Science and religion aren’t inherently at odds, but claiming their union is a bed of roses overlooks the thorns. Introduce politics into this already peculiar partnership, and we find ourselves with a whole bush of nettles, guaranteeing a prickly experience for everyone involved.

A recent event that occurred in the U.S. State of Alabama has much to tell us about how religion, science, and politics get along in the Land of Conservative Ideology.

A ruling (LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine) by the Alabama Supreme Court turned the morals and politics of “personhood” on its head. The Court decided (8 to 1) that human embryos produced through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are “extrauterine children“with the same legal protections as any other children.

This surprise decision put a knee-jerk freeze on in vitro fertilization (IVF) services in Alabama. Women who were in the middle of IVF were told their treatments had to stop. Healthcare providers offering IVF were afraid of future legislation that would criminalize what had been their routine medical protocols for promoting fertility.

Considering that anti-abortion advocates across the nation have become militant in their belief that all abortion services should be banned in the United States, Americans who support the “personal choice” of abortion services braced themselves for a new onslaught of anti-abortion legislation.

The Alabama Court decision provoked a perfect storm when religion, science, politics, and the power of the voting public collided on a national stage. The gyrations caused by turning up the heat on frozen embryos is a case study in conservative head-scratching because IVF is essentially pro-life. Why would conservative Christians want to shut this down?

In its doctrinaire zeal, the Court shuttered IVF, thereby creating a paradox that is making conservative Republicans squirm: the pro-life party is negating a popular pro-life treatment.

What is IVF, and Why Does the Court Care About Lab-Grown Embryos?

From the Court’s perspective, frozen embryos (which you can’t see without a high-powered microscope) are “legal children” who are protected against harm by Alabama law. But what (or who) are these embryos, and how did they come to exist?

Here is a brief summary of the IVF protocol:

• IVF is an increasingly popular treatment for couples who are having trouble conceiving a child.
• The doctor prescribes a fertility drug that stimulates a woman’s ovaries to produce multiple eggs instead of one.
• These eggs are retrieved through a minor surgical procedure and put into a culture medium that supports their growth. The eggs are then fertilized with sperm (from a partner or donor) in the laboratory.
• About 3 to 5 days after fertilization, the egg, now an embryo, is selected for implantation into the woman. The other fertilized embryos are frozen (cryopreserved) for future use if another cycle of implantation is needed.
• Around Day 3 post-fertilization, the size of an embryo is 6 to 10 cells. Eight-cell embryos are ideal for implantation.
• Sometime between Day 3 and Day 5, one or two embryos are implanted into the woman, where they either thrive or fail to survive.
• If another implantation cycle is needed, a frozen embryo is retrieved from the cryo-fridge and implanted.
• When the surplus cryo-embryos are no longer needed, at the couple’s discretion, the embryos are discarded according to medical protocols or donated to other couples who are being treated for infertility or buried.

The Alabama Court ruled that these surplus eight-cell stone-frozen embryos are children and cannot be destroyed if they are not needed for future treatments. As already noted, the Court took this position even though all of the embryos are cultured outside of the woman’s body in a laboratory environment.

Was This a Constitutional Ruling Based On Law or Religion?

Pundits are now arguing whether this state Supreme Court, operating under a national Constitution that separates church and state, rendered a faith-based ruling.

In reading the decision, I found that “God” was referenced 32 times, whereas “science” got four references. Every reference to science was made in a disparaging context.

The Court’s Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote about how “God made every person in his own image” and that “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.”

Regarding Chief Justice Parker’s stance that embryos are crafted in the Divine Likeness, let’s not forget we’re discussing entities that boast a grand total of eight cells. It strikes me as peculiar how the court’s “divine image” rationale conveniently glosses over the biblical detail where God fashioned Adam out of ground dust and Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.

Neither Adam nor Eve were ever eight-cell embryos!

Medical science, not religion, developed IVF technology. While any technology can have its downsides, this medical innovation has been only positive in helping many couples with infertility to have children. By one reliable estimate, at least 12 million babies have been given life since the first IVF birth in 1978.

The Faith, Science, and Politics of Personhood

Within the United States, the fight for abortion rights has led to debates about “fetal personhood” — when does a developing human become a citizen with legal rights intra-utero or ex-utero?

Considering that this is a moral issue for Christians, I wonder why this debate did not occur four hundred years earlier during America’s founding as a “Christian nation?”

Four hundred years ago, there was no consideration of personhood when people were captured in Africa to be forever enslaved in America. And what about personhood when indigenous natives were slaughtered on the American plains? Were American Indians and their children not persons with rights?

But today, righteous Christians wring their moral hands about the personhood of two-cell fetuses and eight-cell embryos.

It is beyond the scope of this brief essay to discuss the complex issues surrounding the concept of fetal personhood. However, a few points in today’s debate are worth noting.

