American Conservatives have been backed into a “gotcha” with the Alabama Supreme court ruling that destroying a frozen embryo (left over from IVF) is murder. Well, “wrongful death”.

A Republican politician, Senator Tuberville, was consequently interviewed where he said he supported the ruling because we need more children, which of course makes no sense. Trump and other leading Republicans then said they support IVF.

So which is it?

Conservatives have got themselves in a pickle because they are trying to find a binary answer to a complicated question. They have tried saying that life begins at conception, but now that does or doesn’t apply to frozen embryos, like a Schrödinger’s Cat policy. In different states, and according to different politicians, abortion is okay as long as it is early enough – yet that number of weeks varies greatly, meanwhile life begins at conception.

Tuberville actually got it right, if he only he (and other such politicians) had the decency to tell us that this was all about religion, and they want their followers to have as many children as possible, and so the binary solution is to never kill an embryo. Which would be admitting that, just like the Catholic Church forbidding abortion (and contraception), this is just a numbers game and not about the souls of unborn children at all.

Choices in fertility and pregnancy are too complicated for binary laws. The only fair and decent solution is individual choice, not enforcing a religious numbers game onto non-believers and non-adherents.