Why Alabama IVF Ruling Has Split the GOP

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, leadership is at play in the United States as well of course. Nikki Haley is suspending her presidential campaign after losing to Donald Trump in yesterday’s Republican Super Tuesday primaries. So, where will she choose to send her delegates and her voters? A key issue dividing the party is reproductive rights where Haley has a much more nuanced view than Trump or hardline Republicans like the Alabama Supreme Court justices, which caused such a nationwide uproar with its ruling, jeopardizing the possibility of IVF for families who are trying to conceive. Now, in her recent piece, “IVF and the GOP,” Mona Charen, policy editor at “The Bulwalk” news site, details the conflict between legislation and fertility treatments. And she’s joining Michel Martin to discuss how conservatives can maintain voter support.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR, NPR: Thanks, Christiane. Mona Charen, thank you so much for joining us.

MONA CHAREN, POLICY EDITOR, THE BULWARK: My pleasure.

MARTIN: Could you just start by talking a little bit about your own thoughts about when life begins? I know you’ve previously identified yourself as a member of the pro-life movement. I mean — and obviously, these decisions are always complicated. But as briefly as you can, if you’d just describe how you came to that decision for yourself, that that’s where you plant your feet. What informs that decision for you?

CHAREN: My path was quite different, I think, from most people. I did not grow up in a religious household. I didn’t come by this that route. But I studied the philosophy of law in college, of course. And one of the sort of fraught topics that we addressed was abortion. So, I was assigned to do all this reading on it. And it seemed to me that the most moral position would be one that took life very seriously, treated it as sacred. And of course, there’s always an understanding that pregnancy is unlike anything else in human experience, and there are competing rights. But I found myself very much on the side of trying to do everything possible to prevent abortion whenever possible. But within the framework of understanding that there are certain situations where the mother’s rights need to prevail, for her health, for life, and for certain other kinds of situations.

MARTIN: You are known as a conservative writer, policy analyst, you’ve been a speech writer in Republican administrations, et cetera. So, you would say, what? You’ve sort of described yourself as pro-life, as part of the pro-life movement but part the mushy middle. Is that — would that be fair?

CHAREN: So completely fair. Look, during the last 15 years or so, I have been writing a great deal about civil society efforts to help moms who find themselves with crisis pregnancies and want an alternative. So, that’s been my focus. I’ve helped to found a Jewish organization called In Shifra’s Arms, which is a nonprofit that helps women who have crisis pregnancies and feel they need the support to carry on with the pregnancy. In Shifra’s Arms was never about changing the laws. It was about just helping women and babies. And I have been very comfortable with that approach to the issue. And I have been a little disappointed that in the wake of the Dobbs decision, the larger pro-life movement, rather than stepping up and saying, now is our opportunity to provide more support for women and would-be moms to make their lives easier, to make it easier for them to choose life. The efforts seemed to be very punitive. And to make it difficult even to get birth control mailed through the mail. And so, I’ve been distressed that that has been the reaction.

MARTIN: So, as we are speaking now, one of the reasons we called you, obviously, is this decision by the Alabama Supreme Court. The Alabama Supreme Court issued a decision last month in a pair of wrongful death cases, which were brought by couples who had frozen embryos who had been accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic. The court ruled that these frozen embryos should be considered children under state law. You know, a lot of people who have been critics of the Dobbs decision or people who support more expansive abortion rights, we told you so. This is exactly what was going to happen. And I just wondered if you felt that way too or what was your reaction when you heard this decision?

CHAREN: Well, I certainly understand the reaction of people who don’t follow these things closely. You know, the reaction was, sounds like now they’re coming after IVF, right? And it felt that way. In reality, the Alabama law at issue really didn’t have anything to do with Dobbs. It was on the books. I guess it’s possible that the judges of the Alabama Supreme Court felt emboldened to rule as they did. But —

MARTIN: Because they felt they wouldn’t be overturned. That’s the argument. That they felt that the Supreme Court had opened the door, and therefore, they were going to walk through it.

CHAREN: Yes.

MARTIN: And I do want to note for clarity that the ruling does not ban in vitro fertilization.

CHAREN: Correct. It does not.

