The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Monday that embryos, even those frozen in an in vitro fertilization clinic freezer, were entitled to the same protection as any other unborn child under Alabama law.
In a majority opinion, Justice Jay Mitchell wrote that there was no exception for frozen embryos under an 1872 law allowing civil lawsuits for the wrongful death of children, or under a 2018 state constitutional amendment that required the state to “ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child.”
“The upshot here is that the phrase ‘minor child’ means the same thing in the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act as it does in everyday parlance: ‘an unborn or recently born’ individual member of the human species, from fertilization until the age of majority,” Mitchell wrote. “Nothing about the Act narrows that definition to unborn children who are physically ‘in…
