“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin said Friday during a discussion on the Alabama Supreme Court’s “wrongful death” decision that she believes there should be a “consequence” for destroyed embryos.
The co-hosts continued their debate on the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that the destruction of embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) could be prosecuted as a wrongful death. Hostin, whose two children were conceived through IVF, recently said all of the embryos conceived through this procedure were children and thus she was opposed to destroying any of them.
She began by arguing she opposes abortion while believing the government should not ban procedures pertaining to women’s health.
“Oh, I do not support abortion!” Hostin said when her fellow co-host asked why she supported abortion. “I have said this over and over again. I believe the government shouldn’t be involved in women’s reproductive health, but I believe that abortion is wrong, and I also believe, not only through my faith but through my experience of having two embryos implanted in my body — and I have a 21-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter — that my life would not be the same without them. So if someone destroyed my embryos, I would feel like someone destroyed my children.”
“It’s problematic, yes. But it’s not a minor. It’s not a child,” co-host Sara Haines said.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin disputed that Republicans were against IVF. She blamed the Supreme Court ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for causing confusion amongst legal scholars and government officials on reproductive health. (RELATED: Sunny Hostin Says Women Voting Republican Is Like ‘Roaches Voting For Raid.’ Co-Host Goes Off)
“It is something that I think you are starting to see Republicans come out and say, ‘This is wrong. We want to be pro-family. More people need to have optionality to have kids,'” Griffin said. “My personal conviction is probably, I haven’t done this yet, that an embryo would be a life. That does not mean that I believe a law needs to be written and someone needs to be penalized accordingly. It is not manslaughter if an embryo falls off of something or if someone knocks it over.”
Hostin pushed back against co-host Ana Navarro, who claimed embryos are not human because they are not viable and do not have a heartbeat. She argued the Alabama Supreme Court should have ruled the destruction of the embryos as negligence rather than define embryos as human beings.
“You can freeze sperm. You can freeze eggs. You can freeze embryos. You can’t freeze babies and bring them back to life!” Navarro said.
“Yeah, but the one thing that I think we’re all losing sight of, this law, this case came about because a person at an IVF clinic accidentally destroyed someone’s embryos,” Hostin said. “That means that couple’s dreams, you [Navarro] just said people that do this do this because they want to have children. Manny and I, we lost our life savings trying to have children, and if someone went in and destroyed my two embryos, they would’ve destroyed everything that I have been working for for five years, and there has to be a consequence for that.”
Hostin argued against the rest of the co-hosts Tuesday, who said that embryos were not children. Hostin said that Catholicism defines fertilization as the beginning of human life and that this claim was backed by science.
Ninety-six percent of biologists from 1,058 academic institutions around the world affirmed that life begins at fertilization, according to the National Library of Medicine. The American College of Pediatricians refers to fertilization as the moment a human “emerges as a whole, genetically distinct, individuated zygotic living human organism.”