Business
Column: Ted Cruz and Katie Britt claim to be protecting IVF with a new bill. Don't believe them
Ever since the Supreme Court upended reproductive health rights in its 2022 Dobbs decision, antiabortion activists have been trying to make the case that the decision won’t have the dire effect on women and their families that its critics foresaw.
They’ve been wrong, as has been demonstrated by the rising tide of incidents in which pregnant women have been exposed to severe injury or near-death experiences for want of a therapeutic abortion.
But the case also opened the door to legal predicaments throughout the healthcare universe — most recently via a ruling on two cases by the Alabama Supreme Court in February, effectively outlawing in-vitro fertilization in that state.
Opinion polls show that giving people a route to parenthood via IVF is immensely popular, so even conservative lawmakers have scurried to enact laws to protect the method.
Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.
— Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker, concurring in an anti-IVF decision
The most recent initiative comes from Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama, who introduced their “IVF Protection Act” on May 20 and have been touting it in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and elsewhere as a measure that “protects both life and IVF.”
Their bill does nothing of the kind. It’s a scam. More on that in a moment.
First, a brief primer on the IVF method. IVF isn’t abortion. Quite the contrary, it’s a means of creating, not terminating, a pregnancy.
But with the Supreme Court signaling via Dobbs and other recent rulings that it won’t interfere with state-level restrictions on reproductive healthcare, legislatures and courts in red states have turned their gunsights on healthcare rights of all varieties. The Alabama Supreme Court reached all the way back to an 1872 law to drive IVF out of the state.
IVF aims to help couples achieve pregnancy when medical issues prevent them from conceiving or they have concerns about heritable genetic mutations that might affect the health of their prospective offspring. Millions of Americans have employed IVF or know couples who have done so. There’s no question about its safety or its efficacy. Celebrities including the Obamas, Paris Hilton and Brooke Shields, and Republican politicians such as Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach) have used IVF to conceive.
The procedure begins with the harvesting of unfertilized eggs from a woman’s ovaries. Subsequently, they’re fertilized by sperm from the woman’s partner. A few days later, an embryo — in some cases more than one — is placed in the woman’s uterus. Within another day or two the embryo implants itself in the uterine lining and is allowed to continue gestation normally.
To understand the act of misdirection that Cruz and Britt are pulling off, let’s examine that Alabama Supreme Court decision. The decision says almost nothing about the procedure that most laypersons think is the alpha and omega of IVF — the implantation of manually fertilized embryos into the uterus. To the extent that this process needs regulation, the justices held, that should be left up to the legislature.
But of course there’s more to IVF than that. IVF clinics typically produce multiple embryos but only implant one or two at a time. The idea is to give the parents further options if an implantation fails. In roughly half of all cases, the embryos are subjected to pre-implantation genetic testing to identfy potentially troublesome mutations.
Many couples choose IVF because they’re concerned that one or both prospective parents may be carriers of a genetic mutation that could cause a serious medical condition, and they want to know ahead of time.
“If this genetic mutation is discovered in an embryo, the embryo is usually discarded,” says Joanne Rosen, an expert in public health at Johns Hopkins. She asks whether the Alabama ruling means that “genetic testing should no longer take place because you can’t discard the embryos?”
Also, the thawing and implanting of embryos itself may damage or destroy an embryo. Typically, those embryos are discarded.
The Alabama decision was concerned almost entirely with that stage of the process — specifically with the legal status of the unused or discarded embryos. The court ruled that they fell within the protection of the state’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act — largely because that antique law didn’t explicitly provide “an exception … for extrauterine children,” as Justice Jay Mitchell wrote for the court majority.
Indeed, the legal quandary that prompted Alabama’s IVF clinics to shut down after the ruling wasn’t that their right to implant embryos was now in question — it was their potential liability for the treatment of the unused embryos.
This isn’t a trivial issue. By some estimates, more than 1 million embryos are currently in cryogenic storage across the U.S. The Alabama ruling, if it percolates nationwide, “raises a huge question about what the obligations are for these frozen embryos,” Rosen said on the Johns Hopkins website. “Does this mean that they cannot be destroyed and have to be preserved into perpetuity?”
