Mark Twain could have added a fourth category of lies to his list: presidential lies. President Joe Biden told some big ones during his State of the Union speech on March 7. Here’s a couple of his whoppers.

In LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, the Alabama supreme court on February 16 held that the word “minor child” in the state’s wrongful-death statute includes frozen embryos. Biden claimed that this decision “shut down IVF treatments across the state” and that it had been “unleashed by the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Each claim is a lie. Biden was obviously trying both to exploit general public support for in vitro fertilization and to demonize the Supreme Court for holding in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”

Every state has a wrongful-death statute allowing civil suits for damages for the wrongful death of specified individuals. Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act provides that parents may sue when “the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, omission, or negligence of any person, persons, or corporation.” In LePage, three couples who had conceived through IVF sued the clinic for negligence after someone destroyed those embryos after entering the cryogenic nursery and handling and dropping them.

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Neither party contested the Alabama supreme court’s previous decisions, more than a dozen years ago, that the statute “allows an action to be brought for the wrongful death of any unborn child.” The only issue in LePage, therefore, was whether the location of an unborn child’s death—outside vs. inside the womb—makes any difference. The court said no, holding that “the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act . . . applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation.”

The court did not hold that unborn children are “persons” or that a frozen embryo is a “minor child” for any purpose other than a lawsuit under the wrongful-death statute. Crystal clarity, however, is no match for abortion warriors, their media enablers, or the Biden administration when intent on spinning anything into an assault on reproductive freedom.

Biden’s claim that this decision “shut down IVF treatments across the state” is false on its face. After the decision, three clinics paused, and others continued, their IVF activity.

Perhaps they realized they could not be as reckless and careless as the clinic in LePage was alleged to have been. Perhaps they were just evaluating their own practices and procedures. Perhaps this was a fake “pause” so that politicians could claim the court had “shut down IVF treatments across the state.” Who knows?

In LePage, the court stressed that “policy-focused arguments belong before the Legislature, not this Court.” Following that counsel, the Alabama legislature passed a bill to provide both civil and criminal immunity to clinics and health-care personnel who provide IVF services. Governor Kay Ivey (R.) signed it into law the day before Biden’s speech, and clinics quickly said they would resume IVF procedures. Biden never mentioned that.

Biden’s other claim, that LePage had been “unleashed by the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade,” was an even more obvious lie. As noted above, the Alabama supreme court held more than a decade before Dobbs, while Roe v. Wade was the prevailing precedent, that “minor child” in the wrongful-death statute includes unborn children “at every stage of development.” LePage merely demonstrated that the court meant what it said.

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In this case, plaintiff couples conceived through IVF and, after implantation of the embryos, gave birth to healthy babies. Any other interpretation of the statute would mean that the same embryo was somehow transformed into a “minor child” by moving a short distance to the womb. Nothing in the text of the statute, the court’s precedents, or even minimal common sense justifies such a bizarre conclusion.

The multiple opinions in LePage take up 131 pages. Roe is cited only once, in a concurring opinion, to wit: “In [Dobbs], the United States Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade.” That’s it. While neither “privacy” nor “abortion” appear in the text of the Constitution, “minor child” is right on the face of Alabama’s wrongful-death statute. The suggestion that a U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning what the U.S. Constitution does not say “unleashed” an Alabama supreme court decision concerning what a state law, enacted a century earlier no less, does say is ludicrous on its face.

Biden, his legal advisers, and speechwriters all know that, whatever their political utility, these claims are patently false. Asserting them anyway made them lies.