Republicans are beginning to get cold feet over just how far the anti-abortion movement is willing to go to restrict health care — and evangelical activists are now turning on some of them.
According to Politico, the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision declaring embryos people and effectively outlawing in vitro fertilization in the state has caused a huge rift among cultural conservatives, with Republican politicians rushing to defend IVF and even protect it in legislation, and their longtime anti-abortion allies responding with fury.
"Several have attacked state and federal lawmakers — who introduced legislation to protect IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children — for giving doctors a 'license to kill' and said legislators’ efforts would result in 'thousands of dead human beings,'" reported Megan Messerly and Alice Miranda Ollstein. "Other groups are going further, running ads against longstanding GOP allies that use the same graphic imagery — blood, babies and scalpels — they have long deployed to oppose Democrats and the abortion-rights movement."
Tom Parker, the Alabama chief justice who helped craft the IVF decision, is an avowed Christian nationalist who has spoken in favor of the "Seven Mountain Mandate," or a call for right-wing Christians to seize control of the government and culture. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has ties to this movement as well.
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Trump, on the other hand, even as he calls for a national abortion ban, has called for Republicans to protect IVF, and Alabama lawmakers themselves recently enacted a law codifying IVF rights in the state. Kentucky and Missouri lawmakers have introduced similar legislation, but are getting attacked by local anti-abortion groups as well.
“For a lot of conservative Republican lawmakers, being against abortion has served as a kind of lazy way to say that you’re a conservative,” said the right-wing American Family Association Action's policy director Jameson Taylor. “Frankly, a lot of Republican lawmakers are not in touch with conservative principles because they have not taken sufficient time to think through what those principles are.”
