Former Vice President Mike Pence said the Alabama Supreme Court made the “morally right” decision finding frozen embryos are children while admonishing the state Legislature’s law shielding in vitro fertilization clinics as “ill-considered.”

“The controversy over the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision on in vitro fertilization obscured the ruling’s importance and spurred the Alabama Legislature to enact an ill-considered law that will harm families seeking treatment for infertility,” Pence said in an op-ed published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal and co-written by John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life.

Pence, a former 2024 GOP presidential nominee who founded the policy organization Advancing American Freedom, said the key takeaway of the ruling was that the Alabama Supreme Court gave the IVF couples involved in the case recourse when a wandering patient destroyed the frozen embryos , not that the embryos are children.

“The Alabama case exposed a culture of IVF industry negligence,” Pence and Mize wrote. “A lack of safeguards, combined with reckless disregard for the facility’s clients, resulted in the destruction of human embryos. The Alabama Supreme Court held that parents and embryonic children alike are owed basic legal protection from such negligence.”

Pence and Mize, who worked at biobanking IVF storage facilities in Indiana, said the events that led to the frozen embryos being destroyed at a Mobile clinic should have never been able to occur.

“The couples who … sued showed that there were massive gaps in oversight. A random patient should never have come close to the liquid-nitrogen tank containing frozen human embryos, let alone opened a completely unsecured tank and mishandled the embryos of strangers, destroying them in the process,” Pence and Mize wrote.

Meanwhile, Azenta Life Sciences, an IVF facility where Mize worked, according to the op-ed, has “several layers of protocols kept the biorepository space secure, with even further layers of security before opening a freezer or liquid-nitrogen tank.”

“The situation at the facility in the Alabama case couldn’t have been more different,” the op-ed stated.

“No couple, whatever their views about when legal personhood begins, would be happy to find their biological embryos treated with utter carelessness. Those experiencing infertility deserve the protection of the law as consumers and as parents,” Pence and Mize went on to say. “Embryonic children in an IVF facility deserve the same sort of wrongful-death protection that children in the womb enjoy from fetal homicide laws. The string of negligence and failures at the Alabama facility shows no such sign of respect for human life—or for the rights of those seeking to become parents.”

Amid the political backlash created by the ruling, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill giving legal protection to in vitro fertilization clinics after the ruling caused some clinics to pause services.

Several high-profile Republicans, including President Donald Trump, called on Alabama to protect IVF.

But Pence and Mize urged other states not to follow Alabama by making IVF clinics accountable if embryos are destroyed.

“Our organizations stand by the principle of basic protections for IVF parents and children. We call on elected officials to regulate IVF facilities by applying the basic standards of care for embryos that Alabama’s Supreme Court rightly called for,” they said.

“That doesn’t require a state to recognize legally that an embryo is a person, as Alabama does. It does require that lawmakers act with greater clarity and confidence than they did in Montgomery in the wake of the court decision,” Pence and Mize continued. “In the rush to preserve access to fertility services, the state Legislature created blanket immunity for IVF clinics—encompassing even criminal acts like the intentional destruction of embryos against the wishes of parents.”