Republicans Confirm Lifetime Federal Judge Opposed To Fertility Treatments
Republicans Confirm Lifetime Federal Judge Opposed To Fertility Treatments
Sarah Pitlyk has claimed that IVF and surrogacy have “grave effects on society” and lead to “diminished respect for motherhood.”
WASHINGTON ― Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to confirm Sarah Pitlyk to a lifetime seat on a federal court, despite her extreme views on fertility treatments having “grave effects on society” and her unanimous “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association.
Every Republican present but one, Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), voted to put Pitlyk, 42, onto the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Every Democrat present opposed her. The final tally was 49-44.
Pitlyk, who is special counsel to the Thomas More Society, a conservative, anti-abortion law firm based in Chicago, argued in a 2017 amicus brief that in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and surrogacy lead to “diminished respect for motherhood and the unique mother-child bond; exploitation of women; commodification of gestation and of children themselves; and weakening of appropriate social mores against eugenic abortion.”
In a related 2017 interview with the National Catholic Register, she said that “surrogacy is harmful to mothers and children, so it’s a practice society should not be enforcing.”
Nearly one in six U.S. couples face infertility, according to a 2014 National Institutes of Health study. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) is among them. She had been urging her colleagues to oppose Pitlyk over her “deeply insulting” views on fertility treatment.
“As a mother who struggled with infertility for years and required IVF to start my family, I would be one of the many Americans who could never enter Ms. Pitlyk’s courtroom with any reasonable expectation that my case would be adjudicated in a fair and impartial manner,” Duckworth wrote in a letter to her 99 Senate colleagues.
Pitlyk fits the mold of many of President Donald Trump’s court picks: young, white and a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group that has served as a pipeline for judges for this White House. Most Federalist Society-backed nominees also tend to have records of opposing abortion, LGBTQ rights and voting rights.
In private practice and in her work at the Thomas More Society, Pitlyk built a clear record of attacking reproductive rights. She defended anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who broke federal and state laws by secretly recording and deceptively editing videos that falsely claimed to expose Planned Parenthood’s illegal sale of fetal tissue. She defended Iowa’s six-week abortion ban that was later struck down as unconstitutional. In another case, Pitlyk argued that it is “scientific fact” that “human life begins at the moment when a human sperm fertilizes a human egg.” (It is not scientific fact.)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sarah-pitlyk-trump-judge-fertility-treatment_n_5de7fd1ee4b0913e6f89d850
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