Jessica Valenti
Anti-Abortion Hypocrisy Has Never Been Clearer
If every fertilized egg is life, why don’t Republicans legislate IVF?
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Anti-abortion activists and legislators have spent a lot of time, money, and political energy trying to convince Americans that fertilized eggs are human beings. Their belief that “life begins at conception” is supposedly why these lawmakers are passing legislation that bans abortion at six weeks (before most women even know they’re pregnant), and why some are against certain forms of birth control — because they believe that IUDs and the pill prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg.
But when Alabama State Senator Clyde Chambliss, a Republican, was asked recently if his state’s sweeping abortion ban would punish those at IVF clinics who discard embryos or fertilized eggs, he replied, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”
And with that one sentence, the anti-abortion hypocrisy was exposed: The fight to end abortion has never been about when life begins, or protecting “babies”; it’s about controlling women, and the anti-abortion movement’s legislative apathy toward IVF proves it.
When a woman who has undergone IVF has embryos she’s not planning to use, the state doesn’t require her to undergo counseling before the clinic can discard them. Nor does she have to wait 48 hours to think about her choice, walk through a line of protesters screaming at her, or carry a stigma that might make her afraid to talk about her experience.
There is no difference between a fertilized egg in a lab and a fertilized egg in a person, yet a woman who gives a clinic permission to discard her embryo doesn’t have to deal with any of the legislative or cultural toxicity that surround women seeking abortions.
Rutgers professor Margo Kaplan, who donated an embryo for medical research, wrote in The Washington Post, for example, that “all my husband and I had to do was sign a form.”
“IVF patients make less-attractive targets,” she wrote, “because we don’t challenge the expectation that women want to be mothers.”
These lawmakers believe all women should be mothers, and…
