Also, if there are 12 million women in the US using IVF, add up all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, friends, neighbors—We might even reach a majority of Americans. This is going to be a huge albatross for Republicans, hopefully even bigger than the threat in 2018 to take away Obamacare. Folks in red states should go to every town meeting of every Republican lawmaker in the country and ask if they believe life begins at conception, now that they have been made to recognize the consequences of saying “yes.” And no letting them off the hook by repeating some pablum about being “pro-life;” insist that they answer the specific question asked!
If I am correctly interpreting my internet research, someone should tell the taxpayers of Alabama that they are now on the hook for paying the $2000 tax credit per embryo (I know a young couple who were able to produce 18 embryos for freezing, and while I realize this was probably an outlier, it is still a substantial hit). Alabama pays $1800 per “child” even when the individual or couple owes no taxes, which can happen even to non-poor people if they’ve had losses in a particular year or lots of deductions. Similarly, someone should tell the couples/individuals in Alabama who are engaged in IVF treatment that they can now collect $2000 per year for each of their frozen embryo “children.” Even though this whole thing is horrendous beyond words, it is also hilarious to watch Republicans try to wiggle out of the implications of the stuff they pass. That is what happens when public officials make decisions, as they say, without intervention of the thought process.
The people who can't distinguish between a fertilized egg and a child or between a living, breathing person and a brain dead body kept "alive" on machines doesn't understand or value what actually makes life valuable. With apologies to Oscar Wilde, they have lost "all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic."
From Rebecca Chalker: Here is the evidenced-based answer to the latest Alabama attack on the right to abortion:
The claim of the putative personhood of embryos and fetuses is scientifically fraudulent. It is not a clump of cells or even immature fetuses, but the brain with consciousness that includes awareness of perceptual and emotional experience that characterize humanness, and these faculties are not sufficiently developed until around the end of the second trimester when early connections to the sense organs are sufficiently established. -- The emergence of consciousness: Science and ethics. Lagercrantz H1. Karolinska Institute and Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital X5:01, 171 76 Stockholm, Sweden. Electronic address: hugo.lagercrantz@ki.se.\
I suppose there is debate about whether we should rebut their arguments, however extreme, or if we should not, because engaging them may give them validity.
Fetal personhood is a terrible idea. However, I also don't think it's the end of it. Even if a fetus were a person, why does it have rights to someone else's body? There is no other situation in our law in which a person has a right to another person's body.
They would have to respond, I think, with an argument that it's some kind of parental responsibility. Which then brings up the question, among others, of what constitutes consent to parenthood? Can it be the simple act of having sex, even if one is using contraception? What about rape?
I think that every time we respond to one of their arguments, it forces them to adopt a new argument that is even more extreme. So pushing them that way is one strategy of fighting back. But it's definitely also important when responding to one of their arguments not to concede anything. i.e. 'A fetus is NOT a person (and an embryo certainly isn't), but even if it were.....'
Yes, REBUT REBUT REBUT. I grew up embedded in this movement and very few people completely understand or believe the deep-seated beliefs and how they will affect life in the US.
YES -- they 100% believe that the simple act of having sex is consent to parenthood. "Don't make a baby if you don't want one" used to be a slogan 20 years ago. They have believed for decades that anyone consenting to any sex act should also be 100% committed to parenthood.
Of course she thinks that...... I wouldn't expect anything different to come out of her mouth, she's no different than the other extremists.... she is an extremist.
Forgive me if someone has / many have made this comment. I always come in late to the comments, and there are so many of them today, understandably!!
So, of course this will be the undoing of many forms of contraception, because it establishes a person as existing at fertilization, before implantation. This is worse than I could have imagined. I thought fetal personhood would be established after implantation or some weeks along. But to have a legal foothold into it at *fertilization* is really sinister.
They have had "think tanks" working on this for decades. They want control in the name of their authoritatve sky daddy. Holding women captive to their biology, is paramount to their plan.
Citizens of Alabama voted on a ballot measure in 2018 that allowed fetal personhood. They voted.
