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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.
Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker known for its collectible Labubu dolls, reportedly plans to open a new office building in Culver City as it seeks to expand its North American presence.
The 22,000-square-foot office will serve as Pop Mart’s new U.S. headquarters, according to real estate data provider CoStar, which earlier reported the deal.
Pop Mart, founded in 2010 in Beijing, is credited with fueling the frenzy over “blind boxes” — small, collectible toys sold in packaging that keeps the exact figure inside a surprise until it is unsealed.
The toymaker, which is publicly traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has nearly 600 physical stores across 18 countries, according to its September 2025 half-year financial report.
Much of its recent growth has concentrated in the U.S. In the first half of last year, the company opened 40 new stores, including 19 in the Americas. In Southern California, it now has stores in Westfield Century City, Glendale Galleria, and Westfield UTC Mall in La Jolla.
The office building Pop Mart is moving into, named “Slash,” features leaning glass windows and a distinguishable jagged design. The 1999 building was designed by the Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss.
Pop Mart’s decision to root itself in L.A.’s Westside comes amid Culver City’s transformation from a sleepy suburb known for being the home to Sony Pictures Studios — to an urban hub, driven, in part, by the Expo Line station that opened in 2012.
Ikea recently announced plans to open a 40,000-square-foot store in Culver City’s historic Helms Bakery complex — its first in L.A.’s Westside — later this spring.
Big tech has played an important role in Culver City’s recent evolution. Recent additions include Apple, which has opened a studio and has been building a larger office campus; Amazon, which in 2022 unveiled a massive virtual production stage, and Tiktok, which in 2020 opened a five-floor office featuring a content creation studio. Pinterest has a new office in Culver City as of last month, according to the company’s LinkedIn account.
Business
After Warner Bros. merger, changes are coming to the historic Paramount lot. Here’s what to expect
With Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. expected to saddle the combined company with $79 billion in debt, Paramount executives are looking to do away with redundant assets including real estate — and there is a lot of that.
Chief in the public’s imagination are their historic studios in Burbank and Hollywood, where legendary films and television show have been made for generations and continue to operate year-round.
“Both of these studios are in the core [30-mile zone,] the inner circle of where Hollywood talent wants to be,” entertainment property broker Nicole Mihalka of CBRE said. “It’s very prime real estate.”
When Sony and Apollo were bidding for Paramount in early 2024, their plan was to sell the Paramount property, but there is no indication that Paramount would part with its namesake lot.
For now, Paramount’s plan is to keep both studios operating with each studio releasing about 15 films a year, but the goal is to eventually consolidate most of the studio operations around the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank in order to to eliminate redundancies with the Paramount lot on Melrose Avenue, people close to Chief Executive David Ellison said.
A view of the Warner Bros. Studios water tower Feb. 23, 2026, in Burbank.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Paramount would not look to raze its celebrated studio lot — the oldest operating film studio in Los Angeles — because of various restrictions on historic buildings there. Paramount also has a relatively new post-production facility on site and will likely need to the studio space.
Instead, the plan would be to lease out space for film productions, including those from combined Paramount-HBO streaming operations. Ellison also is considering plans to develop other parts of the 65-acre site for possible retail use, as well as renting space for commercial offices.
The studios’ combined property holdings are vast, and real estate data provider CoStar estimates they have about 12 million square feet of overlapping uses, including their studio campuses, offices and long-term leases in such film centers as Burbank, Hollywood and New York.
Century-old Paramount Pictures Studios is awash in Hollywood history — think Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond desperately trying to enter its famous gate in “Sunset Boulevard,” and other classics such as “The Godfather,” “Titanic” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
The lot, however, is a congested warren of stages, offices, trailers and support facilities such as woodworking mills that date to the early 20th century. The layout is byzantine in part because Paramount bought the former rival RKO studio lot from Desilu Productions to create the lot known today.
Warner Bros. occupies 11 million square feet and owns 14 properties totaling 9.5 million square feet, largely in the United States and United Kingdom, CoStar said. About 3 million square feet of that commercial property is in the Los Angeles area.
The firm’s portfolio also includes the sprawling Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden complex in the U.K. and Turner Broadcasting System headquarters in Atlanta.
Paramount Skydance occupies 8 million square feet and owns 14 properties totaling 2.1 million square feet, according to CoStar. In addition to its Hollywood campus, Paramount’s holdings include prominent buildings in New York such as the Ed Sullivan Theater and CBS Broadcast Center.
Warner Bros. operates a 3-million-square-foot lot in Burbank with more than 30 soundstages — along with space for building sets and backlot areas — where famous movies including “Casablanca” and television shows such as “Friends” were filmed. Paramount’s 1.2-million-square-foot Melrose campus anchors a broader network of owned and leased production space, CoStar said.
Paramount’s lot is already cleared for more development. More than a decade ago, Paramount secured city approval to add 1.4 million square feet to its headquarters and some adjacent properties owned by the company.
The redevelopment plan, valued at $700 million in 2016, underwent years of environmental review and public outreach with neighbors and local business owners.
The plan would allow for construction of up to 1.9 million square feet of new stage, production office, support, office, and retail uses, and the removal of up to 537,600 square feet of existing stage, production office, support, office, and retail uses, for a net increase of nearly 1.4 million square feet.
The proposal preserves elements of the past by focusing future development on specific portions of the lot along Melrose and limited areas in the production core, architecture firm Rios said.
The Warner Bros. and Paramount lots “are two of the most prime pieces of real estate in the country,” Mihalka said. “These are legacy assets with a lot of potential to be [tourist] attractions in addition to working studios.”
