WASHINGTON (CN) — Lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee traded blows Wednesday over reproductive freedoms, as a panel of expert witnesses sounded the alarm about what they said was a march to roll back women’s bodily autonomy.
The upper chamber’s legal affairs panel has now held three separate hearings aimed at exploring the legal, medical and practical consequences of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which rolled back the constitutional right to an abortion.
Lawmakers’ inquiry gained an extra dimension in February when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos used in in vitro fertilization procedures could legally be considered children and that destroying IVF embryos is a crime.
That decision garnered widespread disapproval, including among Republicans in Congress, and the Alabama Legislature passed a law aimed at shielding medial providers who administer IVF treatment. Despite that, congressional Democrats have sought to place the IVF ruling in the context of what they see as an ever-growing assault on reproductive rights.
“We now live in a nation where health care providers live in fear of civil and criminal liability for simply doing their jobs,” said Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee. Calling the Alabama IVF ruling “heartbreaking,” he argued that it was just the latest example of conservative efforts to strip women of bodily autonomy.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, Durbin’s fellow Illinoisian who herself had a child via IVF, concurred.
“Those seeking to ban IVF won’t stop at one medical procedure,” she said, adding that the Alabama ruling was a “chilling preview of the dystopian future that awaits us”
Duckworth, invited to testify before the Judiciary Committee as a witness, also slammed the “fetal personhood” movement that informed the Alabama decision and is growing in popularity among some members of Congress. The fetal personhood theory argues that embryos should be afforded the same rights and legal protections as any other American.
“We can recognize the value of potential human life,” said Duckworth, “and accept the fact that an embryo is not yet a human being. Attempting to deny this reality … is an affront to the millions of aspiring parents that struggle to conceive.”
Other witnesses invited to testify Wednesday outlined what they saw as the danger of hiking abortion restrictions and the threat posed by clamping down on IVF procedures.
Lourdes Rivera, president of New York-based reproductive advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, said lawmakers should certainly view attacks on IVF in the larger context of efforts to pull back reproductive rights.
“These reproductive health issues do not exist in silos,” she said. “If you define fertilized eggs and embryos and fetuses as independent person with rights it’s going to affect everyone.”
Those consequences could extend to abortion rights, access to contraception and the quality of maternal health care, Rivera said.
The witness also took aim at the fetal personhood movement, arguing that the effort is “not about protecting babies” but instead about “criminalizing and controlling women.”
“We must remember that women and pregnant people must be considered as fully autonomous, rights-bearing individuals,” Rivera said.
Austin Dennard, a practicing ob-gyn living in Texas who previously testified before Congress about her own experience traveling out of state to receive abortion care, told lawmakers that both she and her patients live in fear of prosecution thanks to Dobbs and state-level abortion restrictions.
“No one should have to be lucky to access essential medical care,” Dennard said.
Jamie Heard, an Alabama resident whose IVF treatment was put on hold thanks to the state court ruling, made a similar point about access to such a procedure.
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