After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen human embryos should be treated with care, corporate media spent months lambasting in vitro fertilization critics and advocating for killing the embryos at adults’ leisure. Outlets’ tunes, however, changed this week when stories began to circulate about Israel allegedly destroying the “majority of Gaza’s frozen embryos.”
Reuters published an article, video segment, and podcast last week lamenting a December airstrike it says destroyed an estimated 4,000 frozen embryos in Gaza City’s Al Basma IVF facility, as well as stored sperm and eggs. The Telegraph echoed the story and its angle.
“The embryos were the last hope for hundreds of Palestinian couples facing infertility,” the caption on the video post states. A line in the article echoes the sentiment.
The publication attributed the tragedy to Israel, which it claimed launched a shell in December that compromised the temperature requirements of five of the facility’s cryopreservation tanks, destroying thousands of frozen embryos, sperm, and eggs.
Reuters noted that “Israel denies intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and has accused Hamas fighters of operating from medical facilities, which Hamas denies.” But it also repeatedly painted Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 rape and murder spree, the deadliest attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, as an “all-out assault” on the terrorist-supporting territory.
The Guardian took it further in its “The Week in Patriarchy.” Columnist Arwa Mahdawi not only blamed Israel for the bomb “possibly provided by the US,” but snarkily suggested the “genocidal” country’s intelligence would claim that “at least 25% of those embryos were going to grow up to be terrorists.” She claimed pro-lifers are “weirdly silent” about this loss of life, and that Western leaders didn’t amplify the embryo destruction story because they “simply do not think of Palestinians as human.”
More shocking than corporate media’s ongoing amplification of Hamas propaganda in its coverage of the Middle East war is their sudden concern about the sanctity of preborn human life. Until now, corporate media have ferociously defended the destruction of millions of embryos, some of which were likely viable. That’s what’s required to keep IVF operative. Nor have corporate media expressed concern about the fate of the 1 million little lives likely doomed to indefinite frozen storage, which ultimately means their deaths.
When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that families who lost embryos after the breach of an allegedly secure fertility facility could sue under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, press outlets at home and abroad complained that test tube babies weren’t worth legal protection. Many publications, including Reuters, claimed the ruling, which reaffirmed the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children,” was the Christian, pro-life community’s attempt to advance its quest to acquire personhood rights for unborn babies.
Their fake news fearmongering led to the temporary shutdown of several of the Cotton State’s fertility facilities, a rushed bill that offered immunity to big fertility despite episodes of negligence, and a national fight over Democrats’ radical assisted reproductive technology bill.
Corporate media aren’t concerned with protecting human embryos. In fact, they work overtime to amplify the businesses and politicians who want to shield ethically questionable practices like unreliable genetic testing that pits frozen siblings against each other, premature disposal, manufacturing motherless and fatherless children, “gene editing,” sidelining women in reproduction, and surrogacy. They also cheerlead abortion, the number one killer in the world, every chance they get.
The loss of any unborn, innocent life is a tragedy. But pretending to care about the sanctity of life in its most vulnerable form simply because it was lost in Gaza is the height of hypocrisy.