Two weeks ago the Alabama Supreme Court blew up IVF treatments in the state by ruling that frozen embryos are human life. This made IVF too risky and forced hospitals and clinics to stop providing it. But everybody loves IVF—even Republicans—so the Alabama legislature moved like lightning to pass a bill giving IVF clinics absolute immunity from any criminal or civil action.
Whew. Crisis averted. Or was it? It turns out the pro-life movement is decidedly not on board with this, and on Tuesday they sent an open letter to the governor begging her not to sign the bill. It was signed by some of the biggest anti-abortion groups in the country:
The Live Action coalition points out that the Alabama legislation includes civil and criminal immunity for a doctor who:
- Secretly uses his own sperm to create embryos
- Deliberately implants someone else's child into a different IVF mother's womb
- Intentionally destroys the embryos he creates against the wishes of the parents
I don't know how likely any of this is, but they're quite correct about the bill. It provides blanket immunity for anything as long as you're an IVF provider.
Anyway, I love it when conservatives are feuding among themselves about something that virtually nobody, even conservatives themselves, thinks is wrong or should be illegal:
Anti-abortion politicos have tried desperately for a long time to avoid alarming normies about the logical consequences of their position: frozen embryos as human beings, jailing women who get abortions, banning travel for abortions, etc. But guess what? Now that hardline conservatives have a free hand, it turns out that a lot of them want to do precisely the stuff they've been pretending they would never do.
So may their feuding be long and very, very public. Let's make it clear to everyone what they really think, and then see how many people still support them.
POSTSCRIPT: Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the IVF legislation on Wednesday. In the end, no one cared about the pro-life groups.
in this year's General Assemby session in the Old Dominion, two "Republicans" introduced legislation that would have required women who requested a hysterectomy to be referred to some controversial organization, similar to previous legal tactics ordering women to be forced to view their embryos as a deterrent to abortions.
I've encountered some extreme misogynists in this state, so probably shouldn't be surprised by any of their tactics, however great their proposals veer from their claims of supporting small government & personal freedoms. Democrats really need to point out how hypocritical they are - even when they claim religious beliefs as the basis, forcing their ideology on others is sumply not constitutional..Yes, Comstock may yet come roaring back.
Addendum: Kansaa women taking action again
https://kansasreflector.com/2024/03/06/kansas-house-moves-abortion-survey-bill-draws-erectile-dysfunction-vasectomy-amendments/
What Kawflower said below!!!
Next, going after Griswold. And remember, Griswold was about the right of A MARRIED COUPLE to obtain birth control.
They could probably kill the mother too and still have immunity.
The immunity didn't say what the immunity was for! For all we know, they could go on a bender and rob liquor stores and flash their W2 for immunity.
And it says 'provider' - it doesn't say hospital or lab techs, so they might not have immunity.
This sounds like criminally sloppy legislation. But then again, maybe that's a feature, not a bug to these people.
"The immunity didn't say what the immunity was for!"
Maybe it covers immunity to overturn a free and fair election. Why not? We might soon find out.
I think what it really shows is that conservatives haven't really thought very hard about some of their own bedrock foundational 'moral principals.' If a blastocyst is a person, it doesn't matter whether it's in or out of the womb. For me, the fact that a blastocyst/embryo can be stored in a deep freeze for decades and later turned into a human suggests it's not really yet a human, but that's just me.
Hoping the immigration question (or frankly any serious question) eventually gets some actual analysis in society at large and the media. For instance, maybe ask Republicans who are griping about food costs if that might have anything to do with their feelings about those who perform most of the agricultural work in this country?
For instance, maybe ask Republicans who are griping about food costs if that might have anything to do with their feelings about those who perform most of the agricultural work in this country?
And that is why ALEC and others are trying to lower the minimum worker age. Get those teens working. And there is always prison labor.
Yes, conservatives have not thought hard about their principles or the laws they pass. They were raised to be dumb and they proudly advertise that fact in everything they do.
... the fact that a blastocyst/embryo can be stored in a deep freeze for decades and later turned into a human suggests it's not really yet a human ...
