Opinion | The I.V.F. Ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court Should Not Be a Surprise

“Carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were,” he wrote, in reference to the destroyed frozen embryos at the heart of the case, “would be unacceptable to the people of this state, who have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy God who made them in His image.”

As Alabama’s political leaders search for a way out of this mess, I can’t help but notice their silence on the closely related subject of abortion. As soon as the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Alabama’s pre-Dobbs abortion law sprang into effect. It is a total ban, making an exception only to prevent “a serious health risk” to the pregnant woman, not for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. As of 2021, Alabama had the fourth-highest maternal death rate in the country, behind only Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. (To put this in perspective, a woman giving birth in Alabama is more than four times as likely to die in the process or soon thereafter as one in California.) Restoring access to abortion might seem to be a logical, even natural topic of conversation.

So why do we hear nothing from those so quick to self-protectively bemoan the state court’s I.V.F. decision? Religion is part of the answer, no doubt, but there is something more. Abortion is generally portrayed as a woman’s issue; an unwanted or even dangerous pregnancy is her problem. Infertility, by contrast, is seen as a couple’s problem. That means there is a man involved (even if, for lesbian couples, for example, or for single women, that man is only a sperm donor). And when men have a problem, we know the world is going to snap to attention.

Rhetoric about the “sanctity of unborn life,” in the words of Alabama’s constitution, has for too long been cost-free, a politician’s cheap thrill. Now we see that, taken to extremes in the hands of the ideologues our current political culture nurtures, it has a price, one that society now seems reluctant to pay. For that realization, we can, as I said earlier, thank the Alabama Supreme Court.