Judge Mitchell IVF opinion tagged posts

The mid-February decision by the Alabama Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling and allow a wrongful death lawsuit to proceed against a hospital that left an in vitro fertilization facility unsecured, leading to the breakage of frozen human embryos conceived and stored in the laboratory, hit like another howitzer in the long-running war over abortion rights.

There were two stunning aspects to the case that set the commentariat wires buzzing.

One was the court’s determination that embryos, conceived in a petri dish meetup of sperm and eggs, gestated for 5-7 days and then frozen for later implantation into a womb, meet all the criteria of human children while in that frozen state.

Plenty to talk about there—including the fact that such an embryo, called a “blastocyst,” is comprised of between 100 to 120 cells, totaling one-tenth of a millimeter. (A millimeter is ...