Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall revealed Monday that an explosive device was detonated outside his office building over the weekend.
No one was hurt, and officials are carrying out an investigation. The explosive was set off a day after Marshall said he would not enforce the state Supreme Court’s controversial new ruling on in vitro fertilization, though his office did not connect the two events.
“In the early hours of Saturday, February 24, an explosive device was detonated outside of the Alabama Attorney General’s Office building in Montgomery,” Marshall said in a statement. “Thankfully, no staff or personnel were injured by the explosion. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency will be leading the investigation, and we are urging anyone with information to contact them immediately.”
It was not clear from the statement if the device exploded on its own or was blown up by law enforcement.
A day before the device was detonated, Marshall’s office said he had “no intention of using the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision as a basis for prosecuting IVF families or providers.” His office issued the statement after multiple IVF clinics in the state announced last week that they would no longer be able to provide IVF services out of concern over criminal prosecution after the court ruled that embryos are legally children.
Marshall is one of several Republicans who spoke out against the ruling’s consequences, even though the party has been pushing for years for fetuses and embryos to be legally recognized as human beings. High-ranking Republicans issued a flurry of statements on Friday saying they support IVF access, though they didn’t address how it could coexist with such a ruling.
The question over embryos, which may be kept frozen until being implanted into a patient through IVF, ended up before the state Supreme Court after a clinic employee accidentally dropped and destroyed some frozen embryos. Three couples who owned the embryos sued under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, and the court sided with them.