A big part of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s self-reinvention as a “moderate” with appeal across party lines has been her shrewd rap on abortion policy. A long-time favorite of the anti-abortion lobby, and a proponent of abortion restrictions as South Carolina governor (before Roe v. Wade was overturned), she has positioned herself during the campaign as someone with deep sympathy for both sides of the abortion battle determined to forge a “consensus” on this issue before setting any sort of national policies.
If you look even a millimeter beneath the surface, however, Haley remains what she has always been: a hard-core anti-abortion activist willing to recognize pragmatic political limitations on the use of state power to force all pregnancies to full term. Her empathy towards women choosing abortion goes only so far as opposition to hypothetical laws criminalizing them (which hardly anyone favors and that the anti-abortion lobby regards as a straw man). Her search for a “consensus” really just means she will only fight for state or national abortion bans if the votes in Congress are there to win such fights.
An ideal Haley world, however, would be very unsafe for reproductive rights. And she once again made her underlying views clear in reaction to this week’s Alabama Supreme Court decision recognizing embryos frozen by in-vitro fertilization clinics as persons deserving absolute constitutional protection just like fully grown human beings, as NBC News reported:
[Haley] said Wednesday that frozen embryos created through in-vitro fertilization are “babies,” siding with a recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that raised concerns among doctors and patients about the future of the procedure.
“Embryos, to me, are babies,” Haley told NBC News in an interview, adding that she used artificial insemination to have her son, a different process than IVF that doesn’t present the same complexities around creating embryos in a lab. “When you talk about an embryo, you are talking about, to me, that’s a life. And so I do see where that’s coming from when they talk about that.”
The idea that embryos are “babies” who just haven’t been born just yet is the foundation of the fetal personhood movement, the far frontier of anti-abortion extremism. The idea is that any interference with fetal development from the moment of conception is quite literally homicide, which should be banned categorically. For many personhood advocates, that includes forms of contraception (notably IUDs and perhaps the birth-control pill) thought to operate by preventing the implantation of a fertilized ovum in the uterine wall. And it definitely means ending in-vitro fertilization, which leads to the disposal of countless unnecessary embryos. So clinics serving people desperate to become parents would be shuttered as extermination factories.
Surely recognizing the radicalism of the Alabama decision and the underlying logic, Haley tried to worm around the implications by displaying her famous empathy:
Asked if legislation and rulings like the one in Alabama could have a chilling effect on families using IVF to become parents, Haley said, “This is one where we need to be incredibly respectful and sensitive about it.”
“I know that when my doctor came in, we knew what was possible and what wasn’t,” Haley continued, adding: “Every woman needs to know, with her partner, what she’s looking at. And then when you look at that, then you make the decision that’s best for your family.”
But you cannot make that decision if it’s against the law. In reaction to the Alabama court’s decision, the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical Center shut down its IV procedures, as AL.com reported. “We must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments,” a spokesperson said.
This isn’t an issue on which there is going to be “consensus” uniting people who believe in reproductive rights and people who believe a pre-fetal embryo is a “baby” with all the rights and privileges of fully-grown human beings. Nikki Haley is clearly in the latter camp, and needs to recognize it or change her mind. Her views should surely become better known to the independents and Democrats she is imploring to vote for her against Donald Trump in South Carolina this weekend.
Related