Just like the citizen of Ohio voted last year to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution.
They voted. The point is they voted and isn't that what we want? If you want rights you have to get your fat ass off the sofa and vote. So many people are deer in the headlights thinking they would never need, IVF, abortions, birth control, etc. etc. Guess what assholes, chances of you needing something for your health needs or knowing someone who does/did is great. Don't be a fucking Steve Scalise who voted against stem cell research and then takes advantage of it to help treat his cancer. Any more interviews with any more "deer" who need some kind of reproductive health help better be did/do you vote? Who for? Because I only feel sorry for those too young to vote and pro choice voters. The rest can fuck off.
They don't seem to understand just how many of those embryos are non-viable. Or maybe they do.... I also worry about this in the context of the push to dismiss prenatal testing. PGT (testing of day 5 embryos in IVF to prioritize transfers) is illegal in some countries. There's one doctor in particular who authors most of the papers suggesting the testing is inaccurate and "abnormal" embryos can lead to live birth. This is not true, but gives women false hope when all thier embryos come back as "abnormal". Over 40, 80-90% of day 5 embryos are abnormal. Transfering abnormal or untested can waste precious time and lead to unnecessary heartache and difficult decisions, yet there seems to be a group pushing for this, perhaps the same people trying to sow doubt about other forms of prenatal testing.
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling would be laughable, except that it puts state power behind a n absurd doctrine. Next stop in this nightmare dystopia; prosecuting women and anyone who helps them to leave the state for an abortion with a kidnapping charge. Next: charging someone with murder for the death of a fertilized egg, zygote, blastocyst or embryo.
Seems like a trap is about to be sprung. What I mean is that anti-choice people will say, why is is bad for someone to harm your fetus but yet you can choose to undergo an abortion? Is it a life or not? I think this comes back to whether a woman grants consent - very similar to how the act of sex becomes rape without that consent. Yet, no one wants to say that people can't have sex (well maybe the anti-choice folks do). The woman should have all the power here.
The first thing is don't argue on their terms "life"' is a trap in and of itself, many pieces of us are " alive" sperm is technically alive, until it merges and mutates into an egg, the rest just die. The egg is also technically alive until said joining, and if not implanted dies, and is flushed out with the rest of the waste produced by the body. Tumors and parasites are 'alive'. Their 'logic' is absurd.
What kills me is that no one understands what happens when you define egg-sperm as equal to an adult. The world gets dumb and dangerous fast for anyone near those things.
I don't think men are ready for what their BS is going to get them. If you make going near sperm THAT dangerous, good luck getting laid, and SUPER good luck with your dislike of condoms.
Yes, and what's disturbing about that is their solution is to re-establish male dominance and control over women. They don't want women to have a choice in the matter. It's all part of the same Christian Nationalist ideology, which is very rapey.
"Take, for example, a question Roiphe likes to contemplate in her writing and teaching. Is he at fault, because he assaulted her, or is she, because she drank too much and passed out? To refuse to decide on that question is, in effect, to allow the consequences of the second interpretation—exoneration—to unfold. What such heroic indecision often amounts to, in practice, is a craven reaffirmation of the powers that be."
In addition to the seminars, there were other classes where reactionary talking points are delivered with the assurance that they were very bold and countercultural, because returning to the social order of an imagined pre-liberal America (a great one) is the real revolution. People should be sorted by IQ, and eugenics is the best genics. For all the talk of debate, everyone sure agreed a lot.
I think there is a way to use fetal personhood to legalize abortions. If an embryo is a child, then like all minors, the law says their parents make all the health care decisions for it. If the state thinks the parents are making the wrong decision or they are incompetent, they have to go to court to make them a ward of the state. Then the state can direct their medical care. Otherwise, the parents make the decisions. Sometimes parents make decisions that their doctors disagree with, like refusing blood transfusions or stopping chemotherapy, but we still have to abide by their decision unless the court intervenes. Therefore, in a case of fatal fetal anomaly, the parent can decide that they don't want their baby to suffer and it's best to terminate as early as possible, not bring them to term. They can decide to terminate a pregnancy because their religion allows it, similar to a Jehovah's Witness patient who refuses a blood transfusion because it's against their religion. If the state disagrees with abortions, they have to take every case to court and make the embryo a ward of the state.