There's a company that says it may be on the brink of reviving the woolly mammoth, extinct for 4,000 years or more. It will be a landmark event if and when they do. Ethical considerations aside, the technology to create new human life, even perhaps using preserved DNA of early humans, may soon be at hand. Most of this world is moving ahead toward the future, and there will be legitimate debate ahead about what we should and should not do. But I suspect the conservative lawmakers of Alabama and elsewhere won't have a chance of keeping up.
The mammoth project is *not* about thawing and reanimating a mammoth. It is about editing an elephant genome to replace modern elephant genes with mammoth gene sequences, then implanting an embryo with that edited genome into a female elephant.
It's a faux mammoth, not an actual mammoth.
That's true. The beast-to-be is more a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and an elephant. Perhaps a new right-center party can adopt it as a mascot? Luckily, it has better protections for IVF than humans in states like Alabama. The hope is that the new hybrid will be fit to survive the extreme cold of northern latitudes. That's just guesswork right now. The only thing certain is that it will be an entire species more intelligent than Tommy Tuberville.
You know how they say “I took this job (or chose to study this major) because I was as promised there’d be no math” when it comes to journalism (and sadly lots of other careers)?
Well, many people choose religion *because* it promises you won’t have to think very hard about anything. The simplicity of “just do what we say and don’t worry about any contradictions or gaps in logic” appeals to billions of people worldwide, especially as the world becomes more complex.
Just like a bumper sticker that I once saw said: Don't Pray in My School and I Won't Think in Your Church.
Perhaps they object to any sort of reproductive technology because it violates their deeply held intuition that life begins at ejaculation, hence their assumption that the morning after pill is necessarily abortion.
Hissé par leur propre pétard.
The problem in Alabama is the constitution. Passing a law to carve out an exception for IVF does nothing if Alabama does not change its constitution. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled two weeks ago that the constitution says a fertilized egg is a person with rights. That has not changed. Challenge this new law (no doubt, someone will) and the Supreme Court should rule (if it's consistent) that the persons created in the IVF process have not ceded their constitutional rights because it's an inconvenient situation for Republicans during an election year.
Alabama voters passed the amendment in 2018, and the Supreme Court is ruling correctly on what the language of the amendment says.
The bigger problem is that outlawing abortion and legalizing IVF are incompatible positions. Both are legal or both are illegal. Zygotes are persons or zygotes are not.
If you want to find "middle ground," one way to do it is decide fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses up to a certain point (say, viability) are not persons with rights. That opens the door for IVF, along with abortions early in pregnancy. Most late-term abortions would still not be allowed. That should make everyone happy, right?
You could call it a grand compromise. Or, life under Roe v. Wade.
Republicans are just hoping that any suit filed against this law won't be resolved until after the 2024 election, allowing them to pretend that they are reasonable and consistent for another cycle.
Right. And I also think it's very from certain or even likely a GOP-appointed state supreme court will prove incapable of finding a fudge to spare Republicans political pain. This crowd doesn't lose sleep over issues of ideological integrity or consistency.
I'm struggling to see how (based on what I have read about the decision) the court decision had much of anything to do with the constitution. Unless the constitution establishes (in clear contradiction of the US Constitution) the Bible as a primary legal source.
I haven't read the Court's decision, but Joseph is right in that the problem is the Alabama Constitution, which is a hot mess of contradictions.
It states that the government shall not establish a religion much like the US Constitution does, but then it goes out and gives special protection to displaying the Ten Commandments in Schools and other places. It also states that it protects the "sanctity" (a clearly religious term) of marriage by making illegal all same sex marriages and even common-law or civil agreements between people of the same sex.
Then of course the clause that applies directly here, is that it flat out states that all unborn life (which covers embryos) is to be protected.
It's the state Supreme Court that decided to define embryos in a dish as "unborn life". The term isn't defined in the actual ammendment. In theory the legislature could clarify that embryos do not count as unborn life unless and until they are in a uterus. The Alabama Democrats proposed such a bill, but Republicans refused to put that language in theirs.
You’d think that a state that had no trouble whatsoever with defining black people as non-persons for centuries would be able to handle defining fertilized eggs as non-people… but apparently the doublethink they apply to race isn’t strong enough to apply to sexuality.