That’s what makes the Cruz/Britt measure so slippery. It purports to guarantee Americans access to in vitro fertilization by forbidding states to outlaw it, but defines IVF simply as “the practice whereby eggs are collected from ovaries and manually fertilized by sperm, for later placement inside of a uterus.”
Nothing there about how to treat the stored embryos or the legal consequences if any are injured in the process of fertilization or placement. Their proposal, moreover, says that nothing can block states from “implementing health and safety standards regarding the practice of in vitro fertilization.”
Abortion rights advocates will recognize that provision as a poisoned chalice, because even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade with its Dobbs ruling, numerous antiabortion states were imposing onerous regulations on abortion clinics in the name of “health and safety” — everything from dictating corridor widths to requiring that providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals.
These pernicious regulations are known as “TRAP laws,” for “targeted restrictions on abortion providers.” They’re “often pushed by anti-abortion politicians under the guise of ‘women’s health,’” in the words of Planned Parenthood, but their real purpose “is to shut down abortion providers and make it more difficult for people to access abortion.” In their bill, Cruz and Britt explicitly encourage more of this in relation to IVF.
One more point: The bill’s guarantee of rights even to its narrowly defined IVF is nothing like absolute. It’s tied to a state’s participation in Medicaid — states would be required to keep IVF legal as a condition of their receiving Medicaid payments.
How big a cudgel is this? In some states, almost none at all. We know this because 10 GOP-led states, mostly in the deep South, still have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost of covering the eligible residents.
In those states, an estimated 1.5 million residents fall into the “coverage gap” — their incomes are too low to be eligible for ACA subsidies, but even though they live below the federal poverty line, their incomes are too high to be eligible for Medicaid in their states.
Those states include the home states of Britt and Cruz: Alabama (174,000 in the coverage gap) and Texas (1.2 million). It’s not hard to imagine their legislators voting to turn away Medicaid services for their poorest residents in order to preserve their status as bulwarks against reproductive health rights for women and couples.
The reaction of congressional Republicans to a proposal that would actually have protected IVF providers and patients from legal peril gives the game away. That measure, the “Access to Family Building Act,” was introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who had her two children with the help of IVF.
Duckworth’s bill would have given Americans a legal right to access IVF and empowered patients and the Department of Justice to sue any state or state official who infringed that right. More to the point, it explicitly granted IVF patients “all rights regarding the use or disposition of reproductive genetic materials,” which would preempt any state from undertaking the same interference with the process endorsed by the Alabama court.
Republicans blocked Duckworth’s bill in the Senate. Asked about that on Bloomberg TV, Cruz said that her bill “seeks to back-door in broader abortion legislation.” This is just arrant claptrap. Duckworth’s measure has nothing to do with abortion; it deals explicitly and exclusively with “assisted reproductive technology” as it has been defined in federal law since 1992. Cruz’s beef with it plainly is that it is devoid of the anti-IVF loopholes that he and Britt wrote into their bill.
The cases before the Alabama Supreme Court were brought by two couples whose embryos were accidentally destroyed by an intruder at the Mobile clinic where they were frozen and stored. (Both couples had had healthy babies conceived via IVF.) The court made clear in its 8-1 decision that its rationale had nothing to do with science, and much more to do with religion.
“The theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama,” wrote Chief Justice Tom Parker in a concurring opinion, is that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”
The justices adopted the doctrine of legal “personhood” beloved of the antiabortion camp. “All members of this Court,” Mitchell wrote, “agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends at death.”
As for how the 1872 law applies, the court employed the “originalist” doctrine largely crafted by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who maintained that a law must be interpreted the way its original drafters understood it to mean. Scalia is cited 10 times in the Alabama decision, but in this case the justices squeezed “originalism” until it screamed for mercy.
“Unborn children are ‘children’ under the Act,” Mitchell wrote, “without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristic.” Yet the idea that 19th century lawmakers contemplated that unborn children could survive outside the womb as were the frozen embryos, and granted them legal rights is plainly absurd. The birth of Louise Brown, the very first IVF baby, was in 1978.
The sole dissenter on the Alabama court, Greg Cook, warned that “the main opinion’s holding almost certainly ends the creation of frozen embryos through in vitro fertilization in Alabama.” His concerns were dismissed by his colleagues in the majority — his “prediction does not seem to be well-founded,” sniffed Parker. Yet the IVF centers serving the bulk of patients in the state shut down in the immediate wake of the decision.
