Trump ally Russell Vought and his Project 2025 allies to infuse “Christian Nationalism” in a potential second Trump term. More on that later in this piece, but first, we need to emphasize just how damaging this IVF ruling is.
In spite of the claims made by the Chief Justice, this ruling doesn’t protect life. It actually prevents life from being created.
IVF is a process where eggs are retrieved from a woman and fertilized outside of the body. The fertilized embryos are then either placed back into the woman’s uterus for immediate impregnation, placed in a surrogate, or stored for later use.
About 2% of births in the US have resulted from IVF and over 8 million babies have been born since the first in 1978. A recent poll, from former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway no less, found that 85% of Americans support IVF, including 83% of Evangelicals. A Pew Research Center poll from last year found that 42% of Americans have either used fertility treatments or know someone who has.
It’s a common medical procedure for women grappling with infertility, women who want to preserve their eggs for a future pregnancy, people who want to pursue a surrogate pregnancy, and women with cancer who want to freeze their eggs while they undergo treatment. It’s also a common family planning procedure used by members of the LGBTQ+ community.
The unprecedented ruling came after a lawsuit sought wrongful death liability for an IVF clinic where three couples’ embryos were accidentally destroyed.
This Alabama decision made it effectively impossible to run IVF clinics. If the destruction of an embryo is given the same legal weight as the wrongful death of human life, IVF clinics will be operating under unsustainable risks, given the failure rate and risk of frozen embryos failing to endure the thawing process.
We saw this play out this week. Three Alabama clinics have already paused IVF services, including the largest hospital system in Alabama, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
Hannah Echols, a spokesperson for UAB, released a statement on the ruling:
"We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments.”
The backlash to this ruling has been swift. Even some Republicans have spoken out against it, likely after seeing Kellyanne Conway’s polling. But Republican Presidential Candidate Nikki Haley responded to the ruling by telling NBC News: “Embryos, to me, are babies.”
A full week after last Friday’s ruling, Donald Trump finally released a statement claiming he supports the availability of IVF. The Attorney General of Alabama also said he wouldn’t prosecute families who pursue IVF or clinics that provide it. But until Alabama’s legislature addresses this, IVF care is still uncertain in Alabama.
Trump's statement and the Republican reaction can be seen as an attempt to navigate political fallout, which doesn’t negate the broader movements and ideologies at play here. Nor does it undo their role in getting Roe v. Wade overturned, creating the environment where this IVF ruling could even be possible.
President Joe Biden released a statement yesterday highlighting the impact of this ruling and other restrictive policies:
“Today, in 2024 in America, women are being turned away from emergency rooms and forced to travel hundreds of miles for health care, while doctors fear prosecution for providing an abortion. And now, a court in Alabama put access to some fertility treatments at risk for families who are desperately trying to get pregnant. The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable.
Make no mistake: this is a direct result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade…”
The Biden Campaign went further, directly blaming Donald Trump. Biden-Harris Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez didn’t mince words:
"What is happening in Alabama right now is only possible because Donald Trump's Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade… If Donald Trump is elected, there is no question that he will impose his extreme anti-freedom agenda on the entire country.”
Julie Chavez Rodriguez is right. Trump is trying to distance himself from Alabama’s IVF ruling, but this is a direct result of the Supreme Court Justices he appointed overturning Roe v. Wade. It’s also in line with the self-proclaimed “Christian Nationalist” agenda Trump’s allies are plotting in Project 2025.
The Self-Proclaimed “Christian Nationalist” Agenda Trump Allies Plan For 2025
This Alabama IVF ruling isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening within a post-Dobbs America where allies of Donald Trump are scheming up actionable ways he can pursue extremist policies at the national level.
This week, Politico put a spotlight on the Trump-aligned, right-wing plans to infuse “Christian Nationalism” into the next Trump administration.
Politico obtained documents from the Center For Renewing America think tank that explicitly laid out their intentions:
One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era.
Leading this effort is Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget and current president of the Center for Renewing America. Vought’s group is a partner of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 coalition, and he’s been helping lead policy development for the project.
I’ve written extensively about Project 2025 and discussed it in an appearance on the Meidas Touch Network with PoliticsGirl. But for those who are unfamiliar, Project 2025 is an authoritarian plot to replace tens of thousands of federal workers with trained GOP loyalists, dismantle federal agencies, and turn the federal government into a tool of the far-right.
This coalition of 100 right-wing groups has equipped the next Republican president with a playbook detailing exactly how to destroy the administrative state and replace it with “an army” of trained loyalists who will implement the far-right’s agenda with no pushback.
That agenda includes the centralization of power in the executive branch, outright dismantling of multiple federal agencies, anti-abortion measures, rolling back environmental regulations, ending federal protections for LGBTQ+ people, pushing “Christian Nationalist” ideals, and undoing all progress made in diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government under the guise of religious freedom.
Vought has explicitly posted on social media about these plans, stating: “I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” William Wolfe is a former Trump Administration official and a Christian Nationalist.
Politico reported on Vought’s now-deleted social media posts that further showcase his extremist views:
Wolfe, who has deleted several posts on X that detail his views, has a more extreme outlook of what a government led by Christian nationalists should propose. In a December post, he called for ending sex education in schools, surrogacy and no-fault divorce throughout the country, as well as forcing men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs” — a clear incursion by the government into Americans’ private lives.
There you have it right there. Ending surrogacy. That tracks right in line with the Alabama IVF ruling. Vought’s reference to the Insurrection Act to push back on dissent is also troubling. They know very well that their plans run contrary to the interests of the vast majority of Americans, but they want to push it in the name of “Christian Nationalism.”
There is nothing wrong with having personal religious beliefs. But forcing your religious beliefs onto others via government policy is downright authoritarian and antithetical to what the Founders intended. Separation of Church and State, anyone?
This is an exploitation of Christianity to mask an attack on our freedoms.
You might be thinking, ‘Ok, these right-wing groups may believe this, but I’m not sure Trump will pursue Christian Nationalist ideas.” To that, I’d say, look at his track record.
Trump has appeased the Evangelical Right his entire political career. He delivered them 3 conservative justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Also, reports indicate that Trump has privately signaled support for a 16-week abortion ban.
It’s important to highlight Trump can dramatically erode reproductive freedoms without a single vote in Congress. Project 2025 is drafting executive orders Trump can issue on day one to restrict abortion access and is recruiting and training tens of thousands of loyalists who align with the far-right worldview. Trump can do a lot of damage via executive order, and his appointees can wreak regulatory havoc via federal agencies.
The plans include overturning the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and rolling back all of President Biden’s abortion protections. Project 2025 also cites the use of the archaic Comstock Act to restrict and criminalize abortion pill access and, in an extreme interpretation of the law, restrict all abortions at the federal level through bans on mailing abortion-related material.
Putting Trump back into office poses grave threats to reproductive freedoms.
An America where we have judges quoting the Bible to target our freedoms, an “army” of Republican loyalists filling the federal bureaucracy, and an authoritarian president eager to do the bidding of Christian Nationalists is a system more akin to theocracy than democracy.
This is all on the ballot in 2024. We should repeatedly lay out these stakes every chance we get.
