I’d like to take Alabama’s Chief Justice Tom Parker out for coffee and talk to him about his recent claim that frozen embryos are children, too. Alabama’s Supreme Court recently and wrongly ruled embryos – in or out of the uterus – are children, and that destroying them is “an affront to God.”
I’d share with Justice Parker the trauma and expense my own daughter and her husband endured in their efforts to have children. I’d tell him how my daughter had four embryos implanted, yet, she only has two children. I’d explain in the simplest terms possible how it is that every month women all over the world slough off embryos that do not implant. I’d explain how my daughter sloughed off embryos that were surgically implanted at $30,000 a pop. I’d share with him how these sloughed-off embryos are then flushed down the toilet along with urine and the remains of menstrual flow because clearly Parker and the rest of the Alabama Supreme Court have no idea how a woman’s body functions, or how fertility works, or the emotional and financial chaos that results from lawmakers (mostly white men) making reproductive decisions for women.