MARTIN: But the response to that is that at least three clinics stopped treatment in the wake of the ruling, being concerned that it would open the door to legislation that would basically destroy them.

CHAREN: The reason the clinics stop functioning is because their legal liability, as a result of the Supreme Court decision, would have been insupportable, right? If a fertilized embryo is a person, then any form of negligence on the part of the clinic or even if the power goes out, or you can imagine a million scenarios, you know, someone drops a pipette, that could be a cause for a wrongful death suit, and therefore, it would be unsustainable to practice in vitro fertilization as it is usually practiced in the United States under those conditions. So, my reaction, I was mostly interested to see all of these people came out of the woodwork to say, well, I had IVF, and these are pro-life Republican women. I had IVF, and it was a lifesaver for us, for my husband and me or, you know, my partner and me. We were able to have children we never would have been able to have and we regard that as a pro-life stance. So, certain Republicans immediately recognizing that this issue has now damaged them at the box — at the polling booth in case after case, they were eager to reject this finding, to express their support for IVF, to say that they are completely for it. But of course, this flies in the face of other things that the Republicans have done in the recent past, such as approving of life begins at conception bills. 160 members of the House of Representatives co-sponsored legislation that would declare that life begins at conception. And what I was saying is, they obviously haven’t thought this through. If life begins at conception and a fertilized embryo is a human being deserving of all the protections of the Constitution, then you cannot practice IVF. It’s incompatible. Because the risk to the embryo is too great, and of course to clinics. So, there was that reaction. But I was also — I also wanted to point out, as somebody who is very familiar with the whole IVF process, namely my husband and I, we did it many years ago, that it is possible to approach IVF in a conscientious fashion. That, you know — and people do. People make decisions about handling a fertilized — an embryo that can be very sensitive to the unique nature of what you’ve created there. These things are not so easy as a — you know, or clean and bright as moral matter to be able to say that, for example, a couple, a friend of mine, their family has a history of Trisomy 18, which is a terrible genetic disorder. And so, they did IVF and they were able to segregate the embryos that were carriers of this disease and only transfer the healthy embryos. Does that violate the most strict interpretation of a life begins at conception idea of life? It does. It Does. But is it, in the end, worse than many other things that happen in this world? No. You know, in weighing in balance, it’s not so clear to me that the doctrinaire life always has to be protected no matter what position is really the right one. And sometimes I think our moral intuition is a good guide, not just a bright line test.

MARTIN: So, now, the question I’m asking you is, as a conservative, I don’t know if you still identify as Republican. I don’t know everything that’s happened.

CHAREN: I don’t. I don’t.

MARTIN: Well, exactly. That’s why one has to ask is, what do Republicans do now? I mean, what did they do now? It just seems that those — now that the whole question of life begins at conception is causing some very serious difficulties for people that they care about. What is the mainstream position and what should it —

CHAREN: I do not know what they are going to do. I can only speak for myself and others like me that we are still — we still regard abortion as a tragedy and we still wish that many, many fewer women children had to resort to them or felt they had too. And if it were up to me, there would be a lot more support for women with crisis pregnancies. There would be a lot more social support, financial support, the whole nine yards, so that we could welcome more children into the world. And that is my current posture, that all of these efforts to limit how birth control can be prescribed through the mail, whether, you know, something is an abortifacient, whether you can arrest, as Texas did, a woman who you think is heading out of — you know, they had some crazy proposal that if they — if some citizen thought somebody was driving you out-of-state to get an abortion, they could interfere. All of those things are way beyond the pale. And I think that we should return the emphasis to mothers and babies and trying to help them.

MARTIN: You know, IVF is not without ethical challenges, too. You were kind enough to share. You experienced IVF yourself, and that you and your husband made the decision that you would implant any healthy embryo. In other situations, that has resulted in people carrying eight pregnancies. And I don’t think — the human body is not really built for that.

CHAREN: Right. So, that —

MARTIN: And, you know, we hear about the successful outcomes, but we don t necessarily hear about unsuccessful outcomes, right? Now that people who are outside of the world of assisted reproductive technologies have become privy to some of these things, where do we go with this?

