The Right to a Private Life Is Under Attack
Women in Alabama were already subject to an abortion ban when the state supreme court launched another assault on their reproductive rights. Last Friday, the court ruled that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization are “children” under state law. “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion. Immediately, Alabama’s largest hospital paused IVF treatments. In a statement to NBC News, a spokesperson for the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital said it “must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages” for performing standard IVF procedures. On Thursday, a second IVF clinic also paused treatment.
Nonviable or excess embryos are routinely discarded during the IVF process. That is murder to some proponents of fetal personhood, including the Catholic Church and presidential candidate Nikki Haley. “Embryos, to me, are babies,” she said this week. Though the Alabama ruling did not strictly forbid IVF, abortion-rights advocates worry that its religious logic could lead to restrictions on the practice. A victory for fetal personhood would be a disaster for women and undermine the very notion of a private life. To Parker and his allies, IVF is not a choice a woman has the right to make. The state should decide.
This view is not limited to Alabama or even to the subject of reproductive freedom. Conservative activists are blurring the line between the public and private realms. Days after the Alabama ruling, Politico reported that Trump allies are readying plans to “infuse” a second term with explicit Christian nationalism, namely through Russell Vought. He was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, and now he leads the Center for Renewing America, a far-right think tank preparing an agenda for a Trump restoration. Vought, who reportedly speaks to Trump about once a month, says he believes that a person should accept “Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history” to immigrate to the United States. He has written that America is a Christian nation, “where our rights and duties are understood to come from God.” He’s close to William Wolfe, another former Trump official, who has said online that the U.S. should end sex education in schools along with surrogacy and no-fault divorce. The government, he said in an X post, should force men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs,” which Politico characterized as “a clear incursion by the government into Americans’ private lives.”
Wolfe, Vought, and their ilk may not even recognize the right to a private life. Consider Parker, the Alabama chief justice. Media Matters reported on Wednesday that he adheres to the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which is a popular “theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.” In an interview with Johnny Enlow, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who supports Trump, Parker said that “God created government” and told Enlow, “As you’ve emphasized in the past, we’ve abandoned those Seven Mountains and they’ve been occupied by the opposite side.” Parker added that he himself had been called by God to “the mountain of government.” In his authoritarian view, a Christian government holds sway over a person’s most closely held decisions.
The right to have children by choice, to parent as conscience dictates, and to have sex how and with whom one pleases are all at risk if conservatives get their way. The parental-rights movement is one of domination, for example. By forcing LGBT children to hide their true selves in public classrooms, they contravene the wishes of affirming parents. That lust for domination extends to other private choices as well. Last May, the Heritage Foundation hosted an event that called the birth-control pill into question. A guest called for a “feminist movement against the pill” that would return “the consequentiality to sex.” Online, the Foundation made its intentions clear. “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills,” it said in an X post of the event. Earlier, when Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his concurring opinion in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, he took aim at previous rulings that enshrined contraception access and same-sex marriage, and which banned the criminalization of homosexuality. The high court should “reconsider” the cases, he argued.
The right’s criticisms of IVF are not new. When George W. Bush vetoed a bill to expand stem-cell research in 2006, so-called “snowflake children,” born from donated frozen embryos, attended the event. Recently, as Melissa Gira Grant observed at The New Republic, a piece in Christianity Today speculated that embryo adoption may be “the next pro-life frontier.” On its own, embryo adoption may not seem like much of a threat: If someone donates their frozen embryos, why shouldn’t they be adopted by someone else? But when the practice is framed as a “pro-life frontier,” amid rising threats to IVF and reproductive choice, it can seem sinister. Some proponents favor restrictions on IVF that would make the practice more costly and less successful in order to minimize the creation of excess embryos. Choice would vanish along with privacy. It’s already happening in Republican-led states, where lawmakers have forced their way into the doctor’s office.
Our private freedoms are linked to public notions of equal citizenship. Conservatives attack the former in order to undermine the latter. It’s an unpopular strategy, but as the scholar Matthew Taylor told Politico, “These folks aren’t as interested in democracy or working through democratic systems as in the old religious right because their theology is one of Christian warfare.” This is total war, and not just on women. Anyone who fails to conform is at risk.