America's "Moderate" Republicans are in for Many More WTF Moments

Alabama's IVF ruling is Just the Beginning

A Brief Update

Happy Sunday, readers!

Before launching into my essay proper in this edition of The Bugbear Dispatch, I want to apologize for my tardiness in getting it out. I spent most of last week feeling quite under the weather after running myself very hard for a local event over the previous weekend, at which I spoke several times. I hope to publish a second essay this week in order to make up for not getting anything out last week, but I cannot promise that at this point.

Last weekend’s event was the Content Warning conference, which, as some of you may recall, was organized by my fellow exvangelical Meghan Crozier, who I interviewed here back in November. The event, focused on deconstructing purity culture and having open discussions about queerness, intersectionality, sex work, and more was uplifting despite us addressing some heavy topics in a rough political year, and it was truly wonderful to connect and work with a diverse group of brilliant justice-oriented people—some I’ve known remotely and wanted to meet in person for years, and others I wasn’t very familiar with but was glad to get to know.

Content Warning is headed to Atlanta next year, again on President’s Day weekend, so keep that in mind. I’ll likely be a speaker again, and of course I’ll keep you posted on that. But man, I have got to get myself more used to being around large groups of people for extended periods of time, because, while I would not trade away being a part of last weekend’s event for anything, as an introvert who has only grown more secluded since the pandemic, I needed a lot of recovery time afterward.

Anyway, without further ado, let me get down to it.

Who Knew Considering Fetuses People was a Bad Idea?

So how about that Alabama Supreme Court, huh? In case you’re still unclear on how exactly it came about that the state’s medical providers have stopped offering in vitro fertilization for fear of state punishment, Chris Geidner of Law Dork summed up the situation this way:

On Feb. 16, the Alabama Supreme Court allowed wrongful-death lawsuits to proceed against a lab that allegedly negligently allowed the destruction of frozen embryos created for IVF purposes. In order to permit those lawsuits, the court first had to conclude that frozen embryos in a lab are children.

And man, have Republicans had a hard time figuring out what to do about this. Especially the “moderate” ones. Even Donald Trump, who is clearly not moderate by anyone’s standards, is trying to paint himself as moderate on this issue. Having recently bragged about how he appointed the US Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, last week he said he “strongly” supports IVF and called for the Alabama state legislature to preserve access to IVF in the state, although it is hard to see how they could do so without falling afoul of the state supreme court.

This is a real issue for Republicans, since most of them, and most conservative Christians, support IVF. But they made their bed, and now they have to lie about it. Hey, we’re all trying to find the guy who did this, right?