CHAREN: Well, there’s been — that’s not such a hard ethical question, because there has been advancement in the medical ethics since — and also in the medical technology since those early days when you did have a couple of very high-profile cases of women giving birth to multiple — you know, five, seven, eight kids. There was one woman who gave birth to eight. But now, that is no longer done. They don’t transfer at once that many embryos.

MARTIN: But that’s what gives rise to this whole question of fertilized embryos that may or may not be implanted, right, which speaks to your point. What I’m saying is, where should we go with this now? You see my point, that’s how this whole situation arose in Alabama, because there are embryos that had not been implanted —

CHAREN: Oh, they were frozen.

MARTIN: Yes.

CHAREN: Right. But you can freeze — you know, by the way it’s not so easy to get embryos, especially when people have been dealing with infertility and a lot of — you know, I guess some people get lots, but most people don’t get that many. So, they get — say they get five, a grand total of five embryos after several cycles, then the couple can choose — in an ideal situation, they can choose to transfer — I say transfer not implant because the implantation is up to the embryo not up to the doctors, all they can do is transfer it and hope for the best. But so then, the couple can choose to transfer, say, two embryos. And then, if they’re successful in a pregnancy, great. And if they get one or possibly twin pregnancy, great. And then a few years later, they can come back and get two more. So, it isn’t contrary to the idea of treating the embryos as special and as deserving of a chance at life that you do it in a sequential fashion.

MARTIN: Our political system doesn’t seem really equipped right now to handle nuance or compromise, right?

CHAREN: No.

MARTIN: I guess I’m just wondering — I know what you wish would happen, but what do you think would happen? Realistically, what do you — what would you like to see going forward?

CHAREN: You are so right that our entire culture is — not just our political system, but our whole culture is built to resist compromise. Compromise is seen as surrender. Compromise is seen as lacking in integrity, which does, you know, fails to recognize that our system, we have a huge multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-regional country, and in order for it to succeed, there has to be compromise. I’m very pessimistic about other aspects of our political system, the populism versus democracy contest. But I think on the subject of abortion, you have seen a Republican Party that is beginning to get the message from voters and is kind of scurrying away from the most hardline positions that it took. So, I actually think they’re listening, Michel. I think they’re listening to the voters here, and you will see this is an awkward time. This is — for some people, it’s a tragic time. I really feel for those women and men, the fathers and mothers in Alabama who, for example, were, you know, just on the cusp of getting a transfer, and I know how much goes into that, and how many months and years of injections and tearful waiting, and then to be told when everything is set to go, that it has to be canceled because of a Supreme Court decision. It’s awful. It’s heartbreaking.

MARTIN: A number of news outlets have, you know, approached lawmakers, particularly in Alabama, but, you know, elsewhere, and to say, OK, well, where are you on this, particularly on IVF? And a lot of them are being — you know, being very quick to say that they absolutely support IVF. I wonder if part of the reason is that the people who tend to — the people who utilize IVF tend to be middleclass. It’s not cheap. I mean, most people’s insurance policies don’t cover it or cover all of it. You know, some do, but it’s expensive. And I don’t know. Is there any part of you that wonders whether some of this has to do with class? Is that this is something that middle-class people use and want? And so, therefore, that’s why the system is responsive to it in ways that they perhaps are not other things?

CHAREN: Well, look, the Republican Party is becoming the party of the working class. And so, they are going to be more responsive to the needs of working people than they used to be in the past. I mean, look, for many, many years, the Republican Party was pretty much coterminous with “The Wall Street Journal” editorial page. And that’s just no longer true. So, yes, the class thing may play into this.

MARTIN: You said that you hope — that you think that a more nuanced or sort of, I don’t know, what would you — you use better language than I, that balanced position is sort of, we’re heading toward it. When?

CHAREN: Well, I think, you know, maybe a few more election cycles where the message gets through and then you may look — well, actually, in the case of Alabama, we’re seeing it already. The Alabama legislature is rushing to enact legislation to make it clear that IVF is exempted from their wrongful death, of an extrauterine child, as I think they called it. You know, so they are acting with dispatch. And I think, you know, if there’s another election cycle where abortion is perceived to benefit Democrats, Republicans will switch rapidly.

MARTIN: Mona Charen, thanks so much for talking to us once again.

CHAREN: My pleasure.