The Satanic Temple has bodily autonomy as a tenet like that. But then one has to have a religion to qualify, and they only tolerate 'other' religions for now, since the laws they are pushing are based in their crazy cult.
Interesting. I think the short answer is they want to make us all wards of the state, their Christian state. Because to them parental rights only count when the parents want to do what these people's religion prescribes. Otherwise, it's not parental rights, it's just criminal behavior.
They're expecting other smaller fertility clinics to close as well. The plaintiffs in this case were IVF patients themselves. As a result of winning their case, IVF treatment will no longer be available in the state, even for them. I wonder if this is the outcome they wanted? Or if they were used by some right-wing law firm to further their own agenda.
Serves them right, yes, it was sucky that their zygotes were destroyed, but they probably weren't the only ones they were storing, unless the destroyer specifically sought theirs out. I would like to hear the whole story, they make it sound as if it was a random psych patient, but was it a forced-birther nut trying to provoke this very scenario?
Also, if there are 12 million women in the US using IVF, add up all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, friends, neighbors—We might even reach a majority of Americans. This is going to be a huge albatross for Republicans, hopefully even bigger than the threat in 2018 to take away Obamacare. Folks in red states should go to every town meeting of every Republican lawmaker in the country and ask if they believe life begins at conception, now that they have been made to recognize the consequences of saying “yes.” And no letting them off the hook by repeating some pablum about being “pro-life;” insist that they answer the specific question asked!
If I am correctly interpreting my internet research, someone should tell the taxpayers of Alabama that they are now on the hook for paying the $2000 tax credit per embryo (I know a young couple who were able to produce 18 embryos for freezing, and while I realize this was probably an outlier, it is still a substantial hit). Alabama pays $1800 per “child” even when the individual or couple owes no taxes, which can happen even to non-poor people if they’ve had losses in a particular year or lots of deductions. Similarly, someone should tell the couples/individuals in Alabama who are engaged in IVF treatment that they can now collect $2000 per year for each of their frozen embryo “children.” Even though this whole thing is horrendous beyond words, it is also hilarious to watch Republicans try to wiggle out of the implications of the stuff they pass. That is what happens when public officials make decisions, as they say, without intervention of the thought process.
The people who can't distinguish between a fertilized egg and a child or between a living, breathing person and a brain dead body kept "alive" on machines doesn't understand or value what actually makes life valuable. With apologies to Oscar Wilde, they have lost "all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic."
Trump's Total Abortion Ban Explained. Follow along with this interactive infographic.
https://thedemlabs.org/2024/02/22/trump-total-abortion-ban-ivf/
From Rebecca Chalker: Here is the evidenced-based answer to the latest Alabama attack on the right to abortion:
The claim of the putative personhood of embryos and fetuses is scientifically fraudulent. It is not a clump of cells or even immature fetuses, but the brain with consciousness that includes awareness of perceptual and emotional experience that characterize humanness, and these faculties are not sufficiently developed until around the end of the second trimester when early connections to the sense organs are sufficiently established. -- The emergence of consciousness: Science and ethics. Lagercrantz H1. Karolinska Institute and Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital X5:01, 171 76 Stockholm, Sweden. Electronic address: hugo.lagercrantz@ki.se.\
If embryos are "persons" then we are walking dual-legal entities.
If the embryo, which is now its own "legal entity" threatens my life, can I sue it?
Exactly. Quite a while ago on AED some of us were pushing this article from Caren Myers Morrison
https://virginialawreview.org/articles/state-abortion-bans-pregnancy-as-a-new-form-of-coverture
I suppose there is debate about whether we should rebut their arguments, however extreme, or if we should not, because engaging them may give them validity.
