Nikki Haley: I didn’t say I agreed with Alabama embryo ruling

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley says she did not endorse the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said frozen embryos and fertilized eggs should be treated as children under state law.

Instead, Haley told the hosts of CNN’s “King Charles,” that she agreed an embryo is an unborn baby.

“Well, first of all, I didn’t, I mean, this is again, I didn’t say that I agreed with the Alabama ruling. What the question that I was asked is, do I believe an embryo is a baby?” Haley said Wednesday evening. “I do think that if you look in the definition, an embryo is considered an unborn baby. And so, yes, I believe from my stance that that is.”

“The difference is — and this is what I say about abortion as well — we need to treat these issues with the utmost respect,” she added.

Her remarks come after she faced pushback to an earlier interview with NBC News, in which she said, “I mean, embryos, to me, are babies.”

The Alabama Supreme Court decision, handed down earlier this week, ruled that frozen embryos should be subject to legislation dealing with the wrongful death of a minor, stating that it “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”

The court issued the majority opinion following a lawsuit brought on by a group of in vitro fertilization (IVF) patients whose frozen embryos were destroyed in December 2020 after a patient removed them from a cryogenic storage unit and dropped the embryos on the ground.

The ruling has sparked concerns about the future of IVF — a practice which often involves creating multiple embryos and sometimes subsequently discarding them.

Haley said Wednesday that she thought the case should be treated with “the utmost respect,” and it “was based on, and should be based on, the rights of those parents for their embryos, and to make sure that they have the responsibility with the doctors on how those are handled, nothing more than that.”

“And I will continue to say, these issues keep coming up. And everybody wants to divide people on these issues,” she continued. “This is not the time where you divide people, you bring people together. Our goal is to always do what the parents want with their embryo, it is theirs.”