Hollywood is still reeling from previous mergers, in addition to a sharp pullback in film and television production locally as filmmakers chase tax credits offered overseas and in other states, including New York and New Jersey.
Last year, lawmakers boosted the annual amount allocated to the state’s film and TV tax credit program and expanded the criteria for eligible projects in an attempt to lure production back to California. So far, more than 100 film and TV projects have been awarded tax credits under the revamped program.
The benefits have been slow to materialize, but Mihalka predicts that the tax credits and desirability of working close to home will lead to more studio use in the Los Angeles area, including at Warner Bros. and Paramount.
“These are such prime locations that we’ll see show runners and talent push back on having shows located out of state and insist on being here,” she said. “I think you’re going to see more positive movement here.”
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
Welcome to the age of AI hacking, in which the right prompts make amateurs into master hackers.
A group of cybercriminals recently used off-the-shelf artificial intelligence chatbots to steal data on nearly 200 million taxpayers. The bots provided the code and ready-to-execute plans to bypass firewalls.
Although they were explicitly programmed to refuse to help hackers, the bots were duped into abetting the cybercrime.
According to a recent report from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, hackers last month used Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic, to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies.
Claude initially refused to cooperate with the hacking attempts and even denied requests to cover the hackers’ digital tracks, the experts who discovered the breach said. The group pummelled the bot with more than 1,000 prompts to bypass the safeguards and convince Claude they were allowed to test the system for vulnerabilities.
AI companies have been trying to create unbreakable chains on their AI models to restrain them from helping do things such as generating child sexual content or aiding in sourcing and creating weapons. They hire entire teams to try to break their own chatbots before someone else does.
But in this case, hackers continuously prompted Claude in creative ways and were able to “jailbreak” the chatbot to assist them. When they encountered problems with Claude, the hackers used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for data analysis and to learn which credentials were required to move through the system undetected.
The group used AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, bypass defences, create backdoors and analyze data along the way to gain control of the systems before they stole 195 million identities from nine Mexican government systems, including tax records, vehicle registration as well as birth and property details.
AI “doesn’t sleep,” Curtis Simpson, chief executive of Gambit Security, said in a blog post. “It collapses the cost of sophistication to near zero.”
“No amount of prevention investment would have made this attack impossible,” he said.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. It told Bloomberg that it had banned the accounts involved and disrupted their activity after an investigation.
OpenAI said it is aware of the attack campaign carried out using Anthropic’s models against the Mexican government agencies.
“We also identified other attempts by the adversary to use our models for activities that violate our usage policies; our models refused to comply with these attempts,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We have banned the accounts used by this adversary and value the outreach from Gambit Security.”
Instances of generative AI-assisted hacking are on the rise, and the threat of cyberattacks from bots acting on their own is no longer science fiction. With AI doing their bidding, novices can cause damage in moments, while experienced hackers can launch many more sophisticated attacks with much less effort.
Earlier this year, Amazon discovered that a low-skilled hacker used commercially available AI to breach 600 firewalls. Another took control of thousands of DJI robot vacuums with help from Claude, and was able to access live video feed, audio and floor plans of strangers.
“The kinds of things we’re seeing today are only the early signs of the kinds of things that AIs will be able to do in a few years,” said Nikola Jurkovic, an expert working on reducing risks from advanced AI. “So we need to urgently prepare.”
Late last year, Anthropic warned that society has reached an “inflection point” in AI use in cybersecurity after disrupting what the company said was a Chinese state-sponsored espionage campaign that used Claude to infiltrate 30 global targets, including financial institutions and government agencies.
Generative AI also has been used to extort companies, create realistic online profiles by North Korean operatives to secure jobs in U.S. Fortune 500 companies, run romance scams and operate a network of Russian propaganda accounts.
Over the last few years, AI models have gone from being able to manage tasks lasting only a few seconds to today’s AI agents working autonomously for many hours. AI’s capability to complete long tasks is doubling every seven months.
“We just don’t actually know what is the upper limit of AI’s capability, because no one’s made benchmarks that are difficult enough so the AI can’t do them,” said Jurkovic, who works at METR, a nonprofit that measures AI system capabilities to cause catastrophic harm to society.
So far, the most common use of AI for hacking has been social engineering. Large language models are used to write convincing emails to dupe people out of their money, causing an eight-fold increase in complaints from older Americans as they lost $4.9 billion in online fraud in 2025.
“The messages used to elicit a click from the target can now be generated on a per-user basis more efficiently and with fewer tell-tale signs of phishing,” such as grammatical and spelling errors, said Cliff Neuman, an associate professor of computer science at USC.
AI companies have been responding using AI to detect attacks, audit code and patch vulnerabilities.
“Ultimately, the big imbalance stems from the need of the good-actors to be secure all the time, and of the bad-actors to be right only once,” Neuman said.
The stakes around AI are rising as it infiltrates every aspect of the economy. Many are concerned that there is insufficient understanding of how to ensure it cannot be misused by bad actors or nudged to go rogue.
Even those at the top of the industry have warned users about the potential misuse of AI.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has long advocated that the AI systems being built are unpredictable and difficult to control. These AIs have shown behaviors as varied as deception and blackmail, to scheming and cheating by hacking software.
Still, major AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google — signed contracts with the U.S. government to use their AIs in military operations.
This last week, the Pentagon directed federal agencies to phase out Claude after the company refused to back down on its demand that it wouldn’t allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
“The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons,” Amodei told CBS News.
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