Exactly. The point of having a constitution is precisely to avoid a given legislature pass laws on a whim. Either the Ala. S. Ct. reverses itself or a new constitutional amendment needs to be enacted. If I was an Ala. attorney advising the hospitals, I would tell them that legally nothing has changed.
I'm sure this isn't the last time we'll see IVF challenged. The crisis wasn't averted, it was just delayed until after Trump takes over the federal government. Then no one will care about IVF.
Enjoy your last 10 months of freedom! Carpe diem!
Pro tip: Crises are always just "averted." These things, whatever, keep coming back again and again. It's a constant struggle just to remain in the status quo, much less make anything like "progress."
Pro-pro-tip. Justin isn’t arguing in good faith. Ever. It’s just trolling. Always.
The conservative point of view had always a simple (simplistic?) advantage, the embryo is a human at conception and that's that. They don't all say this, but this is really the moral basis of their position. They drew a clear objective line, and this has huge moral and judicial consequences on all sorts of actions afterwards. In fact, we haven't even begun to acknowledge all the consequences that will fall out of this point of view, including contraception. You say that human life is created as soon as the spermatozoid touches the ovule. Sure, touches at what distance? 1 micrometer? 1 angstrom? Hum, you realize that atoms never really touch each other, you know... The human mind can draw a line, but nature doesn't know these lines.
Just because a moral position is drawn from a simple objective criterion does not make it right or operationally functional nor reasonable. You can declare that drinking water or breathing air or having sex are sins, he ain't going to stop. Then you have to deal with the huge amount of transgressions that become its own unmanageable problem, with all the human suffering that is caused by a simplistic objective line in the sand.
I think that it is time for progressive to reclaim the moral high ground on the reproductive freedom issue. It is time to re-define the true humanistic moral basis for a sane position on reproductive freedom that will minimize human suffering, maximize positive outcome.
Yes. The rightwing position looks only at the fertilized egg. It's the only "human being" involved in its creation, nurturence, and sometimes even birth.
Disregarding the womb-creature, which is also demonstrably "human" and more often, even able to vote, is immoral, as well as willfully blind.
Not always. Prior to the rise of the Moral Majority a great many Evangelical Christians were pro-abortion. This was not considered controversial until the late 1970's, and even as late as 1984 Evangelical publishers were still putting out books that allowed for moral leeway on abortion. It's worth remembering that Jimmy Carter was against abortion but didn't consider it a high priority, while his wife Rosalyn was pro-abortion but also didn't talk about it much. In their day Evangelicals like themselves were allowed to think independently on abortion.
Evangelicals turned hard against abortion only within the past generation, and they did so for political reasons.
Carter was also, not coincidentally, the last Christian to occupy the oval office, if we go by deeds rather than rhetoric.
Well, I would argue for Obama, too.
Really. In what way has Biden ceded the "Christian" label, in your mind? And don't say "he's a murderer" because Carter had people killed, too.
“Disregarding the womb-creature, which is also demonstrably "human" and more often, even able to vote, is immoral, as well as willfully blind.”
I agree but this is a state that had no trouble disregarding the humanity of work-creatures (“slaves” or as we know them today “Black people”) for centuries. Even when they were legally able to vote, Alabama disregarded them for another century under Jim Crow, and the rest of the nation largely turned a blind eye to that disgrace until the 1960s.
I don’t think they’re going to be swayed by “women are people too” arguments.
It’s super clear that a majority of the American public doesn’t agree with almost any Republican positions on anything. Republicans win elections because (1) our electoral structure is set up with lots of biases - House gerrymandering, 2 senate votes per state, the Electoral College, winner-takes-all single member districts, etc - that fall their way more often than not; (2) voters just suck at understanding how our government works, remembering Republicans’ past behavior and/or anticipating their future behavior within the framework of how our government works; and (3) far too many voters don’t care about anything other than making sure their elected leaders hate the same people they hate.
Alas, all of this likely means that Republicans eventually will get another federal trifecta. And even though I personally think my first sentence above means that a good 90% of Americans will hate the America that trifecta creates, enough of them will like it in the short term - because of (3) above - to allow it to be implemented until it’s too late to reverse it. Kind of like how now that Brexit has happened, a good 90% of the UK is unhappy with it for various reasons (goes too far, doesn’t go far enough)… but they’re all stuck with it for a generation or more.