Fetal personhood is a terrible idea. However, I also don't think it's the end of it. Even if a fetus were a person, why does it have rights to someone else's body? There is no other situation in our law in which a person has a right to another person's body.
They would have to respond, I think, with an argument that it's some kind of parental responsibility. Which then brings up the question, among others, of what constitutes consent to parenthood? Can it be the simple act of having sex, even if one is using contraception? What about rape?
I think that every time we respond to one of their arguments, it forces them to adopt a new argument that is even more extreme. So pushing them that way is one strategy of fighting back. But it's definitely also important when responding to one of their arguments not to concede anything. i.e. 'A fetus is NOT a person (and an embryo certainly isn't), but even if it were.....'
Yes, REBUT REBUT REBUT. I grew up embedded in this movement and very few people completely understand or believe the deep-seated beliefs and how they will affect life in the US.
YES -- they 100% believe that the simple act of having sex is consent to parenthood. "Don't make a baby if you don't want one" used to be a slogan 20 years ago. They have believed for decades that anyone consenting to any sex act should also be 100% committed to parenthood.
Just infuriating. Parental responsibility for something you might not even be aware of yet.
Nikki Haley said in an interview today that she agrees with the decision. "Embryos, to me, are babies."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nikki-haley-agrees-alabama-court-ruling-embryos-people/story?id=107422810
So much for her "can't we all agree that women shouldn't be charged with murder" ruse. Agreeing with the decision is pretty sick.
Wonder if tRump will give a statement, if you can call anything that comes out of his mouth a "statement."
Of course she thinks that...... I wouldn't expect anything different to come out of her mouth, she's no different than the other extremists.... she is an extremist.
The fetal personhood laws are so utterly detached from reality. They're absolutely nutso.
Yes, they need to be slapped down, hard.
Forgive me if someone has / many have made this comment. I always come in late to the comments, and there are so many of them today, understandably!!
So, of course this will be the undoing of many forms of contraception, because it establishes a person as existing at fertilization, before implantation. This is worse than I could have imagined. I thought fetal personhood would be established after implantation or some weeks along. But to have a legal foothold into it at *fertilization* is really sinister.
They have had "think tanks" working on this for decades. They want control in the name of their authoritatve sky daddy. Holding women captive to their biology, is paramount to their plan.
Citizens of Alabama voted on a ballot measure in 2018 that allowed fetal personhood. They voted.
Just like the citizen of Ohio voted last year to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution.
They voted. The point is they voted and isn't that what we want? If you want rights you have to get your fat ass off the sofa and vote. So many people are deer in the headlights thinking they would never need, IVF, abortions, birth control, etc. etc. Guess what assholes, chances of you needing something for your health needs or knowing someone who does/did is great. Don't be a fucking Steve Scalise who voted against stem cell research and then takes advantage of it to help treat his cancer. Any more interviews with any more "deer" who need some kind of reproductive health help better be did/do you vote? Who for? Because I only feel sorry for those too young to vote and pro choice voters. The rest can fuck off.
Yes, because it affects ALL OF US, not just those in Alabama.
They don't seem to understand just how many of those embryos are non-viable. Or maybe they do.... I also worry about this in the context of the push to dismiss prenatal testing. PGT (testing of day 5 embryos in IVF to prioritize transfers) is illegal in some countries. There's one doctor in particular who authors most of the papers suggesting the testing is inaccurate and "abnormal" embryos can lead to live birth. This is not true, but gives women false hope when all thier embryos come back as "abnormal". Over 40, 80-90% of day 5 embryos are abnormal. Transfering abnormal or untested can waste precious time and lead to unnecessary heartache and difficult decisions, yet there seems to be a group pushing for this, perhaps the same people trying to sow doubt about other forms of prenatal testing.
You could have stopped at word five. They don't want to understand, because it clashes with theiir cult's belief.
The Alabama Supreme Court ruling would be laughable, except that it puts state power behind a n absurd doctrine. Next stop in this nightmare dystopia; prosecuting women and anyone who helps them to leave the state for an abortion with a kidnapping charge. Next: charging someone with murder for the death of a fertilized egg, zygote, blastocyst or embryo.
