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Credit: ABCThe View co-host Sunny Hostin accused Republicans of wanting “more white children” in a discussion about the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent ruling on In vitro fertilization. Produced by ABC under the Walt Disney Television division, the talk show previously spurred controversy over co-host Whoopi Goldberg’s allegedly racist remarks on the Holocaust.
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Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that couples undergoing IVF who lost embryos following an accident at a storage facility could sue under the state’s wrongful death law. The historic ruling solidified days-old embryos as children in the eyes of the law and, in a darkly ironic twist, inspired three primary IVF clinics throughout the state to temporarily shut down while they sort out the legal implications of the decision. Patients scrambled to find other providers as the process is highly time-sensitive, invasive, and expensive to repeat.
During The View’s “Hot Topics” segment, the co-hosts discussed the implications of the Alabama ruling. While all women seemed upset about the government’s increasing control over reproductive health in the post-Roe v. Wade era, hosts Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines sparred over the Republicans’ incentive to litigate fertility services.
Hostin is anti-abortion as a practicing Catholic but previously agreed that a six-week abortion ban was “egregious” because she doesn’t believe the government should control women’s bodies. She claimed the IVF ruling was an extension of that overreach and felt that Republicans weren’t “saying the quiet part out loud.”
“I actually think they do want you to have more children, and they’re just not saying the quiet part out loud,” she said.
Citing a recent study that found multicultural Americans will be in the majority by 2050, Hostin told co-host Joy Behar that because well-off white people are the overwhelming majority of IVF patients, Republicans want to protect those embryos more alongside restricting abortions and birth control to increase the birth of white children.
“They want to have more American white children born because the birth rate has gone down,” said Hostin, who has two children conceived via IVF.
She also added that the Republicans knew LGBTQIA+ people frequently use IVF; the Alabama ruling was explicitly intended to impact the queer community.
Her comments stirred a heated reaction from co-host Sara Haines, who argued against the ruling not based on race but on misinterpreting science.
“50% of Americans believe that a human embryo is a baby,” Hostin responded. “I am one of those.”
“This is science, Sunny,” Haines argued.
“Fifty percent of Americans believe that a human embryo is a baby — I’m one of them,” Hostin said, cutting her co-host off.
Still, Haines’s support for science received boisterous applause from the audience: “The embryo is an embryo until ten weeks when it becomes a fetus; a fetus is not viable until 24 weeks. If we’re going to use science, let’s use scientific terms.”
In the end, all co-hosts agreed that despite their individual religious beliefs, they all took issue with government control over women’s bodies.
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This is hardly The Walt Disney Company’s first brush with conversations about racism in recent years. Perhaps the most widespread discussion began when Walt Disney Imagineering announced it would retheme Splash Mountain to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort.
In a historic move, the Disney parks swapped the racist stereotype-loaded, widely banned Song of the South (1946) for The Princess and the Frog (2009), the film that introduced the first Black Disney Princess. The reimagined attraction opens at Magic Kingdom Park and Disneyland Park later this year.
What do you think about the debate between Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines? Share your thoughts with Inside the Magic in the comments.