Following the fall of Roe v. Wade in June, Tennessee’s pro-life “trigger” law protecting preborn children from abortion from the moment of fertilization took effect on August 25. Now the state’s attorney general has stated that the law will not protect preborn human beings who exist within Tennessee fertility clinics.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti released an opinion stating that the law “does not apply to a human embryo before it has been transferred to a woman’s uterus and, therefore, disposing of a human embryo that has not been transferred to a woman’s uterus is not punishable as a ‘criminal abortion.'”
Skrmetti explained that though an embryo may fit under the law’s definition of an “unborn child,” the law itself does not criminalize disposing of embryos that have yet to be implanted because no one is pregnant and therefore no one is having an abortion. He wrote that “if there is no pregnancy to terminate, there can be no abortion.”
The collective fertility industry in Tennessee remains unchecked, creating and destroying human lives for profit. The process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) actually destroys human lives more often than abortion does.
Since Roe v. Wade first thrust legalized abortion on the states in 1973, 63 million human lives have been lost to abortion. Between 1991 and 2012, more than 3 million embryos were created through IVF, but only 235,480 were successfully implanted. Research shows that 93% of the embryos created through IVF never survived to birth. While some failed to implant, others were donated to research or were stored indefinitely — and nearly 1.7 million embryos were simply thrown away.
“By the numbers, the IVF industry violates the lives of children more often than the abortion industry does,” Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us, told Live Action News in a previous interview. “If you love babies, you are going to oppose these reproductive technologies because the core technology that’s at the root of most of these processes, IVF, destroys more embryonic life than abortion does every year.”
While some pro-lifers view IVF as a pro-life endeavor that helps adults have the children they desire, in the process of IVF, the right to life is violated. Embryos conceived in a lab have the same intrinsic human rights as embryos conceived in the womb, yet they do not have equal protection under the new Tennessee law.
As more pro-life laws are enacted to protect human lives from abortion, this question will continue to arise: are human embryos living in a fertility clinic deserving of the same rights as human embryos living in their mothers’ wombs?
