President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign on Thursday blamed former President Donald Trump for the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent decision on in vitro fertilization and the subsequent decision by the University of Alabama-Birmingham to pause IVF treatment in response to the ruling.
“What is happening in Alabama right now is only possible because Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “Across the nation, MAGA Republicans are inserting themselves into the most personal decisions a family can make, from contraception to IVF.”
“With their latest attack on reproductive freedom, these so-called pro-life Republicans are preventing loving couples from growing their families,” she added. “If Donald Trump is elected, there is no question that he will impose his extreme anti-freedom agenda on the entire country.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through in vitro fertilization are children under state law, prompting legal concerns among doctors and patients over unused embryos that get discarded in the process.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham announced Wednesday that it would stop IVF treatments in light of the high court’s ruling, citing possible legal repercussions as a result of the decision.
“We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments,” a university spokesperson said in a statement.
Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have voiced their opposition to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling, decrying it as another threat to reproductive rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“This decision is outrageous—and it is already robbing women of the freedom to decide when and how to build a family,” Harris said in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, however, sided with the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, saying that frozen embryos created through in-vitro fertilization are “babies” when asked whether she agrees with the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling stating that embryos created through IVF are considered children and are offered those same protections.
“Embryos, to me, are babies,” Haley told NBC News in an interview. “When you talk about an embryo, you are talking about, to me, that’s a life. And so I do see where that’s coming from when they talk about that.”
Haley, however, later backpedaled, saying that her personal position is that embryos are babies while claiming she didn’t say she agreed with Alabama Supreme Court ruling.
“I didn’t say that I agreed with the Alabama ruling,” Haley said in an interview on CNN Wednesday night.
Haley went on to argue that the goal of medical providers should be to “always do what the parents want with their embryo — it is theirs,” adding, “So any physician that is in control of those embryos, they owe it to those people to make sure they protect that embryo and that they do with that embryo what those parents want done with that embryo.”
Ali Vitali, Alex Rhoades, Sarah Dean and Aria Bendix contributed.
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