In the US State of Alabama, the human embryo and foetus are recognised as a child and legal person, at least in certain contexts. In 2016 the Supreme Court of Alabama, in Kimberly A. Stinnett v. Karla G. Kennedy (CV-12-903943), reaffirmed the principle that “unborn children are protected by Alabama’s wrongful-death statute from the moment life begins at conception”.
The case in question concerned a doctor who, believing that a pregnant woman was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, performed a diagnostic D&C (dilation and curettage) and prescribed methotrexate (a drug that acts as an abortifacient). However, it was found that there was no evidence of ectopic pregnancy and that the pregnancy was progressing in the womb. Sadly, a few weeks later the woman suffered a miscarriage.
Considering these events, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that a wrongful death claim rightly applied to this circumstance since, in the words of one judge, unborn children “are human beings and thus persons entitled to the protections of the law – both civil and criminal”.
Only five years later, a different case, the death of IVF embryos resulting from claimed clinical negligence, reached the Mobile County Circuit Court in Alabama. In this incident, several families whose embryos were in frozen storage at the Mobile Infirmary made a wrongful death claim after a hospital patient had allegedly removed the embryos from the freezer and dropped them on the floor, causing the deaths of the embryos.
However, District Court Judge Jill Parrish Philipps ruled in favour of the defendants (Mobile Infirmary and the Centre of Reproductive Medicine) on the grounds that in Alabama an embryo is legally considered a child/person only if located in the woman’s womb: IVF embryos outside the womb are excluded from the 2019 Human Life Protection Act.
“Very concerning”
Dr Helen Watt, a senior research fellow at the Bios Centre, made the following comment on the judgement: “This ruling is very concerning. The location of a child should make no difference to that child’s legal personhood.
“IVF is itself destructive of life, treating embryos more like disposable products than like the young human beings they are. However, that does not mean that distressed parents should have no remedy when their surviving embryos suffer harm.”