GET BUSY: The theocrats are coming for IVF next. They just won in Alabama. Here’s how to stop them

Amanda Litman of Run for Something on how to respond to a stunning court ruling in Alabama's and head off more right-wing assaults on reproductive freedom

It was an astonishing ruling, and an ominous one.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled last week that frozen embryos are children. The decision — reversing a denial of a wrongful-death suit filed by several clients against an IVF clinic that had lost several frozen embryos to a mishap — was brought explicitly to establish precedent for the notion that life begins at conception, part of a far-right assault on reproductive rights that could make IVF illegal in Alabama (and do a lot of damage everywhere).

The decision itself may seem straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, with its use of Biblical precedent and descriptions of “embryonic children” stored in a “cryogenic nursery.” But it’s deadly serious, with dire implications for the practice nationwide, as well as for prenatal testing and potentially for other reproductive health care we all take for granted — for now.

You may be wondering what you can do about this, given that the decision was handed down in solidly red Alabama. We were, too, so we reached out to Amanda Litman, founder of Run for Something (which supports local candidates across the country), for advice.

“When something bad happens in a red state,” Litman tells us, “those of us in safe blue states need to be ready to fight back, both because there's real harm happening to people we should give a shit about, and because there's a chance that the same prohibitions could be governing our lives a few years down the road. After all, the Dobbs decision didn't come out of nowhere — it came from Mississippi, after the GOP-controlled state legislature passed a law in 2018.”

So what can you do? There’s plenty. And Litman has lots of advice.

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