Hans Christian Anderson’s fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes concludes with a child stating the obvious – “he is naked.” That is what the Alabama State Supreme Court did on Friday, February 16, 2024, when it ruled that frozen embryos obtained by means of IVF are children and not property. A person is a person, no matter how small, conceived, or wanted.

For years, people have turned a blind eye to the IVF industry. Parents, grandparents, and friends praise the blessing of children born through IVF and never speak of those children who were destroyed in this quest for a child. Countless human lives, conceived in a Petri dish, nurtured to grow, and then sorted to select those to implant, freeze, or destroy.

The IVF industry, much like the abortion industry, thrives on obfuscation. Barbara Collura, CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, said, “This ruling is stating that a fertilized egg, which is a clump of cells, is now a person. It really puts into question the practice of IVF.”

With dehumanizing terminology like “fertilized egg” and “a clump of cells,” Collura and those of her ilk attempt to obscure the truth. Fertilization, whether within a woman’s fallopian tube or in a Petri dish, creates a human life.

That “fertilized egg” and those “clumps of cells” are not pieces of a plant or animal. They are growing, and left to grow, will progress through the stages of life as we have. They do not become something else. Destroyed as a microscopic “clump of cells,” aborted as a larger “clump of cells,” or killed at birth as an even larger “clump of cells” always means the same thing – there was human life, and now it is dead.

The psalmist talks of life at its earliest moments:

Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. (Psalm 51:5)

The Scriptures also talk about how people will portray evil as a good thing and good as an evil thing (Isaiah 5:20).

We commend the Alabama Supreme Court for declaring the truth so clear a child could see it. To defend the current practices of abortion and IVF demands that we admit we want to defy God and kill some lives and then figure out how to explain that to life’s Creator.