Part II Where are my people?
The exclusion of gay people, and difference, from the IVF conversation
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels
Hey there everyone —
Let’s start with a thought experiment: Picture a couple that’s about to get IVF.
What’s the first image that comes to mind? Stay with that very first image—don’t try to “get it right.” Where are they? What do they look like? How are they feeling? What’s their relationship like? What kind of support do they have? How long have they been trying to get pregnant?
I’ll tell you mine.
I see a white straight couple. She’s slender, with long brown hair, the silky flat kind. It’s past her shoulders. She’s wearing “no makeup” makeup, and a sleeveless dress with large red poppies on it against a white background. It’s tight to her body and comes just past her knees. I see her narrow waist; her thin arms, toned enough from the gym that she doesn’t mind wearing a dress with no sleeves. She’s wearing black sandals, flats. She’s holding her husband’s hand.
He’s wearing a light blue cotton shirt with a white Hanes undershirt peeking out the top where his first button is open. No tie. A suit jacket, light brown.. He’s taller than she is, hair the same color as hers but thicker, and his head is tilted down towards her. They’re walking through the parking lot to the clinic. They drove here, in a large car that’s fairly new but they bought it used. They got it back when they thought they’d have two or three kids by now; it had good mileage for a big car and room enough for the car seat and later, some kids’ bikes.
At least one of them grew up going to church: the protestant kind. On the weekends they socialize with other married couples, most of whom have kids. At first these couples asked them excitedly how it was going, getting ready to start a family, but now they don’t. They don’t want to make her upset. The mothers in law take turns, calling and checking in: how’s it going? The husband doesn’t know what to do with his anger. He’s supposed to provide. He’s supposed to do the right thing. He doesn’t know how to make this better.
This is their third appointment. They’re trying to be hopeful but not too hopeful.The door to the office building is dark smoked glass. When you pull the handle the suction from the temperature difference makes it so you have to tug it a bit. The elevator doors are right there, just a few steps away.
I do this kind of experiment with myself when I’m trying to catch the ways I’ve internalized the dominant culture’s script. The story of who gets to be seen. It takes a beat for me to ask myself if my life experience and those of others is included. To see how the story changes if we all show up. When the Alabama decision was announced, it took a minute for me to remember all the lesbians who depend on reproductive technology to get pregnant, and to imagine what would happen to them, now that IVF was halted in Alabama.
There’s a joke you’ll hear from lesbians who are pregnant: “Oh, we had an accident!” because it takes so much planning, so much money, and there are so many other considerations for two women who choose to have a child together. There are things that are very particular to the lesbian experience that don’t get explored by the mainstream media. We get folded into the “queer” community; we get a letter in the alphabet soup; most of the time we fly under the radar.
A lot of the time I enjoy this privacy. But I bristle at the ways our needs, our experiences are flattened or erased.
I notice I feel like I’m betraying the larger community if I call out the lesbian experience as a distinct thing. Part of that is internalized sexism. Most of it is about the fact that there are folks who are more overtly targeted for violence and hate; about the nineteenth-century history of lesbian sexuality being seen as less threatening to patriarchy than gay male or trans or nonbinary sexuality, which has engendered murder and physical assault and a different kind of pathologizing language that continues in the present and is only being amplified today.
I also like being part of a larger power bloc. I love all of us together in all our differences; a huge group of people who are less a subculture you see on TV and more a cross section of the entire population: a demographic that includes every other demographic except straight people in its ranks.
When I read the mainstream coverage of the Alabama decision I was struck by our erasure—all of us who aren’t straight—and how the lack of coverage was skewing the way the case was being understood. But I was also struck by how limiting the representation was of even straight people who are affected by the case. When I did a simple Google search: “Alabama Supreme Court decision IVF,” what came back was article after article profiling white, cisgendered, married couples, most of whom explicitly identified as Christians. Articles that represented back to me the people who came to my mind when I did that thought experiment.
