It is also possible that any miscarriage could be investigated as a murder.
Either an embryo is a person, or it isn’t. If it is a person when it is in the womb, then logically, it should also be a person outside the womb. The Alabama Supreme Court is correct in its decision if the law is that an embryo is a person at inception, then an embryo is also a person if it is a frozen embryo. I don’t agree with the law but that is not what I am writing about.
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, Alabama’s Supreme Court said frozen embryos are children and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death – a decision that puts back into national focus the question of when life begins and one that reproductive rights advocates say could have a chilling effect on infertility treatments and the hundreds of Alabamians who seek them each year. Source
The Supreme Court of Alabama reached the right decision based on their law as written.
In its majority opinion, the court ruled they should, noting Alabama residents voted in 2018 to amend the Constitution to include protections for unborn life. Whether that unborn life is physically in or out of a uterus shouldn’t matter, it said.
“The People of Alabama have declared the public policy of this State to be that unborn human life is sacred,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in his concurring opinion. “We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness.”
Texas is not as restrictive as some other states. Texas uses when a heartbeat can be detected. What do other states have?
A handful of Republican-led states, including Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma, have passed laws declaring that life begins at fertilization, a contention that opens the door to a host of pregnancy-related litigation. This includes wrongful death lawsuits brought on behalf of the estate of an embryo by disgruntled ex-partners against physicians and women who end a pregnancy or even miscarry. (One such lawsuit is underway in Arizona. Another reached the Alabama Supreme Court.)
In Kentucky, the law outlawing abortion uses morally explosive terms to define pregnancy as “the human female reproductive condition of having a living unborn human being within her body throughout the entire embryonic and fetal stages of the unborn child from fertilization to full gestation and childbirth.” Source
