The head of the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention said Monday that the Alabama Supreme Court got it right on in vitro fertilization when it said embryos should be protected as human life.

The Rev. Albert Mohler, a Samford University graduate and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., called on Southern Baptists to stand against discarding human embryos in IVF treatments.

“The catalyst for this was the decision handed down by the Alabama Supreme Court that stated that life in the state of Alabama had to begin at fertilization,” Mohler said.

“We mean when the sperm and the egg meet and God says, ‘Let there be life.’”

Mohler criticized those who took exception to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, especially Christians who defend the destruction of embryos in IVF treatments.

“Even in the state of Alabama there was lack of political will to stand behind what was the correct ruling and judgment by the Alabama Supreme Court,” Mohler said.

“And now we have evidence nationwide of all kinds of slippage on this issue. Quite frankly, we know that in our churches we have compromised on this issue. But if we believe in the sanctity and dignity of every single human life from the moment of fertilization, we need to recognize any intervention with an embryo, any commodification of the embryo, any turn of the embryo into a consumer product, is an assault upon human dignity.”

“And we need to understand that IVF as it is practiced is not only the alienation of reproduction from the conjugal setting, it is also an engineered system whereby multiple embryos are created only for most of them assuredly to be destroyed,” Mohler said.

“That is as immoral as anything we could imagine if you state the proposition clearly, but a lot of evangelicals don’t want to state the proposition clearly.”

Even though it’s used to help couples struggling with infertility, IVF as practiced is immoral, Mohler said.

“We have grave concern, and this is personal experience, with couples who are experiencing pain of infertility,” Mohler said.

“They’re longing for children. The Bible validates that so kindly, sweetly and honestly. But the answer to that cannot be the extension of an assault upon human dignity, which quite frankly plays into every other agenda destructive of the family we can imagine.”

Mohler said the acceptance of IVF as it is practiced is exploited by the LGBTQ community.

“Much of the market for this is actually not even found among heterosexual married couples, but the redefinition of marriage, the redefinition of gender, the redefinition of all things in light of the LGBTQ movement, also means that there are people who can now have children alienated from that natural process and from the union of a husband and a wife in the institution of marriage and the larger institution of a natural family,” Mohler said.

He called on the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Indianapolis, topass a resolution on IVF.

“I want to urge you to vote for that resolution on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention and honestly, I want to urge you to be consistent in your pro-life advocacy in your local church, in your community, with your legislators and political leaders and frankly with the medical community, where honestly there’s a lot of slippage on this among doctors who think themselves to be faithful Christians,” Mohler said.

“Some of them have probably not thought through the issue. Sadly, some of them have.”

Mohler was speaking Monday in Indianapolis to a meeting of The Danbury Institute, a pro-life and religious liberties organization founded by Baptists, inspired by the Danbury Letter sent by the Danbury Baptist Association to President Thomas Jefferson calling for a guarantee of religious liberty.

Jefferson replied to the letter in 1802 and promised a “wall of separation” between church and state.

Former President Donald Trump was expected to deliver a virtual speech to the Danbury group later on Monday.

Nationally the number of Southern Baptists has dipped below 13 million, the denomination’s lowest number since the 1970s, but it remains the nation’s, and Alabama’s, largest Protestant denomination. The SBC has 753,653 members in 3,164 Southern Baptist-affiliated churches in Alabama.