Seems like a trap is about to be sprung. What I mean is that anti-choice people will say, why is is bad for someone to harm your fetus but yet you can choose to undergo an abortion? Is it a life or not? I think this comes back to whether a woman grants consent - very similar to how the act of sex becomes rape without that consent. Yet, no one wants to say that people can't have sex (well maybe the anti-choice folks do). The woman should have all the power here.
The first thing is don't argue on their terms "life"' is a trap in and of itself, many pieces of us are " alive" sperm is technically alive, until it merges and mutates into an egg, the rest just die. The egg is also technically alive until said joining, and if not implanted dies, and is flushed out with the rest of the waste produced by the body. Tumors and parasites are 'alive'. Their 'logic' is absurd.
What kills me is that no one understands what happens when you define egg-sperm as equal to an adult. The world gets dumb and dangerous fast for anyone near those things.
I don't think men are ready for what their BS is going to get them. If you make going near sperm THAT dangerous, good luck getting laid, and SUPER good luck with your dislike of condoms.
Yes, and what's disturbing about that is their solution is to re-establish male dominance and control over women. They don't want women to have a choice in the matter. It's all part of the same Christian Nationalist ideology, which is very rapey.
Yes.... VERY rapey indeed......every ban is rapey...... I really don't think the Christian Taliban even believes rape is a thing.
They absolutely don't.
"Take, for example, a question Roiphe likes to contemplate in her writing and teaching. Is he at fault, because he assaulted her, or is she, because she drank too much and passed out? To refuse to decide on that question is, in effect, to allow the consequences of the second interpretation—exoneration—to unfold. What such heroic indecision often amounts to, in practice, is a craven reaffirmation of the powers that be."
In addition to the seminars, there were other classes where reactionary talking points are delivered with the assurance that they were very bold and countercultural, because returning to the social order of an imagined pre-liberal America (a great one) is the real revolution. People should be sorted by IQ, and eugenics is the best genics. For all the talk of debate, everyone sure agreed a lot.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/forbidden-anti-woke-truths-at-bari
I think there is a way to use fetal personhood to legalize abortions. If an embryo is a child, then like all minors, the law says their parents make all the health care decisions for it. If the state thinks the parents are making the wrong decision or they are incompetent, they have to go to court to make them a ward of the state. Then the state can direct their medical care. Otherwise, the parents make the decisions. Sometimes parents make decisions that their doctors disagree with, like refusing blood transfusions or stopping chemotherapy, but we still have to abide by their decision unless the court intervenes. Therefore, in a case of fatal fetal anomaly, the parent can decide that they don't want their baby to suffer and it's best to terminate as early as possible, not bring them to term. They can decide to terminate a pregnancy because their religion allows it, similar to a Jehovah's Witness patient who refuses a blood transfusion because it's against their religion. If the state disagrees with abortions, they have to take every case to court and make the embryo a ward of the state.
The Satanic Temple has bodily autonomy as a tenet like that. But then one has to have a religion to qualify, and they only tolerate 'other' religions for now, since the laws they are pushing are based in their crazy cult.
Interesting. I think the short answer is they want to make us all wards of the state, their Christian state. Because to them parental rights only count when the parents want to do what these people's religion prescribes. Otherwise, it's not parental rights, it's just criminal behavior.
🎯🎯🎯Yes, you nailed it.
The University of Alabama just announced that it was pausing its IVF program.
They're expecting other smaller fertility clinics to close as well. The plaintiffs in this case were IVF patients themselves. As a result of winning their case, IVF treatment will no longer be available in the state, even for them. I wonder if this is the outcome they wanted? Or if they were used by some right-wing law firm to further their own agenda.
Serves them right, yes, it was sucky that their zygotes were destroyed, but they probably weren't the only ones they were storing, unless the destroyer specifically sought theirs out. I would like to hear the whole story, they make it sound as if it was a random psych patient, but was it a forced-birther nut trying to provoke this very scenario?