“It’s The Racism, Stupid “

"I think Obama is driving the train" -- Ted Cruz tells Maria Bartiromo that Barack Obama is the secret president pic.twitter.com/VghJ5gUzhX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 18, 2024

In some ways the Republican party has changed, but there is something truly timeless in Republicans scapegoating minorities to cover up the damage that their own economic policies have done to poor and middle-class people. https://t.co/xVdB0RyBGk

— Ben Yelin (@byelin) February 18, 2024

Liz Cheney on CNN: "When you think about Donald Trump, for example, pledging retribution, what Vladimir Putin did to Navalny is what retribution looks like in a country where the leader is not subject to the rule of law ... you've now got a Putin wing of the Republican Party." pic.twitter.com/gDpyJMdJnB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 18, 2024

Politics makes very strange bedfellows when I agree with Liz Cheney.

Not really where I was going, but I had to look this up:

The Republican-appointed Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen, unimplanted embryos qualify as “children,” threatening access to IVF across the state.

This is made possible by Donald Trump ending Roe v. Wade, which he calls a “miracle”https://t.co/C2SnboqjqW pic.twitter.com/VjTe0rC9Ky

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 18, 2024

The basic facts are:

Mobile Infirmary “allowed one of its patients to leave and/or elope from his or her room in the Infirmary’s hospital area and access the cryogenic storage area,” according to one of the lawsuits. The patient removed embryos from the freezer, and “it is believed that the cryopreservation’s subzero temperatures burned the eloping patient’s hands, causing him or her to drop the cryopreserved embryonic human beings on the floor, where they began to slowly die,” one of the filings stated.

The Alabama Supreme Court, sounding a lot like the Texas Supreme Court, held:

The Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell. “[T]he Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified. It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

This raises a question: what if the frozen embryos are never used? Or pass their viability before use? (Assuming they cannot be viably frozen indefinitely.) What if, for example, a hospital suffers a catastrophic loss of power, as most the state of Texas did in February, 2021? We lost power and water, because the pumps had no power to operate. If the calamity caused even back-up generators to be insufficient to power the freezers, would that support a wrongful death charge? Or, to return to where I began, if the embryos simply expire frozen?

This procedure is for IVF, a procedure that expects to lose embryos in a high percentage before success. If the first attempt succeeds, must the parents try the remaining embryos? Wouldn’t failure to punish such a decision exclude unborn life from legal protection? Is IVF itself a form of wrongful death?

Maybe it would be better just to not offer IVF in Alabama. Or maybe because it’s only available to rich people, nobody else is gonna much give a shit.

There’s always that.