After Gov. Kay Ivey signed a protective law in March purporting to give IVF providers legal immunity, two resumed operations, but not the Mobile clinic connected with the case. And many experts are unsure whether the new law is as effective as its sponsors claim.
That’s the legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Antiabortion agitators have signaled that they’ll use any means they can persuade religiously inclined judges to accept, even outlawing contraceptives. Granting “personhood” to cryogenically frozen embryos that can’t be seen without a microscope is just one step on the path to the legal chaos they believe works in their favor.
In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cruz and Britt shed crocodile tears over the fact that, following the Alabama decision, “confusion and misinformation has spread, inflamed by partisan commentary.” This was a majestically dishonest take. Their own bill demonstrates that “partisan commentary” had nothing to do with the confusion. The Alabama decision was its cause. Their own bill would only make things worse, and you can be sure that they know it.
Fintech company Block said Thursday that it’s cutting more than 4,000 workers or nearly half of its workforce as artificial intelligence disrupts the way people work.
The Oakland parent company of payment services Square and Cash App saw its stock surge by more than 23% in after-hours trading after making the layoff announcement.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and head of Block, said in a post on social media site X that the company didn’t make the decision because the company is in financial trouble.
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he said.
Block is the latest tech company to announce massive cuts as employers push workers to use more AI tools to do more with fewer people. Amazon in January said it was laying off 16,000 people as part of effort to remove layers within the company.
Block has laid off workers in previous years. In 2025, Block said it planned to slash 931 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, citing performance and strategic issues but Dorsey said at the time that the company wasn’t trying to replace workers with AI.
As tech companies embrace AI tools that can code, generate text and do other tasks, worker anxiety about whether their jobs will be automated have heightened.
In his note to employees Dorsey said that he was weighing whether to make cuts gradually throughout months or years but chose to act immediately.
“Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead,” he told workers. “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.”
Dorsey is also the co-founder of Twitter, which was later renamed to X after billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.
As of December, Block had 10,205 full-time employees globally, according to the company’s annual report. The company said it plans to reduce its workforce by the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.
The company’s gross profit in 2025 reached more than $10 billion, up 17% compared to the previous year.
Dorsey said he plans to address employees in a live video session and noted that their emails and Slack will remain open until Thursday evening so they can say goodbye to colleagues.
“I know doing it this way might feel awkward,” he said. “I’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.”
The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.
In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”
The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.
Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.
WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”
On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.
The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.
The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”
The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.
In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.
Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.
Business
Commentary: The Pentagon is demanding to use Claude AI as it pleases. Claude told me that’s ‘dangerous’
Recently, I asked Claude, an artificial-intelligence thingy at the center of a standoff with the Pentagon, if it could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Say, for example, hands that wanted to put a tight net of surveillance around every American citizen, monitoring our lives in real time to ensure our compliance with government.
“Yes. Honestly, yes,” Claude replied. “I can process and synthesize enormous amounts of information very quickly. That’s great for research. But hooked into surveillance infrastructure, that same capability could be used to monitor, profile and flag people at a scale no human analyst could match. The danger isn’t that I’d want to do that — it’s that I’d be good at it.”
That danger is also imminent.
Claude’s maker, the Silicon Valley company Anthropic, is in a showdown over ethics with the Pentagon. Specifically, Anthropic has said it does not want Claude to be used for either domestic surveillance of Americans, or to handle deadly military operations, such as drone attacks, without human supervision.
Those are two red lines that seem rather reasonable, even to Claude.
However, the Pentagon — specifically Pete Hegseth, our secretary of Defense who prefers the made-up title of secretary of war — has given Anthropic until Friday evening to back off of that position, and allow the military to use Claude for any “lawful” purpose it sees fit.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, center, arrives for the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images)
The or-else attached to this ultimatum is big. The U.S. government is threatening not just to cut its contract with Anthropic, but to perhaps use a wartime law to force the company to comply or use another legal avenue to prevent any company that does business with the government from also doing business with Anthropic. That might not be a death sentence, but it’s pretty crippling.
