US President Joe Biden on Thursday deemed it “scandalous” that the Supreme Court of the conservative state of Alabama equates frozen embryos to children.
• Read also: Network outage disrupts AT&T mobile service in the United States
• Read also: Cleaning slaughterhouses: 24 minors employed illegally in the United States
“An Alabama court has jeopardized access to certain infertility treatments,” denounced the Democratic leader in a press release.
“The refusal to recognize the capacity of women to make these decisions for themselves and for their families is scandalous and unacceptable,” he lambasted.
In a court ruling issued Friday, the highest court in this southern US state considered embryos preserved by freezing to be “children.”
Direct consequence of this decision: several clinics specializing in medically assisted procreation have announced that they are suspending their in vitro fertilization (IVF) activities.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) said in a statement that it was “saddened” by the impact of this suspension on patients at its medical establishments.
“But we must evaluate the possibility that our patients and doctors could be criminally prosecuted or face punitive fines for following standards of care for IVF,” she said.
“The recent decision by the Alabama Supreme Court gives us no choice but to suspend our IVF,” Mark Nix, head of another clinic in the city of Mobile, announced Thursday.
Resolve, the main American association dedicated to infertility, had already warned on Tuesday that this reasoning could have “devastating consequences” for in vitro fertilization procedures.
Law of 1872
“Make no mistake,” Joe Biden said Thursday, this decision “is the direct result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” the ruling establishing the right to abortion that the United States Supreme Court overturned almost two years ago.
The judgment in Alabama reflects “exactly the kind of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned” this ruling, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre had already denounced.
In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court ended the constitutional guarantee of the right to abortion, leading many states, including Alabama, to restrict or ban them.
The defense of the right to abortion has since become a hobby horse for Democrats, ahead of the presidential election in November.
At the origin of Friday’s decision, a complaint from three couples against a clinic practicing in vitro fertilization.
Citing an 1872 law on wrongful deaths of minors, they filed a complaint after another patient, upon entering a storage facility, accidentally destroyed their embryos.
A court initially dismissed the complaint, finding that the embryos could not be qualified as a “person” or a “child”.
But on Friday, with a majority of 7 judges to 2, all Republicans, the Alabama Supreme Court on the contrary ruled that the law on infant deaths “applies to all unborn children, without limit”.
“This applies to all children, born or unborn,” writes Judge Jay Mitchell in the text of the decision, peppered with biblical references.
