Democrats plan to use the fight over the personhood status of embryos to pass a sweeping bill that would protect the multibillion-dollar assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry and punish states and health institutions that try to limit third-party child manufacturing.
Senate Democrats plan to introduce Tammy Duckworth’s in vitro fertilization bill on Wednesday with hopes that they can garner unanimous consent from their colleagues across the aisle to proceed.
The legislation seeks to protect the unlimited creation and destruction of healthy eggs, sperm, and embryos in all 50 states by punishing any entity that tries to “unduly restrict access” to a range of reproductive technologies.
While Duckworth’s bill does not explicitly mention the manufacture of motherless and fatherless children, surrogacy, or experimental transhumanist technologies like artificial wombs, “gene editing,” and the creations of eggs outside of women’s reproductive systems, its vague language and lack of definitions could easily be construed to protect such actions.
“If you truly care about the sanctity of families, and you’re genuinely, actually, honestly interested in protecting IVF, then you need to show it by not blocking this bill on the floor,” Duckworth challenged on Tuesday.
Only one Republican senator would need to oppose the bill to keep it from moving through the upper chamber. In 2022, that senator was Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee told Axios last week, however, that “there are zero Republican Senate candidates who support efforts to restrict access to fertility treatments.” Its assertion that classifying embryos as human life is merely “fodder for Democrats hoping to manipulate the abortion issue for electoral gain” further casts doubt that anyone from the GOP would object this time around.
If Republicans fail to stop this wide-ranging bill in its tracks, they would not only be abandoning their pro-life commitments but they would effectively greenlight legislation that gives individuals and Big Fertility facilities the authority to sue red states that move to impose even the most commonsense limits on ART.
They would also be handing more power to President Joe Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice to pursue action against pro-life, Republican governments like Alabama’s if they attempt to regulate the use of past, present, and future babymaking tech.
Laws designed to hold the baby manufacturing market accountable are already largely nonexistent, save in a few states that ban commercial surrogacy. Under Duckworth’s bill, no politician or state could limit even the most unethical and immoral aspects of the global industry that routinely exploits and profits off of the misfortunes of those struggling with infertility without punishment.
If accepted without GOP objection, the Democrats’ IVF legislation would guarantee the indefinite freezing of millions of embryos and the destruction of millions more.
As I explained last week, “Being pro-baby and pro-life doesn’t mean giving Big Fertility, a multi-billion dollar industry, permission to do whatever they please because scientific advancements have made it possible.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed passing the bill was a necessary step to curb the “hard-right attack on IVF” after the Alabama Supreme Court, per the state’s constitution and legal precedent, deemed embryos minors under the state’s civil Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
His comments paled in comparison to the inaccurate and radical rhetoric touted by the Biden-Harris 2024 page on X, which falsely asserted it’s “not possible” to do IVF without creating excess embryos and claimed the Alabama Supreme Court “ruled that starting a family is basically murder.”
The Alabama court’s controversial ruling never addressed how Big Fertility in the state should approach ART or creating embryos in labs. Instead, fertility facilities chose on their own to cease serially creating and subsequently discarding embryos via IVF because it might put them on the legal hook for negligence in the Cotton State.
Even that fact, however, hasn’t stopped Democrats and some Republicans from using the Alabama ruling to advance their political agendas.
