The Catholic Church is pro unwanted children. They are the permanent and living Scarlet Letter to shame immoral women.
One thing to consider is that, especially if it’s because he died, an RNC without Trump will be like Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral. Delegates will be tearing at their clothes and throwing themselves on the floor wailing in despair for their departed Dear Leader. Anyone who previously said anything critical of him will find themselves deeply vulnerable in this circumstance, which is why I think none of his primary opponents will get the nod (except maybe Scott, who bowed out early enough and ran an “I’m just happy to be here” campaign).
Would TPTB in the GOP believe that any of the above could win? I don’t think so. So I think they would hold their collective nose and go for Haley, since she does have a chance of winning. I don’t think she would, but at least she wouldn’t trash the downballot in the way that MTG would, LOL!
Isn’t it really just a question of when they’ll die? AIUI there’s a cost to storing the embryos. Maybe the couple who owns them will elect to continue to pay, but eventually they’ll die and it’s fairly unlikely future generations will pay.
Even if they set up some kind of perpetual trust, will the embryos be viable forever? It seems to me that even frozen they’ll degrade over time and after a few decades (or perhaps centuries) they will no longer be usable.
The GOP “powers that be” will represent only a fraction of the 2,400 delegates who will decide who the nominee will be. The remainder will be Trump true-believers who take enormous joy in thumbing their nose at the Republican establishment.
Well, yes, of course, but then, you’re discussing reality, not religious or political ideology. I can assure you that no one in the GOP has stopped to think for even a moment about any of those issues.
It’s gonna be messy.
I don’t know if Haley had IVF. Looking at it both ways:
If she had IVF personally, then she must have realized that they were going to create more embryos than would be used. Did she say at the time “hey those are babies that you’re going to waste”? Of course not. They’re clumps of tissue. For her to say now “I’ve always thought of embryos as babies” doesn’t make sense and doesn’t agree with her personal history.
Let’s say she didn’t personally have IVF. Then her saying that embryos are babies fits with her stated anti-abortion stance and doesn’t conflict with her personal history. But then to walk it back and say that she didn’t want to stop IVF conflicts with her stated belief that embryos are babies.
Either way, it seems that she’s being too cute by half and trying to toe the fundamentalist right line but then changing her positions when proven to be wildly unpopular. She’s turned into Groucho Marx and saying “those are my principles and if you don’t like them, I have others.” She wants to be a leader but wants to go where the followers tell her to go. She may be infinitely better than DJT, but still not presidential timber.
A number of Dems have said they personally adhere to and believe Catholic teachings but don’t believe that gives them the authority to inflict that restriction on women who choose otherwise. Biden and Pelosi come to mind.
But your point is still a good one. To believe they’re all babies and deserve protection, but you draw the legal protection well within (but not before!) a pregnancy is incoherent. Exceptions for rape and incest are also non sequiturs, given the belief system.
I don’t have a problem with the Biden/Pelosi position. They believe in the separation of church and state and recognize that even though something is against their personal religious beliefs, that does not give them the right to impose their beliefs on others.
So? Hypocrisy is a Republican feature, not a bug. Republicans can believe 4 contradictory things before breakfast.
Yes, their positions and beliefs are consistent. It must be nice to not have to do a dance in response to every question on the topic.
She can dance if she wants to
She won’t leave her “friends” behind
Haley did – she spoke of it on the CNN news program The Lead yesterday afternoon (Link to article).
Video of interview to serve as a primary source (3:39 long):
The video doesn’t show what happens next in the interview. An on the ball interviewer might have mentioned that the ivf procedure often has unused embryos and wait for Haley to volunteer any more information.
That was a link to the wrong CNN video – I had intended to link to Jake Tapper’s interview with Haley from Thursday 2/22/2024. Below is the correct link to the video (9:19, but the IVF discussion is within the first 4 minutes) and a text transcript of the interview (spoilered for length).
Summary
Tapper: I want to turn to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on in-vitro fertilization and embryos. You have said that you believe an embryo is a baby, is a life. But you also said the decision about what to do with embryos that should be between a doctor and a patient. So I guess my question is, you then disagree with the Alabama Supreme Court, right?
