Tuberville and Republicans Are Tripping All Over the Alabama IVF Decision

The senator from “Huh?” Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Senator Tommy Tuberville is not known for being a particularly deep thinker on public-policy issues, much less the vexed and metaphysical question of when life begins. He is, however, a proud foot soldier of the anti-abortion movement; he spent months blocking routine military promotions in an effort to get the Pentagon to stop facilitating service members’ perfectly legal abortions (he eventually stood down after alienating virtually all of his colleagues). So, his reaction to the wildly controversial decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos created and destroyed in IVF treatments are “extrauterine children” meriting constitutional protections was of great interest as a leading indicator of where the forced-birth crowd might land on this development.

Ol’ Tubs was completely flummoxed by events in his home state, as NBC News reported:

“Yeah, I was all for it,” Tuberville told reporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday when asked about the Alabama Supreme Court’s Friday ruling that embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children under state law.

“We need to have more kids. We need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” Tuberville said.

Pressed by NBC News about whether he was concerned about how the ruling could impact people who are trying to have kids through IVF, Tuberville sidestepped the question.

“Well, that’s, that’s for another conversation. I think the big thing is right now, you protect — you go back to the situation and try to work it out to where it’s best for everybody. I mean, that’s what — that’s what the whole abortion issue is about,” he said.

Really? People like Tuberville typically don’t see much nuance on the abortion issue. But then it became clear he just didn’t know what to say:

“People need to have access. People need to have — we need more kids, we need the people to have the opportunity to have kids,” he said.

It can get ugly when pro-natalism collides with anti-abortion dogma. But Tuberville is hardly the only Republican politician put it a bad spot by the Alabama decision. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley is struggling to get out of a trap of her own making on the issue. She reacted to the decision by instantly agreeing with the central finding that embryos are “babies.” Now, as The New Republic observed, she’s trying to retreat into a state’s rights decision on a matter whose essence hardly varies by location:

“We don’t want fertility treatment to shut down, we don’t want them to stop doing IVF treatment, we don’t want them to stop doing artificial insemination,” Haley said on CNN on Thursday. “But I think this needs to be decided by the people in every state. Don’t take away the rights of these physicians and these parents to have these conversations.”

The basic politics of this issue isn’t that complicated: Fetal personhood, the constitutional theory that is the basis of the Alabama decision, is very unpopular. Imposing it by ballot initiative has been attempted in multiple states with uniformly negative results, most notably in Alabama’s deep-red neighbor Mississippi, where a 2011 personhood initiative backed by the entire statewide Republican Establishment was drubbed by voters. Every time personhood has been discussed, the implications for IVF treatments are front and center. So it shouldn’t be surprising to those politicians who have flirted with fetal personhood to learn they are playing with fire given the large number of middle-class voters (including many Republicans) who have resorted to IVF in a deeply emotional effort to have children.

Conservative politicians who are a bit more nimble than Tuberville seem likely to stampede away from the Alabama ruling. Here’s Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick:

When you think about it, defending IVF is an excellent way for Republicans who support draconian abortion bans to depict themselves as less than completely extreme, or even as “moderate,” much like embracing rape-incest exceptions while supporting early-pregnancy bans. In the end, the Alabama Supreme Court may have put the nail in the coffin of the “personhood movement” politically, but it’s serving the anti-abortion cause nonetheless in identifying a position so crazy that most politicians can safely triangulate against it without truly becoming more moderate.

If that’s the way the wind is blowing, someone needs to give Tommy Tuberville the memo.