I.V.F., the First Daughters of a Fetus, and the Alabama Supreme Court Fast and Right”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children, and that led to the pause in the debate.

If it moves ahead, the bill would add Florida to the ranks of about a dozen other states that allow parents to receive financial damages in some instances when a fetus has died. The bill says parents of an unborn child are considered survivors in wrongful death cases.

Democrats warned that the bill amounts to “fetal personhood”, assigning full rights to a fetus. Such a designation, they said, would imperil doctors and anyone who assisted women in obtaining an abortion and would also adversely affect fertility treatments.

There are still some things that need to be done and I have been trying to respond to questions and concerns, but I know there is more work to be done. We have an issue of significance and it is important that we get the policy right.

Donald J. Trump, as well as a number of Republican governors, put their support behind I.V.F. after the Alabama ruling.

Though the Florida bill does not mention I.V.F., critics feared that it could affect fertility treatments and make it harder for families to have children.

It should be obvious that I.V.F. was not a problem for this bill from the beginning. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, used to teach at Florida State University. “But the degree of backlash and concern increased significantly after the ruling. It’s kind of like it turned into a firestorm.”

The Times and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision: What can we learn about the right to abortion, and what should we do about it?

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that erased the constitutional right to abortion was an alert, too, of course, leaving Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the fruits of the court they had populated with such glee only a few years earlier. As I noted, the religious doctrine at the center of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was perfectly clear. Today, though, it’s usually thought of as a conservative power play rather than a projection of a religious view of fetal life onto the public.