Ok, let's talk Alabama
🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
To be completely honest, I did not plan to tackle topics focused on “abortion access” stressor node this early in the project. I have not assembled the experts. I have not had the critical conversations. I have not scoured the research and dug into the data. I am not ready.
But then… Alabama.
Six white men and two white women made a judicial decision grounded in their religious beliefs, taking a stance traditionally reserved for targeting abortion access and sending the fight in an unexpected direction1 – fertility.
These judges set a precedent that, when two gametes combine, the resulting small ball of cells equals a person. This is not accurate science. This is not even an accurate interpretation of the law. This is a narrow reading of the bible.
(check out ’s newsletter for a deeper analysis on this ruling and all things related to abortion access in America)
Now I am raging.
Internally tied in knots at the implications of this ruling and how it will inevitably reverberate across the stressor map and affect the health of so many real, breathing, hoping, loving, grieving, actually living PERSONS.
The immediate effect, of course, will hit IVF patients in Alabama hardest. The humans that need this kind of stress least of all. Read this Q&A from the New York Times to get just a hint of their experience right now.
The stories coming out of Alabama hurt my heart and light up so many stress points:
For example, as reported in The Cut:
“The logistics of IVF can be overwhelming — even before the surprise court decision. Scheduling daily blood draws and ultrasounds; receiving calls from the clinic about next steps; waiting to hear when egg retrievals and embryo transfers can be scheduled; and what medications you’ll need to take, how often to take them, and how to buy them is an incomplete list of what an IVF patient may need to manage. Paying for it all may include another set of logistics. Patients I spoke with used insurance, savings, family money, and considered loans. The emotional roller coaster of it all can also be difficult to navigate, sometimes after years of heartbreak of trying to conceive.”
Now, add in that surprise court decision:
“Hannah Miles, 29, was in the middle of an IVF transfer cycle when the news broke. After three years of trying to get pregnant and a failed embryo transfer in January, she was scheduled for another embryo transfer in March. As of Friday — she kept saying that all she could say was “as of today” — it was still on. Her clinic, Alabama Fertility, has so far continued cycles that were already started but stopped scheduling any new ones. “I have reached out to them because do I keep shooting myself up with this Lupron? Do I need to take these birth-control pills, still? Is this still happening? I mean, just in a panic,” she said. This is the last embryo she has stored. “Those were our two little shots until we found the money to do another egg retrieval,” she said. When, where, and how she would do another are questions she doesn’t yet have answers for.”
Do you see it?
The unpredictability, the lack of control, the mental labor load – cognitive and emotional – on top of financial stability and strain, added in with fertility-related stress, mixed with narratives of motherhood, every connected psychological stressor stacking onto the physiological instability of body bathed in the exogenous hormones required to prime it for an intense procedure. Not to mention what these humans have already endured in the cycles of egg retrieval (listen to this incredible reporting to hear the extreme end of the pain and heartbreak going into that side of IVF). The health consequences of the layers and layers of connected stressors will only deepen.
What are we doing to these women? And for what reason? The “wrath of a holy God”? Really?!
So that god of yours would rather watch other people, who are not in the form of ball–of-cells suffer and die? C’mon, be honest here, Justice Parker, you don’t understand the science, you don’t care about families, you are here to control women and their bodies. Their stress, their life, does not matter to you.
As Robin Marty, executive director of the West Alabama Women’s Center told The 19th News:
“The ways that we keep diminishing people who are capable of becoming pregnant and their pain and their suffering and their physical health, in order to keep up this continuing line of ‘fertilized eggs must be protected at all cost.’ It’s horrifying down here.”
But “here” could expand beyond Alabama’s borders. And “protection at all cost” could expand beyond IVF treatment.
Which brings us to…
Tip of an even more frightening iceberg –
Alabama already instituted a total abortion ban after the fall of Roe. Coincidentally (eye roll), Alabama also has one of highest rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, one of the highest rates of preterm birth, limited/no access to paid leave, and a growing childcare desert and maternity care desert.
Again, though, this is not just about Alabama. This is about anti-abortion language jumping into far reaching territory. Here is what I’m really worried about right now.
What happens with miscarriage?
The stress related to having a miscarriage carries weight across the map.
Now, what happens when the idea of miscarriage carries equal weight? For those carrying or hoping to carry a zygote or blastocyst or (gasp!) a fetus, how will the worry of losing a pregnancy sit in their brain? The stressful thoughts swirling around potential legal consequences if/when fetal development goes wrong, if/when their body naturally rejects nonviable biological material.
Will we see more cases like Brittany Watts, who was charged with “abuse of a corpse” when she miscarried in the toilet and flushed, even earlier in pregnancy?
What happens with birth control?
“They came for abortion first. Now it’s IVF and next it’ll be birth control. The extreme right won’t stop trying to exert government control over our most sacred personal decisions until we codify reproductive freedom as a human right.” – Hillary Clinton
This statement is not alarmist. It is a logical, terrifying path from here.
Most forms of birth control aim to prevent conception, either halting egg release or getting in the way of sperm finding the egg so, theoretically, they should be safe in this current whack-a-do interpretation of “personhood” as the combo of an egg+sperm. However, most forms of highly effective birth control can also mess with implantation because they thin the uterine lining (e.g. IUDs and any progestin-containing methods). If person = egg+sperm then actively preventing that blastocyst from burrowing itself into the endometrium could equal murder under these insane definitions.
So, yes, I am terrified of the implications of this one ruling in this one state. And you should be too.
To end on a lighter note, here’s a fun fact and a brain scratcher!
Fun fact – Anton van Leeuwenhoek took the very first peek at (his own!) sperm through a compound microscope in 1677 and called them “animalcules”. This kicked off the long-held idea that each sperm contained a pre-formed human (a homunculus) that only needed a place to grow: babies come entirely from the male anatomy and women are the incubators.
Brain scratcher – if we still believed that each sperm contained a tiny, pre-formed human, how would the same MALE judges and MALE politicians and every other anti-abortion MALE be interpreting personhood?
Hmmm…
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ok, some of you probably expected this.
Bright and brightening article! Thank you!