The whiteness of the people profiled was only one element of the whiteness on display in the hits that came up in that Google search. Google gave me a national political analysis written by reporters who are almost exclusively white–they’ve got high-end jobs with big name media orgs which means there’s a greater statistical probability they’ll be white. Most of the people being interviewed as experts are white, the Alabama Supreme Court Justices Mitchell and Parker, who wrote the opinion, are white, the political power structure that is being affected by and using the decision for political ends is largely white. The people whose photographs are published in articles about the case are white. They appear straight, cisgendered and, many of these articles told me, are also married and Christian. The implied argument seemed to be: if these normal and good people are being affected by the decision, well then, it must be really radical.
Where was everybody else?
I realized that part of the reason the mainstream media’s response was so uniform wasn’t just about patriarchy and white supremacy. It was also a result of the fact that the languages that different communities, organizations, and political segments of the population use are now so different, so separated from each other, that merely discovering what terms like “family” or “pregnancy” or “choice” or “reproductive justice” or “sanctity of life” or “pregnant person” mean to different elements of our population is dizzying. You need a lexicon to speak to all these different perspectives before you can even begin to understand what this decision is actually fighting for, and why. You need to slow down. Reporters, writing under fast deadlines, aren’t doing the thought experiment I just asked you to try. They’re not asking who’s left out and what we all could see, if we could hear from many voices.
I started to research this case as if I had a number of different political and personal identities. I then juxtaposed those languages and world views and moral frameworks, to try to “see” the decision. It’s like gluing back together pieces of a fractured mirror: what you see is both a distortion and a representation of reality.
Part of the reason this post is late is because as I searched and read, I became untethered from one singular view; I became emotionally and intellectually unmoored. The more I learned about the far right views of the Alabama Supreme Court Justices, for example, the more afraid I became about writing about LGBTQ families and what this decision might mean for our communities. The more I saw how much the language of “choice” framed the discussion of abortion in relation to the case, the more I wanted to write about the Alabama decision from the perspective of reproductive justice. The more I learned about the way this case is linked to the Seven Mountain Mandate, which has been explicitly advocated for by Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, the more I understood the language of the decision to be about the erasure not just of gay people’s experiences and needs, but of everyone in Alabama who isn’t asking its Supreme Court to enshrine Christian theology into state law, so that Alabama becomes in some ways a miniature Christian nation inside the U.S., creating legal precedents to allow other conservative states to follow suit.
It’s become such a “duh” to say that there’s polarization in the U.S. that I wonder if people have thought about the actual literal implications of trying to represent difference in reporting and political analysis in such a way that doesn’t flatten the complexity of our collective experiences. As newspapers, magazines, and other news sources collapse and close, the pressure increases on the remaining folks to pick the right thing to cover, or to try to cover as much as possible. When a big national media organization decides its audience is largely white, middle class, middle aged, educated and straight, and then writes as if they’re speaking “the truth” to “everyone,” we as readers and viewers don’t get to know how they made the decisions about what to cover, and more importantly, what to excise from that coverage, to make the story clean, tidy, and clear. We may know that everything we consume is perspectival. But we don’t know how much the news has been already digested before it’s represented to us as if it’s “breaking.”
To close this out, I’m going to share with you some of the fears that came up for me when I read the decision, and how the narrowness of the media’s framing of this case has excluded from conversation the needs of many vulnerable, marginalized populations in the U.S.. The caveat, of course, is that I’m not a lawyer. I’m reading as a layperson, trying to make sense of what is at once a simple and complex text.
I’m not going to re-summarize the case: it’s in the previous post. One thing I found fascinating when I read the decision was that Justice Mitchell didn’t actually devote any time to defending the idea that embryos should be considered “children.” To Mitchell, the fact that embryos are children is settled law:
All parties to these cases, like all members of this Court, agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends at death. The parties further agree that an unborn child usually qualifies as a "human life," "human being," or "person," as those words are used in ordinary conversation and in the text of Alabama's wrongful-death statutes. That is true, as everyone acknowledges, throughout all stages of an unborn child's development, regardless of viability.
