After Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children and that those who destroy these embryos can be held liable for wrongful death, two of the state’s major providers of in vitro fertilization treatments suspended services while they consider the legal ramifications of what has become the latest controversial and hysteria-inducing chapter in the battle to protect the unborn.

“This is part of a long and strategic march towards entrenching this ideology of fetal personhood, that is at the heart of controlling pregnant people, their decisions and their birth outcomes,” Dana Sussman, the deputy executive director of the legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, told CNN.