Today, as the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on nationwide IVF protections to combat the ongoing assault on reproductive freedoms by MAGA Republicans, new reporting from Mother Jones shows that the North Carolina Republican Party’s state platform calls for the government to legislate life as beginning at conception and opposes the destruction of embryos – mirroring the policies that imperiled IVF access in Alabama. Thanks to Donald Trump, who paved the way for states to wreak havoc on reproductive rights and continues to applaud those draconian efforts, women in North Carolina, and nearly every state across the south, are living under an abortion ban and in constant fear that Republicans will take their attacks even further.

Key Point: “Alabama’s supreme court decision sent Republicans scrambling to clarify their views on IVF, which is supported by 86 percent of the population. But, in the wake of this uproar over reproductive freedom, the GOP in one battleground state is reaffirming a controversial position that may make IVF much more complicated. In its official 2024 platform, the North Carolina Republican Party says, without qualification, that it opposes the destruction of human embryos. “We support developments in biomedical research that enhance and protect human life, including stem cell research. We oppose human cloning and the destruction of human embryos,” the 17-page document states.”

Mother Jones: North Carolina’s GOP Opposes Embryo Destruction. That Could Threaten IVF.

[Abby Vesoulis, 06/12/2024]

• In February, the conservative Alabama Supreme Court delivered an unprecedented opinion, ruling that failing to protect an embryo from destruction is the legal equivalent of failing to prevent a human child from dying.

• Alabama’s supreme court decision sent Republicans scrambling to clarify their views on IVF, which is supported by 86 percent of the population. But, in the wake of this uproar over reproductive freedom, the GOP in one battleground state is reaffirming a controversial position that may make IVF much more complicated. In its official 2024 platform, the North Carolina Republican Party says, without qualification, that it opposes the destruction of human embryos.

• US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in March that policymakers, especially state lawmakers, need to grapple with these issues. Lawmakers “need to look at the ethics surrounding” IVF. “If you do believe that life begins at conception, it’s a really important question to wrestle with.”

• “It’s something that every state has to wrestle with,” he said, adding, “Alabama has done a good job of it.”

• If embryo use is regulated, IVF will become more complicated. “Not all eggs will make embryos and not all the embryos will make babies,” says Dr. Sigal Klipstein, a reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialist in Illinois. “It’s not really predictable. So invariably, in some cases, patients will have extra embryos.”
  
• IVF patients will have to navigate what to do with their embryos that can’t be implanted for various reasons.“What happens if the embryo is not viable? What if we know it will miscarry or not implant—is that an embryo that should be discarded? What about embryos that carry disease? There are a number of downstream effects. And I think the most interesting one is what happens to these embryos? Who pays for that storage? Who maintains that storage? Should patients be obligated to maintain embryos they no longer need? This places undue limits on their reproductive liberty,” Klipstein says.

• Reproductive rights are a touchstone issue of the 2024 election, with several states attempting ballot measures to enshrine abortion access. Democrats are betting that such measures could buoy Democratic candidates in the process. North Carolina’s Republican legislature has gone against popular opinion in the state and against their Democratic governor by overriding his veto of a 12-week abortion ban the GOP passed earlier this spring.

• Democratic National Committee spokesperson Jackie Bush says the North Carolina GOP’s position on embryos is another example of their war on reproductive autonomy. Republicans in North Carolina “are attempting to rip away women’s reproductive rights, including North Carolinians’ ability to grow their families through IVF.”

• Meanwhile, congressional Republicans’ widely backed Life at Conception Act defines a “human being” to “include each member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization or cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”

• That bill provides any fertilized egg—perhaps one in a petri dish—protection under the 14th Amendment “for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.”

• It’s inconsistent to simultaneously hold that fertilized eggs are equivalent to children and can’t be disposed of, and that a fertility treatment that routinely results in the disposal of some fertilized eggs is permitted.

• If you’re bewildered by that contradiction, so are fertility specialists.