Alabama to execute men for murder by masturbation?
The Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that fertilized frozen embryos enjoy all the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as people who walk, talk, and rock around the clock.
This came in a ruling that couples who had lost frozen embryos in an accident at a storage facility had the right to sue the facility for wrongful death.
He did not say so, but the logical extension of Chief Justice Tom Parker’s ruling is that men will face the death penalty for “spilling the seed” (to use the biblical phrase; see Genesis 38) after masturbating. It remains to be seen whether boys who were minors at the time they were caught masturbating would also face execution or only life in prison.
Justice Parker, who according to reports has been linked to several Christian Nationalist causes as well as Qanon, ruled in the case that frozen embryos are people and have the same rights as live babies. This appears to be an extension of the theory that unborn fetuses are people and that abortion is therefore equivalent to murder.
According to the New York Times, Justice Parker’s legal writings on past cases lay much of the groundwork for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade. He often cites the Bible in his opinions.
According to the website FindLaw.com, Alabama permits execution by lethal injection or electrocution. Earlier this year, Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution by nitrogen gas. Judges in the state have the authority to override juries’ recommendations of life sentences to impose execution instead, and have done so about 90 times.
You may scoff at the notion of capital punishment for murder by masturbation. But after Justice Parker ruled that a frozen fertilized embryo is a person, we have to ask how it became fertilized. That would occur when a live sperm cell penetrates a human egg cell. So, the living sperm cell is a crucial component of the embryo/person. Since the sperm cell is alive and is trying diligently to make an embryo, then intentionally blocking the little fellow from fulfilling his mission could be seen as equivalent to destroying the embryo, i.e., committing murder.
According to the medical website WebMD.com, just a milliliter of semen can contain 15 million to 200 million sperm cells. And the site says those sperm cells will all die the moment that the semen carrying them dries up. Now, even though it only takes one of those millions of little swimmers to impregnate a woman, Justice Parker’s reasoning would indicate we have to give equal protection to all the unsuccessful little fellers. Thus, spilling the seed could be seen as mass murder.
According to the Census Bureau, there are close to 2.5 million males in Alabama, and about 550,000 of them are minors. So, rounding up, we could guess there might be 2 million adult men who would be covered by a law imposing the death penalty for murder by masturbation.
According to Psychology Today, 61 percent of adult men admitted to having masturbated in the year prior to a 2009 survey on the topic. In other words, maybe 1.2 million adult men in Alabama could face prosecution if they were caught , er, red-handed.
But that’s just the guys who self-pleasure themselves. What about the sensible men who use condoms either for safe sex or birth control? They too could be found guilty of murder for denying those millions of live sperm cells the opportunity to grow into embryos and thus living people.
A 2017 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 33.7 percent of men aged 15 to 45 used a condom. In other words, one-third of the men in Alabama could find themselves strapped to a gurney with a mask pumping nitrogen into their lungs because they wore condoms during sexual intercourse.
If you want to explore the CDC’s figures on men engaging in non-vaginal sexual intercourse that would most definitely result in the death of their sperm cells, the CDC website has details regarding several forms of such intercourse. Without going into salacious detail, we can say that about nine out of every ten men in the state could suddenly have Alabama police busting through their bedroom door with a warrant.
The long and short of it is that if Justice Parker’s theory on the personhood of frozen embryos stands and is extended to live sperm cells, then almost all the men in Alabama could face the death penalty. And if Justice Parker’s decision already condemns pregnant women and their doctors to legal liability for murder, it is only fair that the men be included.
