Alabama's IVF decision, biblical law, constitutional crisis: Weekend reads for February 24, 2024

The implications of the Alabama embryonic personhood ruling for abortion, women's and LGBTQ+ rights, marriage equality, interstate travel

Yesterday it was the right to abortion. Today it is the right to have children by IVF. Tomorrow it will be…recreational sex?

The far right, not satisfied with its victory in the Dobbs case, overturning Roe v. Wade, is pursuing a multi-pronged effort to turn The Handmaid’s Tale into nonfiction.

This week the big news was out of Alabama, where IVF clinics are shuttering and new worries about travel restrictions are emerging. But what happens in Alabama isn’t likely to stay in Alabama, as a look back at the history of the cases leading up to Dobbs tells us, and with cases on the conservative docket covering everything from medication abortions to contraception to the very right of government agencies to regulate food safety, pollution, and everything else we take for granted.

So in Weekend Reads this week, a primer on the many fronts of the far right’s war on basic bodily freedom, and efforts to fight back.

We hope the articles we’ve collected below for our subscribers to read challenge you to see the world in new ways. Thanks as always for reading The Ink and continuing to support us (and if you’re not a paid subscriber already, we encourage you to join our community).

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Rights at stake

Biblical precedents in the courtroom

“Folks, this is the chief justice of a state supreme court, and he is explicitly invoking fundamentalist Christian ideology to justify assigning legal liability and financial penalties to people who run afoul of Christian orthodoxy.” [The Nation]