Yabbut, the vast majority of conservatives have never actually acted as if they believe that a zygote is fully human. There would be vast implications if anyone actually believed this. We can start with concern about the slaughter of the innocents found in routine menstrual flow. Just imagine the funding that would be devoted to preventing this! In practice, most only act as if they believed this when it is about punishing slutty sluts for slutting around sluttily. This Alabama ruling stands out precisely because it takes the obvious and unavoidable logic into a non-slutty slut realm.
+1
So this is another case of badly drafted legislation (the US has a long tradition in this, starting with the Constitution). It is time upper houses in the US started doing the job they are meant to do, improving legislation instead of just playing partisan games.
The Constitution isn't that bad. After all, they built in mechanisms to fix it. Too bad for us that we haven't used them enough, or very effectively. Banning booze?? Come on.
The constitution is an abortion of its own. Sure it wasn’t bad for the 1700s when they was nothing to compare it to. But its flaws and gaps and wild misunderstandings of how things would actually work in real life only become more glaring each passing year. And one of the biggest flaws is how hard it is to amend it. No other constitution in the entire world mimics ours in how they structure their electoral system, how they give short shrift to human rights vs rights of political sub-national entities like “states” or how much of a straitjacket they put future generations in changing the document itself. Supermajorities of both states AND congress to pass an amendment?! No wonder it’s only been “improved” 27 times over 240 years.
The tell is: even when the US itself writes constitutions for other countries (Germany, Japan) we don’t copy much of our own at all, heavily implying that even our leaders realize our constitution sucks in many deep ways. It’s better than absolutely nothing and a good first stab when there was nothing else to go by in drafting it… but even the Founders thought it would be discarded and rewritten every few generations or so.
Yep. The worst constitution of any advanced industrial democracy. And it’s not particularly close.
The US constitution is an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo that outlived it's usefulness by more than a century.
Heh. We need some sort of Bourbaki program for constitutional law.
One state, I forget which, says a frozen embryo is entitled to child support. Sperm and. egg donors take notice. Question: All the frozen embryos or just one. How are the embryos treated in wills and trusts. Fun Fun Fun!!!!
If you're wondering why people who identify as Christian are violating Christianity's foundational principle (see Luke 10:27 and etcetera), and walking themselves into the blind alley that is criminalizing the death of an embryo, it's simple. They stopped adhering to the principle.
If you're not adhering to the principle in every context, then you're violating the principle. If you're violating the principle, you're playing a zero sum game.
If you think we're playing a zero sum game, then you're on Team Trump.
If you think either everyone wins or everyone loses, then you're against Team Trump.
If you think progressives are good and conservatives are bad, then you're on Team Trump. You just don't know it yet.
Yes ... what Republicans are doing is bad. What they are doing is saying, in word and/or in deed, "I am right, you are wrong, and this conversation is over."
So, if what Republicans are doing is bad, what is good? The answer is to say, in word and in deed, "We disagree. Let's have an adult conversation starting with the idea that an 'I am right, you are wrong, and this conversation is over' is always wrong."
I apologize for being concerned about the survival of our species.
Umm, by your definition conservatives are bad here, so your definition that progressives are not automatically good is suspect.
Either you think we should embrace change and chance, or you don't.
But this isn't about that: this is about people turning women into second-class citizens whose labor, life, health, do not matter.
By my definition, a conservative is good, and so is a progressive, but anyone that supports former President Donald is not a conservative. A conservative is openminded and skeptical, which are two sides of the same coin, except they are more skeptical than openminded. A progressive is openminded and skeptical, except more openminded than skeptical.
Anyone that wants to turn anyone into a second-class citizen is not a conservative, a progressive, openminded, or skeptical. Instead, they are naïve and cynical, which are two sides of the same coin. And I can't stop them from calling themselves conservatives or progressives.
Our species will be fine because our species isn’t limited to the US. (By “fine” I mean the collapse of the US isn’t going to wipe out the human species everywhere. It will create lots of other problems to be sure since we act like the world’s police force. But it’s not like the rest of the world will cease to birth and raise children if the US devolves into a failed country.)
The outcome of that unnecessary experiment is uncertain, to say the least.