On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people under the law. While some call the decision shocking, Margaret Marsh, a historian and professor at Rutgers University, is not surprised.
Marsh, who is also a core faculty member at Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers Health, and gynecologist Wanda Ronner are the authors of The Pursuit of Parenthood: Reproductive Technology from Test-Tube Babies to Uterus Transplants (2019), a history of assisted reproduction from the early days of IVF to the technologies of the present.
The following quote from Marsh is available for pickup:
“The anti-abortion movement strongly opposed IVF in the early days. In 1979, a year after the birth of the world’s first IVF baby, a coalition of anti-abortion organizations denounced IVF in an ad in The New York Times as a ‘morally abhorrent’ technology, and they successfully thwarted all efforts to allow federal funding for any research using human embryos. Over the years, the anti-abortion movement gradually accepted some reproductive technologies, as long as no embryos were destroyed during their use. But the peace it made with the new technologies was always an uneasy peace.”
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