War of the Roses 2024. America is living through the divorce of a couple fighting over embryos

In the 1989 black comedy The War of the Roses, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner viciously and disgustingly destroy each other during divorce court. The title of the film has now become popular among Americans for the shameless tussle over property and children in a marriage coming to an end.

The Rose’s, i.e. Heidemann’s, war is taking place in the middle of a legal and ideological debate across the country, writes The Washington Post.

After doctors diagnosed her with stage three breast cancer in 2017, Honeyhline faced a grim reality: her ability to bear another child had been severely limited by the disease. However, the American knew that despite several rounds of chemotherapy, she still had a chance. She and her husband at the time had two more frozen embryos. In 2015, they were frozen during artificial insemination in a test tube (professionally, in vitro fertilization – IVF, a process in which the egg is fertilized by sperm outside the uterus), reminds WP.

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“I think their value cannot be quantified because without these embryos I would not have any more biological children,” Honeyhline said during her court testimony.

Judge Dontaè L. Bugg is now set to decide in Fairfax County District Court what should happen to the embryos after the wife filed a property division lawsuit against her former husband.

According to the Daily Mail, Honeyhline Heidemann testified in the courtroom that she wanted both embryos to belong to her, but would also agree to the court assigning one to each.

Her former spouse, in turn, is demanding that the embryos remain in storage until they can agree with the “ex” how to deal with them. “It would be a great burden for me to have more children with my ex-wife,” he told the court.

His ex, who works for Microsoft, objects that she will agree that her ex-husband will not be involved in raising the new children. “The fetuses are the only chance for me to have another biological child after my battle with cancer,” she explained in court.

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Jason Zellman, Heidemann’s attorney, argued that the embryos should be considered property because the Heidemanns signed a contract in 2018 mentioning them as property. The divorce papers then state that they will keep the embryos until it is decided how to deal with them – either based on a court order or based on a written settlement between them.

The Heidemans’ lawsuit comes amid a legal and ideological debate about the future of artificial insemination and whether fetuses should be considered human. According to a report by Pregnancy Justice, at least five states have defined fetuses as “persons,” “individuals,” or “human beings” in their legal codes.

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen fetuses are human and ruled that those who destroy them can be prosecuted. Since that decision in Alabama, several fertility clinics in the state have halted IVF treatment.

The Heidemanns’ case had already sparked public outrage when, in a preliminary hearing, Judge Richard E. Gardiner invoked slavery-era law to reject Heidemann’s claim that the state’s share settlement law did not apply to the embryos.

Gardiner cited a 19th-century Virginia state law that allowed slaves to be considered “goods or chattels” separate from, rather than part of, the land they worked on.

“Prior to 1849, slaves could be distributed in kind or made subject to sale because the law regarded them as personal property not attached to the land,” Gardiner wrote.

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