The senator did not seem to understand that the ruling on embryos would lead to fewer children being born, not more.
One of the most maddening aspects of the Republican plot to control women’s bodies is that, in many cases, these people couldn’t pass a ninth-grade biology class (and oftentimes, it’s more like fifth grade). Yes, from claiming an ectopic pregnancy can be reimplanted to suggesting that the anatomy of a human female is no different from that of, say, a dog or a horse, the conservatives trying to take away reproductive rights and bodily autonomy often have no idea what the f–k they’re talking about. And Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville is obviously no exception.
When asked on Thursday if he had “a reaction to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on the fact that embryos are children,” Tuberville said, “Yeah, I was all for it. We need to have more kids, we need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do.” Informed that IVF is a method by which people are able to have children when they otherwise could not, and that some clinics have paused the procedure as a result of the ruling, Tuberville responded, “Well, that’s for another conversation. We need more kids. We need people to have the opportunity to have kids.”
After another reporter asked what he had to “say to the women right now in Alabama who no longer have access to IVF, and will not, as a result of this ruling,” a clearly stumped Tuberville answered: “That’s a hard one. It really is. Really hard. ’Cause, again, you want people to have that opportunity…. We need more kids.”
While I understand where the sentiment is coming from, the country has a really racist history with tying voting to tests. Literacy tests were illegally used to stop black people from voting in the wake of the civil war, because black people were (at the time) fresh out of slavery and largely illiterate.
Black people had recently been given the right to vote, but states went “ah but you need to either own land (which was only white people, because the freshly freed slaves couldn’t afford to buy land,) or pass a written test (which was designed so literate white people could pass, but illiterate black people couldn’t) first.” It was a blatant way to disenfranchise the new black voters and prevent them from having a voice and representation in congress.