Q Toon: Tragedy at an Alabama Fertility Clinic

Unless you've been living under a rock (or perhaps in a petri dish), you have heard by now that the Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos have all the legal rights of living, breathing children. Fertility clinics in the state abruptly halted services to patients who have been using in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in their desire to become parents.

Several of my colleagues, and multiple memesters, have flooded the internet with jokes about Alabamans no longer being able to distinguish breakfast eggs from chickens... which was worth a chuckle the first time I saw it, but glosses over the fact that your breakfast eggs are unfertilized. They do not contain any chickens, real or theoretical. I wager that most people upon finding cracking open an egg to find a half-formed chick inside would be a little grossed out. (Unless they live on a farm. Or actually ordered the balut.)

Meanwhile, it's just as illegal to poach (in either sense of the verb) a bald eagle egg as it is to shoot an adult bald eagle. 

I don't think one can reasonably dispute that the prospective parents whose frozen embryonic cells were accidentally destroyed by some bozo who had no business messing with them in the first place suffered some degree of damage, although I couldn’t put a dollar figure on it. If one set of parents can no longer produce eggs or sperm together for whatever reason, perhaps the figure should be high. Where same-sex couples may be barred from adopting children, IVF could be a valuable option.

But if parents of a frozen embryo split up, would that make that embryo worthless — at least to one of them?

The Alabama Supremes have nevertheless opened up a Pandora's icebox of embryonic dilemmas. Clinics don't save one embryo per couple, so what of all those embryos who are destined never to gestate into what Genesis 2:7 considers a living baby? 

By the way, one should be careful about using Genesis 2:7 as an argument here. The verse refers specifically to Adam — who is a unique case, since he never spent nine months in somebody's womb but was instead molded out of clay. 

Which technically makes him not a human being, but a golem.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, all those surplus frozen embryos.

In Georgia, Missouri, and fourteen other states which have laws or pending legislation granting full legal personhood to single-cell protohumans, those zygotes are destined to live forever. 

In eighteen years, they'll even be eligible to vote.

Although in most of those states, officials will want to see proof of gender. Registering as something other than their future birth gender, an embryo could end up tried as an adult and sentenced to prison.