Republicans Scramble to Save IVF After Alabama Court Ruling

A recent decision from the Alabama Supreme Court has left Republicans struggling to respond to the ruling in a post-Roe world, pushing some to even express support for legislative and legal challenges to the decision.

The state's Supreme Court ruled late last week that frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children under Alabama law. The decision has prompted at least three facilities in Alabama to pause IVF services, but it has also altered the national reproductive health care debate, giving Democrats a new opening in an election year while putting some Republicans in a bind.

At least one House Republican is already planning a legislative response, while others publicly oppose the ruling. At the same time, the only GOP presidential candidate still in the primary race against Donald Trump has called for Alabama's Legislature to reconsider the law.

"We should do everything we can to protect IVF for women everywhere," GOP Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Axios late Thursday. "We are currently drafting a resolution to express our sentiment and then looking at legislative options."

Her Republican colleagues in swing districts that President Joe Biden carried in 2020 have also pushed back. Representative Nick LaLota of New York said the ruling "goes too far," while Representative Marc Molinaro, also from New York, said he was "troubled by and opposes the ruling."

But the challenge for Republicans in finding the right response to the IVF fallout in Alabama was evident as presidential candidate Nikki Haley tried to walk back her initial response to the ruling: "Embryos, to me, are babies."

Just hours after that comment, Haley clarified her position, saying, "I didn't say that I agreed with the Alabama ruling," even though she said she still believes "an embryo is an unborn baby." She amended her answer again a day later, calling for a law that would override the Alabama court's decision.

"I think that the court was doing it based on the law, and I think Alabama needs to go back and look at the law," she told CNN's Jake Tapper.

Even GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, one of the most vocal opponents of abortion in Congress, sidestepped questions about how the ruling could affect people who want to have children through IVF, telling NBC News, "That's for another conversation."

He continued: "I think the big thing is right now, you protect—you go back to the situation and try to work it out to where it's best for everybody. I mean, that's what the whole abortion issue is about," he said.

Democrats, on the other hand, have quickly moved to frame the Alabama ruling as a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which ended the constitutional right to an abortion. It's a strategy that has been successful for the party, helping to fend off a red wave in the 2022 midterms and to score state and local election wins last year.

Democrat Tom Suozzi's win in New York's special congressional election earlier this month indicated that abortion continues to be top of mind for voters and could be an issue that helps Democrats cut through GOP messaging on immigration and border security this election year.