This month’s Alabama court ruling that IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) embryos are “children” covered by wrongful death lawsuits has Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the fallout. According to the party’s own polling, 85% of Americans support increasing access to fertility-related procedures and services. The high level of support remains consistent among the GOP’s most dedicated voters: 78% of abortion opponents and 83% of evangelicals support IVF specifically.
Certainly, you have the right to not be prohibited from having children, but you aren’t entitled to assistance for it. I don’t think IVF should be prohibited either, but it isn’t a right in the same sense as having a right to an attorney or the right to vote; it isn’t even in the same category as the others. I can understand being entitled to food, housing, healthcare, and even the internet!, but entitlements to IVF make no sense.
All rights require assistance to a lesser or greater extent to have any practical consequence. For example, if I were to make it illegal to share any information about where polling places are and then move them somewhere one would be unlikely to find by chance, it is technically still possible to vote if you manage to find the place to do it, but if I were to then argue that what I was doing wasn’t violating your right to vote because you aren’t entitled to assistance in exercising that right, you’d rightly call bullshit on that argument.
Further, “rights” do not exclusively refer to things spelled out as part of the constitution like the right to vote. There isn’t any explicit right to walk in the constitution that I can think of, but were I to make canes and crutches illegal, it’d absolutely be fair to say that i was taking away disabled people’s right to walk.