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“What are you doing, Alabama?� Neil Young sang. The question must be asked again and at the top of the nation’s lungs, as abortion fundamentalism has just resulted in a ruling by the state’s top court that, in the name of protecting life, shows patent disrespect for families and the children they seek to bring into the world.

The Alabama Supreme Court’s decision, rooted in the state constitution and state laws, finds that embryos created for the purpose of in vitro fertilization — and kept in freezers so that they can then be implanted or not — must be treated as human beings. To quote the majority decision: “the ordinary meaning of ‘child’ includes children who have not yet been born,� and children are children “regardless of that child’s viability or stage of development.