In the United States, in Alabama, where people are voting this Tuesday, March 5 for “Super Tuesday,” legislators reacted to the court decision of the State Supreme Court. While Alabama judges ruled – last month – that frozen embryos resulting from fertilization in vitro (IVF), were protected in the same way as unborn children, a panic had seized the health personnel involved in IVF: they could potentially be prosecuted for each destruction of embryos. Legislators, with a Republican majority, circumvented the ruling by passing a decision affirming that no individual or establishment involved in IVF could be prosecuted. They thus responded immediately to their worried voters.
2 mins
With our correspondent in the United States, Carrie Nooten
Republican as they are, it took less than a few weeks for the legislators of Alabama (southern United States) to find how to circumvent the judgment of their own Supreme Court which had caused a wave of panic in their State and among their voters in particular. Because, considering that the embryos created by fertilization in vitro and frozen, awaiting transplantation or destruction, were people in their own right, the judges suddenly made the doctors and nurses destroying them into murderers.
Republican women divided
The main hospital in Alabama immediately announced that it would stop all IVF. But emotion had gripped the public, particularly women who rely on the procedure to get pregnant, including the most conservative among them! The debate thus divided the Republicans, even more than it pitted Republicans and Democrats.
A Christian influencer caused an outcry by posting that being “ pro-life, this did not mean accepting all methods of procreation » ; to which another believer, having resorted to IVF, replied that “ limiting care to reproduction was going against progress. »
Read alsoAlabama equates frozen embryos to “children”, receives criticism in the United States