Binary Thinking and the Fallacy of Personhood

The question of when human tissue, starting with a one-cell zygote, becomes a “person” is an example of simplistic binary thinking. For fundamentalist Christians, personhood is a yes/no choice: you are either a person or you are not. They want to codify this binary view by passing legislation that gives a freshly fertilized fetus the legal rights of personhood, which means fetuses are citizens like all other Americans.

The problem with this conservative thinking is that personhood is not a binary state. As children or adults, each of us lives in our biological, social, economic, physical, and cultural contexts. We will never exist context-free. However, during the course of our lives, these contexts will vary and have profound implications for our self-identity.

In a recent journal article, bioethicist Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby identified several contexts in which any one of us might someday find ourselves — (or hopefully not):

• A vegetative or minimally conscious state
• Advanced dementia
• Your brain is connected to a computer that reads your nerve impulses and displays your thoughts on a screen (people with ALS use this brain-computer interface to communicate with others).
• At some future time, the contents of your brain might be uploaded to an AI environment, where it can communicate with other uploaded brains.
• Your cells could be off-loaded to an aminal (pig or sheep), where your replacement organs will grow (known as the human-animal chimera).
• You may give permission to scientists to take stem cells from your fetus for the purpose of growing “organoids” (human cells mixed with animal cells) capable of correcting a neurological disease that has been diagnosed in your fetus.

The conservative Christians’ black-and-white approach of binary thinking (yes/no) tries to ascertain if a mix of biological cells, possibly including human and non-human elements, aligns with the Biblical concept of a person being “created in God’s image.” Such rigid thinking falls short of addressing the complexities of defining personhood, especially when faced with unconventional contextual scenarios that are likely to become more common in our technological future.

Another contextual state is that the fertility of both women and men can be negatively impacted by cancer and its treatments. IVF allows couples facing an infertile future to mitigate the impact of the disease by creating a supply of embryos in advance, thereby improving their options for having a family.

Considering these caveats, this is the advice given by bioethicist Blumenthal-Barby:

I suggest that we…stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition, respect) to help us answer them. It is time…to end talk about personhood.

Indeed, doctrinaire Christians should heed this advice.

When Politics Meets Religion: An Eternal Paradox

The foundational beliefs of the world’s numerous religions are not inherently in conflict with scientific progress. The friction between religion and science arises when strict (originalist) interpretations of religious texts confront the scientific understanding of the present, setting the historical perspectives of faith against the empirical evidence of modern science.

The recent rulings about the legal rights of embryos, as established by LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, are based on a doctrinaire interpretation of the Christian Bible. Conflicts like these are age-old and harken back to the home imprisonment of Italian astronomer Galileo in 1633 and the public castigation of Charles Darwin in 1859 because his theory of evolution contradicted the Christian myth of creationism.

While conflicts between doctrinaire religion and progressive science are old stories, what is new in today’s society is polarized politicians finding themselves wedged between these two worldviews.

And herein lies the paradox of the embryo-as-person problem.

From a medical perspective, the paradox is that the IVF treatment creates a surplus of embryos, not all of which will be used for implantation. If you don’t allow the option of eight-cell embryos becoming casualties of a medical protocol, then you don’t allow IVF.

From a political perspective, conservative Republicans find themselves caught in a paradox of their own making. Because IVF is extremely popular among both Republicans and Democrats, legislation that supports the personhood of embryos will result in them losing the support (which translates into “votes”) among conservative Republicans.

And yet, Republican legislators in 14 states have passed or want to pass legislation that establishes “fetal personhood” — the legal rights of a fetus upon conception. If successful, such legislation would put an end to IVF in each of those states.

What paradox is created by codifying fetal personhood? Let’s define a paradox.

A paradox is an instruction that cannot be obeyed without being disobeyed. In the subway sign posted above, the message “Do Not Look At This Sign” can only be obeyed by disobeying the command. Republican politicians now find themselves in a paradox professing this faux-truism: every human fetus has the legal rights of personhood — with a few exceptions, such as frozen embryos.

If this sounds like strained logic, it is. And yet, this is exactly what the Republican Alabama legislature did in response to the paradox of recognizing personhood-with-a-few-exceptions. They passed a law allowing IVF to continue, followed up by a statement from Alabama Attorney General’s office said it had “no intention” of prosecuting IVF providers or families who use their services.

We have seen that a strict interpretation of religious doctrine can conflict with science. What we are also seeing is that religious values, which conservative Republican politicians strenuously defend, can be bent by the power of the popular vote.

From these events of the past few weeks, a new truth emerges: when caught between values of righteous faith and values of popular disregard for those righteous values, politicians will choose the power of the people’s vote. Why? Because if these politicians firmly stood up for their righteous values in opposition to voter preference, they would have to give up the keys to their offices of power, influence, and wealth.

When asked to stand on principle or keep the keys to their better future, it is the rare politicians who will stand by their principles. Most will bend to the power of the vote.

Final thoughts on When Religion Collides With Politics, Frozen Embryos Feel the Heat

Isn’t this the definition of hypocrisy?