Greene County Democrat

Tag: vitro fertilization (IVF)

  • Newswire : Britt backlash stokes GOP fears about losing women voters

    Alabama Senator Katie Britt

    By: Julia Manchester, The Hill

    Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-Ala.) State of the Union response is shining a light on the GOP’s struggle to appeal to women voters ahead of November’s elections.
    The rebuttal was met with an avalanche of backlash for being out of touch, with many critics calling the choice to have Britt sitting at a kitchen table for the address sexist.
    Political strategists and observers say Britt’s performance is largely emblematic of her party’s problem in appealing to women voters, particularly in the suburbs, who have recently turned their back on the party.
    “Republicans have now two years in a row have picked a young woman — last year Sarah Huckabee Sanders, this year Katie Britt — to try to shift the image of the Republican Party away from older white men, which is really quite the reality of the party,” said Debbie Walsh, the executive director of the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University.
    And there is no question that Britt is in the minority within her party in the Capitol. She is one of nine Republican women serving in the U.S. Senate. “It is the image they are trying to strike in an attempt to reach women voters in some way,” Walsh said.
    Republicans praised the choice of Britt to deliver the rebuttal, citing the contrast in age between her and President Biden, as well as her own record in the Senate. Last month, Britt played a leading role in helping Republicans navigate a ruling by her state’s Supreme Court that frozen embryos were considered children. She worked to gather support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) as Democrats were using the issue to attack the GOP.
    The GOP has struggled to reach women in recent years, particularly those in the suburbs, since former President Trump took office in 2016. In the 2022 midterms, they helped deliver significant victories to Democrats in key swing states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. According to the Pew Research Center, Biden won 54 percent of suburban voters in general. And back in 2018, 53 percent of suburban women voters said they voted for Democrats, up from 47 percent in 2014 and 51 percent in 2016, according to CBS News exit polling.
    “Not only do they have a problem appealing to women, but it’s just to suburban voters at large,” said Gunner Ramer, political director the Republican Accountability Project, an anti-Trump right-leaning group.
    Britt’s rebuttal featured her at her kitchen table, a location she and her family discuss issues impacting them, she said. Critics on the left and some on the right criticized the senator for using her kitchen backdrop, arguing that it fed into the outdated stereotypes about gender roles in the home. Britt defended the venue choice on “Fox News Sunday,” saying, “Republicans care about kitchen table issues.”
    “We care about faith, family; we care about freedom. We are the ones talking about the economy and the real effects of that,” Britt said.
    Meanwhile, Britt’s performance was excoriated during both a “Saturday Night Live” opening and comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue at Sunday’s Academy Awards.
    On top of all that, Britt has faced backlash over a story she told during the rebuttal of a woman facing sexual violence from two decades ago in Mexico. The senator defended the anecdote in the same “Fox News Sunday” interview, saying it was representative of Biden’s border policy, even if it significantly predated his administration.
    However, the venue choice, coupled with what many have described as an awkward delivery from Britt, resulted in critics pouncing.
    Ramer highlighted a focus group that the Republican Accountability Project conducted with voters from swing states the day after the State of the Union. They overwhelmingly said that “weird” was the word that summed up their reaction to the address.
    “It misreads the voters they need to win back, because appealing to the traditional woman voter sort of thing — a lot of those voters are already going to support Trump,” Ramer said. “What they needed to do was go after the suburban vote, and Katie Britt’s response didn’t do that, and I think we saw that reflected in the focus group we did.”
    And while Britt’s rebuttal may be in the headlines now, the speech itself likely won’t play a long-term role in the GOP’s appeal to women and suburban voters unless Britt is a leading contender to be Trump’s running mate.

  • Newswire : Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled frozen embryos are ‘children’. Touching off national controversy

    From Reuters, BBC and wire reports

    The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos created and stored for in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children under a state law allowing parents to sue for wrongful death of their minor children. The ruling revived three families’ lawsuits accusing a Mobile, Alabama fertility clinic, Center for Reproductive Medicine, and the hospital where it is located, Mobile Infirmary, of failing to properly safeguard frozen embryos, resulting in their destruction.

    The 8-1 majority of the court found that it was a long-established precedent that “unborn children” are “children” for the purpose of the 1872 wrongful death law at issue in the case. It said that any doubt about that was removed by a 2018 amendment to the state’s constitution, which declared that it was “the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.”

    The court, whose members are all elected Republicans or appointed by a Republican governor, further found that there was no “unwritten exception” for frozen embryos outside of a woman’s uterus. Chief Justice Tom Parker drew widespread attention for his overtly religious concurring opinion, in which he wrote that the state constitution includes the “theologically based view” that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

    It is not yet clear, but IVF providers are very concerned about the implications of the ruling. IVF treatment typically involves the creation of multiple embryos in order to maximize the chance of a successful pregnancy, leaving some unused. At least three providers – the defendant in the case, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System and Alabama Fertility – have said they are pausing IVF treatments, citing potential civil and criminal liability in the wake of the decision.

    The ruling left open the question of whether destroying a frozen embryo could result in criminal homicide charges. It also left it to the legislature to determine whether and how IVF could continue in the state.

    When the US Supreme Court struck down a nationwide right to abortion in 2022, in the Dobbs decision, it opened the door for states to make their own laws on the issue.

    Since the decision, Democratic-controlled states have expanded access while Republican-controlled states have restricted it. Alabama already has a total ban on abortion, at all stages of pregnancy.

    It is unclear how the Alabama court decision will affect other states. It has opened a debate between “Pro-Life, anti-Abortion forces” and “Pro-Women’s Right to Choose forces”. The Anti-abortion forces support the concept that “life begins at conception” and all abortion is “baby killing” so they support the court decision which calls into question the IVF process.

    The Biden White House called the Alabama ruling “exactly the type of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and paved the way for politicians to dictate some of the most personal decisions families can make”.
    Some Republican politicians who support and have used IVF themselves are caught in the middle of this debate, which is a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion. This issue will be a major factor in the national elections in November and may persuade many women to come out to the polls, to assert their rights to control their bodies and healthcare.