The Media Research Center was unsurprisingly happy about an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos created through in-vitro fertilization are children under the law and were even more happy to use the ruling to advance right-wing anti-abortion narratives. Anti-abortion extremist Tierin-Rose Mandelburg cheered in a Feb. 19 post:
Sweet Home Alabama just got even sweeter for babies.
In a 8-1 vote the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children and deserve the same legal rights as other unborn children do.
[…]Critics insist that this ruling may impact In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Oftentimes couples will have multiple eggs fertilized resulting in multiple successful, scientifically created embryos. More times than not, the embryos that aren’t implanted are disposed of. This new ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court, will make it illegal to dispose of those embryos, those babies.
This is a good thing. Regardless of whether a child is conceived naturally or by artificial implantation, that child has value and has sanctity and deserves to be treated as such. Throwing embryos away should be considered murder, as, now in Alabama, it is.
As part of his daily hate-watch of “The View,” Nicholas Fondacaro complained in a Feb. 20 post that “staunchly pro-choice co-host Sara Haines ghoulishly argued that pregnancies and babies born via in vitro fertilization should not be considered part of the ‘miracle of life.’ Surprisingly, she got pushback from co-host Sunny Hostin, who declared that a frozen embryo was indeed ‘an unborn child.'” So surprised was Fondacaro by this that he forgot to add his usual libelous smear that Hostin is “staunchly racist and anti-Semitic.”
Comedy cop Alex Christy complained that a comedy show commented on the ruling in a Feb. 21 post:
Desi Lydic is The Daily Show’s temp host of the week on Comedy Central and she got started on Tuesday by reacting to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos are people. Lydic did not take the news well, as she dismissed embryos as “just jizz and eggs.”
After an ABC report on the ruling, Lydic claimed, “That’s right, the bar has been moved again. From now on in Alabama, life begins when a man notices his first cousin is hot.”
[…]By her own materialist logic, Lydic isn’t a person, “technically,” she is also the result of sperm and eggs. Of course, one assumes that deep down Lydic doesn’t believe that about herself, so why is it different for embryos?
Christy had another post the next day similarly lecturing commentators who didn’t spout right-wing narratives, further irrelevantly lashing out at the OB/GYN commentator who purportedly spouted “pronoun nonsense” referencing “those assigned female at birth”:
The media freakout over the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos are people continued on Thursday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, where the MSNBC eponymous host welcomed OBGYN Jennifer Lincoln to label the state “dangerous” and claim Evangelicals are trying to kick women out of the workplace.
[…]Throughout the media focus on this story there have been plenty of denunciations of the decision as well as proclamations about how the ruling’s unpopularity puts Republicans in a rough spot politically, but precious little time has been spent on the logic of when life begins. Unfortunately, that is not too surprising when the media’s experts use phrases like “assigned female at birth.”
Jorge Bonilla returned to anti-abortion framing in a Feb. 23 post:
The networks are doing their level best to continue to fuel the ongoing panic over in-vitro fertilization treatments (IVF) in the wake of Alabama’s Supreme Court opinion that granted embryos rights equal to those of a child in utero. But from watching the coverage, it is pretty obvious that what is happening is about something beyond just IVF.
[…]But why fuel the panic? There are eight IVF clinics total in Alabama, and three have paused their procedures. This means that five clinics remain wherein people can seek and obtain services. So, not a total shutdown of IVF.
The panic point for the media is the Court’s grant of personhood to human embryos. Such a finding, were it to be upheld by the United States Supreme Court, drives a dagger into efforts to codify Roe. Personhood, even if not uttered out loud, is the whole ball game and the media know it. It’s hard to imagine the liberal media caring too much about IVF except that these stories enable advocacy for a Roe restoration. Personhood gets in the way of that.
Fondacaro was back to his usual sick smear of Hostin in another Feb. 23 post for saying something he didn’t like:
Good things don’t last long on ABC’s The View. After defending embryos as children earlier in the week, staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) found her angle of attack against Republicans on Friday, in the wake of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling on in vitro fertilization. According to her, the only reason Republicans were now coming out in defense of IVF was because it was how they planned to stave off white people being replaced by minorities.
“On the one hand, they want you to not have an abortion and then they also don’t want you to have more children. Make up your minds. Whatever that means,” Friday moderator Joy Behar kvetched, keeping with the narrative that the GOP was trying to stop people from using IVF, for some reason.
Before cracking open the lid on her crazy conspiracy theory, Hostin suggested she was on the trail of something major. “I think they do want you to have more children and they just not saying the quiet part out loud,” she teased.
Christy lashed out at more criticism of the ruling in a Feb. 24 post:
MSNBC’s host of The ReidOut, Joy Reid, and political analyst Michelle Goldberg continued the discussion of the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent ruling that embryos are people by arguing that the Republican reaction to the ruling proves that pro-life ideology is full of “actual consequences” and “contradictions.” However, they ultimately failed in this attempt, as their efforts led them to create a version of the famous trolley problem that denied the humanity of the people on one side of the switch.
Reid ran through a list of pro-lifers and their positions that she considered to be radical, “These are recently backed bills that make the same argument as Alabama’s, 125 House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, they’ve co-sponsored something called the Life at Conception Act which states the term human being includes all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being. It does not include an exception for IVF.”
She also claimed, “The chair of the NRSC, Steven, Senator Steven Daines of Montana, co-sponsored a bill in 2021 that claimed that homo sapiens, born and unborn, are entitled to full protections of the 14th Amendment. They’re for it, they want to make it illegal everywhere.”
The Alabama ruling was the result of a couple seeking IVF that sued over the destruction of frozen embryos that had been dropped on the floor. It was not brought by an activist seeking to protect embryos from destruction simply because they were of the “wrong” sex or had other “unwanted” physical traits. Of course, the media has pretended that such ethical issues don’t exist.
The original motivation for the ruling does not disprove the fact that anti-abortion activists like Christy and his co-workers have been more than happy to exploit the ruling to push anti-abortion narratives. Indeed, Christy went on to claim that ” IVF represents a threat to the pro-abortion side because if a woman is seeking to become pregnant via IVF, it means deep down she knows what an embryo is.”
Christy further lectured in a Feb. 27 post:
Ever since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that an embryo is a life, the media has tried to have it both ways. They have tried to mourn the supposed threat to IVF, which means aspiring parents will have their dreams of having a baby crushed while also denying the embryo is a life. Tuesday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC was just the latest example, as Washington correspondent Yamiche Alcindor condemned the ruling while embracing its logic.
[…]Ultimately, the media has been upset at the Alabama case for two reasons. First, the promise of parenthood found in the embryo shreds the pro-abortion case that a fetus is not alive. Second, because IVF involves both intentional and unintentional destruction of embryos, the media has been silent on related ethical concerns because the industry also tries to have it both ways. If sex-selective abortion is wrong, what does that make sex-selective IVF and sex-selective embryo destruction? The media would rather not ask and just portray pro-life logic as extremist on the wrong side of polling showing 85 percent of Americans support IVF.
[…]The media can have an honest conversation about IVF and the beginning of life or it can try to help Democrats paint pro-lifers as out-of-touch extremists, but it cannot do both. Thus far, it has chosen the latter.
As an anti-abortion activist, is Christy having an honest conversation about IVF, or is he the one trying to paint the opposition as out-of-touch extremists? Looks like the latter.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Fox News coverage of the Alabama ruling was scarce, perhaps reflecting how anti-abortion extremism is not popular with the public. The MRC said nothing about that.,