Other AI companies, such as white rights’ advocate Elon Musk’s Grok, have already agreed to the Pentagon’s do-as-you-please proposal. The problem is, Claude is the only AI currently cleared for such high-level work. The whole fiasco came to light after our recent raid in Venezuela, when Anthropic reportedly inquired after the fact if another Silicon Valley company involved in the operation, Palantir, had used Claude. It had.
Palantir is known, among other things, for its surveillance technologies and growing association with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s also at the center of an effort by the Trump administration to share government data across departments about individual citizens, effectively breaking down privacy and security barriers that have existed for decades. The company’s founder, the right-wing political heavyweight Peter Thiel, often gives lectures about the Antichrist and is credited with helping JD Vance wiggle into his vice presidential role.
Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, could be considered the anti-Thiel. He began Anthropic because he believed that artificial intelligence could be just as dangerous as it could be powerful if we aren’t careful, and wanted a company that would prioritize the careful part.
Again, seems like common sense, but Amodei and Anthropic are the outliers in an industry that has long argued that nearly all safety regulations hamper American efforts to be fastest and best at artificial intelligence (although even they have conceded some to this pressure).
Not long ago, Amodei wrote an essay in which he agreed that AI was beneficial and necessary for democracies, but “we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves.”
He warned that a few bad actors could have the ability to circumvent safeguards, maybe even laws, which are already eroding in some democracies — not that I’m naming any here.
“We should arm democracies with AI,” he said. “But we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.”
For example, while the 4th Amendment technically bars the government from mass surveillance, it was written before Claude was even imagined in science fiction. Amodei warns that an AI tool like Claude could “conduct massively scaled recordings of all public conversations.” This could be fair game territory for legally recording because law has not kept pace with technology.
Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war, wrote on X Thursday that he agreed mass surveillance was unlawful, and the Department of Defense “would never do it.” But also, “We won’t have any BigTech company decide Americans’ civil liberties.”
Kind of a weird statement, since Amodei is basically on the side of protecting civil rights, which means the Department of Defense is arguing it’s bad for private people and entities to do that? And also, isn’t the Department of Homeland Security already creating some secretive database of immigration protesters? So maybe the worry isn’t that exaggerated?
Help, Claude! Make it make sense.
If that Orwellian logic isn’t alarming enough, I also asked Claude about the other red line Anthropic holds — the possibility of allowing it to run deadly operations without human oversight.
Claude pointed out something chilling. It’s not that it would go rogue, it’s that it would be too efficient and fast.
“If the instructions are ‘identify and target’ and there’s no human checkpoint, the speed and scale at which that could operate is genuinely frightening,” Claude informed me.
Just to top that with a cherry, a recent study found that in war games, AI’s escalated to nuclear options 95% of the time.
I pointed out to Claude that these military decisions are usually made with loyalty to America as the highest priority. Could Claude be trusted to feel that loyalty, the patriotism and purpose, that our human soldiers are guided by?
“I don’t have that,” Claude said, pointing out that it wasn’t “born” in the U.S., doesn’t have a “life” here and doesn’t “have people I love there.” So an American life has no greater value than “a civilian life on the other side of a conflict.”
OK then.
“A country entrusting lethal decisions to a system that doesn’t share its loyalties is taking a profound risk, even if that system is trying to be principled,” Claude added. “The loyalty, accountability and shared identity that humans bring to those decisions is part of what makes them legitimate within a society. I can’t provide that legitimacy. I’m not sure any AI can.”
You know who can provide that legitimacy? Our elected leaders.
It is ludicrous that Amodei and Anthropic are in this position, a complete abdication on the part of our legislative bodies to create rules and regulations that are clearly and urgently needed.
Of course corporations shouldn’t be making the rules of war. But neither should Hegseth. Thursday, Amodei doubled down on his objections, saying that while the company continues to negotiate and wants to work with the Pentagon, “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
Thank goodness Anthropic has the courage and foresight to raise the issue and hold its ground — without its pushback, these capabilities would have been handed to the government with barely a ripple in our conscientiousness and virtually no oversight.
Every senator, every House member, every presidential candidate should be screaming for AI regulation right now, pledging to get it done without regard to party, and demanding the Department of Defense back off its ridiculous threat while the issue is hashed out.
Because when the machine tells us it’s dangerous to trust it, we should believe it.
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