Haley: Yeah. But I think that the court was doing it based on the law. And I think Alabama needs to go back and look at the law. This is incredibly personal to me because I had both of my children with fertility. And what we want to make sure is two things. One, you want to make sure that embryos are protected and respected in the way that they’re supposed to be. Two, you want to make sure that parents have the right to make those decisions with their doctor as they go through and what they’re going to do. And we want to make sure whatever we do, that we have plenty of opportunities and availability for for fertility treatments to go forward. We don’t want fertility treatments to shut down. We don’t want them to stop doing IVF treatments. We don’t want them to stop doing artificial insemination. We want to make sure that people are able to have these blessings. But I think this is, again, needs to be decided on the people in every state. But what what states need to remember is don’t take away the rights of these physicians and these parents to have this conversation. It is too sensitive and too personal to not have that happen.
Tapper: Well, you seem to suggest there that they made the decision based on the law. But in the Alabama ruling, the judge, the chief justice, wrote in his opinion, quote, Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God. I mean, that was what Chief Justice Tom Parker had to say. That seems to be his personal religious view, not the law, as I understand it.
Haley: Yeah, I had not heard that. I mean, it certainly does. And I think what we need to do is say, look, if Alabama what they need to do is look back at at whatever it was, this was it’s my understanding it was a civil case. But look back at that and say, how is this going to impact, you know, other women in the state of Alabama? How is it going to impact parents? How is it going to impact physicians who are helping these parents have their baby? And we need to make sure hat we’re not closing any doors. We need to make sure that embryos are protected. I personally believe an embryo is a baby. Not everybody’s going to agree that an embryo was a baby. But that’s why parents need to be able to have the decision on how they’re going to handle those embryos. And they need to know that they’re going to be protected, that they’re not just going to be discarded by accident or that someone is not properly taking care of them.
Tapper: When do you define when a fertilized egg becomes a baby? And the reason I ask is because there are some Republican lawmakers out there who want to outlaw some forms of contraception because, as you know, some forms of contraception work by either inhibiting or blocking a fertilized egg from implanting in a uterine wall because they think the fertilized egg is a life is a baby. They say that should be outlawed. Do you think a fertilized egg is a life, is a baby?
Haley: I have always said I think contraception should be accessible, very important. That’s again, it goes to the fact that people need to be able to have as much freedom to make decisions as they possibly can. This is where it goes back to the role of government, Jake. Government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. And when you have situations like this, what I don’t want to see happen is everybody look at Alabama and every state think that they’ve got to go and put some sort of laws or regulations on these processes that parents go through. You don’t have to do that. All you have to do is make sure that parents are protected and make sure that there is a scenario where these embryos are protected. The rest is between the parents and the doctor, and we need to keep it that way.
If you were sitting with Haley in her living room, with no press and no influential conservatives within earshot … I would expect her private position on IVF and the legal status of embryos to be essentially a recognizably Democratic position. In line with Biden’s own. Publicly, she’s using “embryos must be protected” as a catchphrase that can mean different things to different listeners.
I read “[embryos are] not just going to be discarded by accident or that someone is not properly taking care of them” as simply meaning that the embryos should be handled and treated as they’d normally be in a professional medical care setting. A conservative listener, on the other hand, might grasp on “protect the embryos!” as something else entirely.
She’s backed into a corner a bit I think. However, the answer to the whether a fertilized egg is a baby question demonstrates how she will probably handle it going forward in the typical politician way.
1)Ramble
2)Fit a pre-drafted talking point in
3)Answer a different question from the one asked.
Someone should ask her if embryos were the cause of the Civil War.
I wonder if she thinks a fried egg is a chicken cutlet.
There are multiple versions of a dish called “mother and child reunion” which has some variation of chicken and egg in it, so at least someone sees an egg as a “child” in the culinary world.
I’ll also note that eggs that people eat are usually unfertilized.
As silly as this all sounds, this really is the sort of thing that I’ve heard come up in ethical discussions regarding abortion, fertilization methods, and so on.