John Oliver has criticised the past week’s ruling in Alabama that classified frozen embryos as children, referring to the situation as “chaos”.
On Last Week Tonight, he said that those within the state were “reeling after a major decision” which saw a court put those intending to use IVF in jeopardy.
He said that referring to frozen embryos as people was “wrong for a bunch of reasons – mainly if you freeze an embryo it’s fine, if you freeze a person, you have some explaining to do”.
In the US, about 2% of babies are born via IVF and the ruling has led to multiple fertility clinics pausing treatment, but Oliver said “you can’t just hit pause and wait out a court case”, referring to it as “a seismic decision”.
It all goes back to the case of a patient who destroyed a number of frozen embryos in a clinic, which is now being sued for wrongful death, and while Oliver admitted that it’s a “genuinely horrible” story it “just isn’t murder” and “if anything, it sounds like the script for a pretty tasteless Mr Bean sequel but that is it”.
He continued: “The reason clinics are pausing treatment right now is that nobody quite knows what it means for an embryo to be the legal equivalant of a person going forward. What happens if an embryo is stored improperly? What if they’re, as inevitably happens, left over or destroyed in the implantation process? What about genetic testing, which can reduce the risk of miscarriage but does carry a slight risk of damaging embryos? Would that now be considered a wrongful death? It is chaos.”
Other states are reportedly considering a similar ruling but “none of this should be that surprising” as “this ruling is a natural outgrowth of the concept of fetal personhood”.
Oliver spoke about the far-right groups who have been influencing politicians who are now scrambling to defend and explain the latest decision. He said that Republicans were in “a tough spot right now trying to hold on to hardline anti-abortion forces while not alienating the majority of Americans”.
Donald Trump has come out in support of IVF yet has also been behind a push for a 16-week abortion ban.
If he wins this year’s election then Republicans are allegedly hoping to use his presidency as a way to bring back the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that criminalises the shipping of anything aiding abortion.
It’s already been referenced by Lindsey Graham, leading Oliver to joke: “It’s old and it’s there basically sums up Lindsey Graham.”
It would mean that the decision, which would ban all forms of abortion medication being shipped, could be brought into law without going through Congress, an “alarming” eventuality.
But while allies have been pushing it behind closed doors, they are also keen for Trump and his public-facing cronies to avoid talking about it as it could deter voters as a result of its extremity. “Whenever they don’t want you to talk about something, it’s probably worth you knowing about it,” Oliver said.
It comes from Anthony Comstock, who was an anti-sex crusader and a chronic masturbator who called for a ban of obscene materials, including anything aiding abortion. Oliver called it a “wild law pushed for a deeply weird, dangerously horny man”.
He said that Republicans were now “desperately trying to distance themselves from extreme policies they have enabled”.
