The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that the frozen embryos created during fertility treatment can be considered as children under the state law.
The decision issued in a pair of wrong deaths brought by couples who destroyed the fetal frozen in an accident in a reproductive clinic, brought a crowd of warning from advocates who said that it would be implications for reproductive treatment.
Citing the anti-miscarriage language in the Alabama Constitution, Justice ruled on Friday that the state’s law allows parents to sue the death of a minor child “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
Justice J. Mitchell wrote in the majority ruling ruling, “Unborn children are ‘children’ under the Act.
Mitchell said that the court had earlier ruled that the fetus killed during a woman pregnant is covered under the wrong death of a small act of Alabama and nothing “excludes additional children from the coverage of the Act.”
In the Alabama case, the plaintiff had to undergo IVF remedies, causing many embryos, some of which were transplanted and resulted in a healthy birth. The couple paid to keep others frozen at a storage facility at the Mobile Information Medical Center. A patient wandered into the area and removed several fetuses, dropped them on the floor and “killed them,” said the ruling.
Chief Justice Tom Parker issued a consensus opinion, quoting the Bible as he discussed in the Alabama Constitution “the meaning of the phrase” unborn life “.
Parker said, “Even before birth, all human beings tolerate the image of God, and their life cannot be destroyed without provoking their glory.”
Justice Greg Cook, who filed the only complete dissatisfaction for the majority opinion, stated that the 1872 law did not define the “minor child” and was being spread with the original intentions to cover the frozen fetus.
“In addition, there are other important reasons for being worried about the main opinion. Any court – anywhere in the country – has come to the conclusion that the main opinion reaches, “he wrote, the ruling” almost certainly eliminates the construction of the fetus through in vitro fertilization (“IVF”) in Alabama. ,
In 2018, the voters of Alabama agreed to add language to the Constitution of Alabama that the state policy to recognize “the rights of unborn children”.
At that time the supporters said that it would be “announced the beliefs of voters and would have no effect until the states get more control over the reach of abortion. The states gained control of abortion in 2022. At that time critics said that it would have widespread impacts for civil and criminal law beyond the reach of abortion and it was essentially a” personality “measure which would establish constitutional rights for the prohibition.