The only question to answer, then, was whether children who were located outside a “biological uterus” at their time of death had the same rights as children who are inside a uterus. Mitchell is concerned that these “extrauterine” children might be denied rights because they’re not in a uterus. So that’s what he is affirming: yes, extrauterine children have rights, and thus yes, the parties to the case can sue for wrongful death of a child.
Then Chief Justice Parker chimes in. It’s Parker who Media Matters has noted went on QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow’s show to discuss his work to fulfill the Seven Mountain Mandate:
Enlow is a pro-Trump “prophet” and leading proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a “quasi-biblical blueprint for theocracy” that asserts that Christians must impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in U.S. life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.
Parker says Mitchell’s already nailed the decision by rooting it in Dobbs and the Alabama constitutional amendment. What he wants to do is an explainer on the amendment’s language: specifically, the use of the word “sanctity” to characterize “life.”
Here’s his warmup:
A good judge follows the Constitution instead of policy, except when the Constitution itself commands the judge to follow a certain policy. In these cases, that means upholding the sanctity of unborn life, including unborn life that exists outside the womb.
Parker takes pains to clarify that the term “sanctity of life” is intentional. Whereas secular usage might demand the term “inviolable right”—the right to not take a life is “inviolable,” and thus a crime is committed if a life is taken—the people of Alabama, he writes, selected the term “sanctity” to refer to the fact that it is a crime to kill a man because only man is made in the image of God.
But the principle itself -- that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification -- has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man "in the image of God." Genesis 1:27 (King James). . . . Finally, the doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment: "You shall not murder." Exodus 20:13 (NKJV 1982).
It’s not much of a logic hop from a constitutional amendment that sees life from inside a Christian theological framework to seeing the Law as abetting and upholding this Christian ethic, to then seeing the Supreme Court as charged by the People of Alabama to uphold this theological worldview through its laws.
In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Section 36.06 recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life -- that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.
And there you have it. The People of Alabama have a theological view of life.
This is where I hope you’ll indulge me a bit in my concerns. I’m not going to spend much time here explaining why I imagine Justices Mitchell and Parker aren’t looking to promote the flourishing of secular, let alone non-heteronormative, non-binary and anti patriarchal ways of being. I don’t know whether they foresaw the immediate outcome of their decision: that is, the shuttering of some reproductive tech clinics, based on liability concerns. But that’s what happened.
So when I thought about the denial of IVF to lesbians and members of the LGBTQ community as a side-effect of this decision; when I read the explicitly theological imperative of this decision; it occurred to me that controlling access to IVF is a great way to implement a new kind of eugenics: a way of preventing certain children, and by extension certain families with children, from existing in the first place.
In doing so, they thus also prevent children from being raised within an ideological logic the Justices find abhorrent; they prevent a larger group of people advocating for curriculums in schools that represent their and their childrens’ experiences, including LGBTQ history and sex ed; and perhaps most importantly, they prevent children being raised in such a way that as they reach adulthood, their expression of gender, desire and sexuality might occur outside a binary, heteronormative Christian framework of morality and Biblical law.
If the mandate of the Justices is to uphold the desires of the People by expressing in state law its foundation in theological law—specifically, a Pentecostal version of Christian law—what is to prevent them from deciding they must monitor, regulate, and control access to reproduction itself: not only by outlawing abortion, but also by making the state responsible for ensuring that the right kind of people reproduce. If you’re thinking I’m sounding a little extreme here, think about the enforced sterilization of American Indians, of people with disabilities, of African Americans; of medical racism and Tuskegee; of the “born criminal,” identified and incarcerated before he even committed a crime; think of the logics of genocide, a kind of reverse-eugenics, snuffing people out.
I’m going to stop here, because this is already long, and because I’ll have more to say in Part III.
Stay safe out there this week—
xo
Rebecca
Update: 3/21/24
The arguments I made in this piece have been further substantiated by reporting today announcing that members of the Republican Freedom Caucus sent a letter to President Biden opposing a policy designed to expand access to IVF to unmarried veterans and veterans in same-sex relationships.