Owning up: GOP shouldn’t get to disavow unpopular IVF restrictions

A few months ago, the idea that in vitro fertilization — the medical process of fertilizing eggs in a lab setting and selecting embryos to be carried by would-be parents — would be a major political issue in the State of the Union would have seemed shocking. Yet, Thursday night, President Joe Biden referred to it explicitly as a priority, calling for Congress to guarantee a national right to IVF.

The issue was nervously raised by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s Republican response, with the GOP rising star unconvincingly claiming the party would “strongly support continued nationwide access to in vitro fertilization.” Left unsaid was that this was a topic of conversation at all because a fellow Alabama Republican, State Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell, had weeks earlier written a majority opinion that frozen embryos are children.

The opinion left unsaid what exactly this is supposed to mean for the embryos; presumably they were intended to remain frozen indefinitely, because the ruling was ultimately unconcerned with them or the parents trying to conceive. It was about advancing a Christian vision, as made clear by Chief Justice Tom Parker’s direct and extensive references to the Bible.

Here’s the lesson that the right-wing political operatives and candidates who’ve made common cause with Christian supremacist extremists over the last several decades are learning: there is no simple line in the sand that you can draw to rein this ideology in, particularly when you’ve already given it significant power.

There was no real reason to think that this would stop with access to abortion care, or misleading and religiously-tinged teachings in public schools, or the efforts to constrain the rights of LGBTQ people in society. Zealotry cannot just be turned off like a switch when it’s no longer quite as politically expedient.

What people like Britt are doing now is effectively damage control upon the realization that these policies are so unpopular that even anti-democratic measures like partisan gerrymandering can’t hold back the results of voter dissatisfaction.

There’s been no clearer indication than the electoral response to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has led to cascading victories including an undefeated record of rejections of abortion restrictions in no less than six states, including some rock-solid Republican ones. That’s not even counting the litany of individual races where abortion as an issue seems to have made the difference in electing a Democrat in a tight state or federal race.

Parker was comfortable quoting scripture in his opinion precisely because this type of explicit injection of Christian religious principles into questions of law has been at least tacitly, if not openly, embraced and excused by the GOP elite (and, it’s worth noting, this is not a universal religious imperative; various religions have various approaches to IVF ).

Now that it’s become clear that this is going to be an electoral anchor around the neck, the party is beginning to panic and cut rope, but voters shouldn’t buy it. The party has set in motion this chain reaction that now threatens not only abortion and IVF but access to contraception, same sex marriage, interracial marriage and all sorts of other private choices Americans should be entitled to. It certainly doesn’t now get to wash its hands of it.

— New York Daily News/TNS