Alabama abortion ruling 'was not a shock' to activists
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling last week that embryos are people, imperiling in vitro fertilization, shocked many Americans.
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling last week that embryos are people, imperiling in vitro fertilization, shocked many Americans. But the decision was vindicating for abortion rights activists who have warned for years that the fall of Roe v. Wade would put other forms of reproductive health care on the chopping block.
“This is something that we knew was coming,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, told NBC News, adding, “For the folks who were watching closely, this was not a shock.”
NBC News spoke to several leaders in the abortion rights movement who said they view the Alabama decision as the latest target in the yearslong history of anti-abortion advocacy that won't end with IVF. They also said they hoped the ruling would galvanize support for protecting access to abortion and other reproductive rights.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2021 that it would take up a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, abortion rights supporters began to prepare for the possibility of Roe's downfall. And once the high court struck down the landmark abortion ruling in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, those same activists began to prepare for further threats to reproductive health care.
“With the Dobbs decision, we knew that the opposition wasn’t going to stop at that,” Candace Gibson, the director of state policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights think tank, said in an interview. “We always have known that the anti-abortion movement, the opposition, will try to find any avenue to … restrict the right of bodily autonomy.”
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