Patricia Heaton

The BBQ Pit
21

[QUOTE=Miller]
I’m amenable to this position, but that doesn’t really answer my question to you. Which, again, is “How is outlawing the sale of eggs equivalent to outlawing abortion?”
[/QUOTE]

Because it is controlling a woman’s right to control her own reproductive organs.

the reason selling your own heart is wrong is because it’s tantamount to suicide. You need your heart to live; kidneys aren’t quite as rare, but let’s be honest, it’s a risk to go with just one.

A woman has a LOT of eggs. She is not seriously risking her life by giving some up; yes, I know it’s an invasive procedure, but it’s not equivalent to surrendering a survival-necessary internal organ.

22

[channelling Roseanne Roseannadanna]

What’s all of this fuss I hear about poor women being seduced by big chicks? Why is it that some of them aren’t being seduced by tiny scrawny little chicks? What’s with that, anyway? Who made the rule that big chicks get all the poor girls?? It isn’t fair!!

What’s that? Oh.

Never mind. :smiley:
[/channelling Roseanne Roseannadanna]

It’s rather insulting to presume that very wealthy white grad student women are able to sell their eggs of their own free will, but somehow poor minority women are incapable of making the same informed decision.

In fact, that idea is rather boldly racist. Assholes. :rolleyes:

23

I’d like to donate my eggs towards stem cell research. Fuck the money, I’d do it for a decent Osso Bucco and Chianti dinner. But only if we can get embryo-worshippers like Patricia Heaton to BOW TO THE BLASTOCYST!

Sometimes I wonder why the fetus fetishists’ idolatry of humanity decreases with the age of the human/cell cluster. Somthing about that ‘all are born into sin’ mythos, so we become lesser creatures once we start lung functioning?

24

[QUOTE=Cartooniverse]
[channelling Roseanne Roseannadanna]

What’s all of this fuss I hear about poor women being seduced by big chicks? Why is it that some of them aren’t being seduced by tiny scrawny little chicks? What’s with that, anyway? Who made the rule that big chicks get all the poor girls?? It isn’t fair!!

What’s that? Oh.

Never mind. :smiley:
[/channelling Roseanne Roseannadanna]

It’s rather insulting to presume that very wealthy white grad student women are able to sell their eggs of their own free will, but somehow poor minority women are incapable of making the same informed decision.

In fact, that idea is rather boldly racist. Assholes. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]

[RoseAnne Roseannadanna]
It just goes to show you, if it’s not one thing it’s another. Either some uptight, hoity-toity Hollywood actress is trying to tell me I can’t sell my own eggs, or some insolent young whelp on an internet “message board” is confusing me with Emily Litella.
[/RR] :smiley:

25

[QUOTE=RickJay]
The difference being that blood donations are far likelier to carry communicable diseases than are unfertilized eggs.

Any law that prohibits women from selling their eggs is every bit as awful as a blanket ban on abortion. It is just as much a violation of a woman’s right to choose. Actually, it might be worse. It’s horrifying that any thinking person would support such a thing.
[/QUOTE]

You use hyperbole much?

I don’t think anyone is proposing blanket bans on abortion anywhere, there is always a carve out for preserving the life of the mother.

IMHO a blanket ban on abortion is far, far, FAR worse. I don’t have nearly asw much of a problem with saying you cannot traffick in human eggs as I have with telling women that they have to give birth to a baby.

I was offended by the paternalistic attitude that says that we can’t allow people to pay for eggs because they might pay so much that women who otherwise wouldn’t let people harvest their eggs would be compelled to do so. It seemed like the most retarded argument in the world. If you want to say we should allow people to sell eggs because we are concerned about the moral and ethical implications of stem cell research then thats a different matter, I don’t agree but it is not flat out retarded.

26

[QUOTE=Annie]
Sometimes I wonder why the fetus fetishists’ idolatry of humanity decreases with the age of the human/cell cluster. Somthing about that ‘all are born into sin’ mythos, so we become lesser creatures once we start lung functioning?
[/QUOTE]
BING BING BING! The lady wins an osso buco dinner, with a nice chiaaaaanti, redeemable at any Casa Dougo franchise as soon as I build some.

27

[QUOTE=samm]
One difference might be that most women don’t have 500 kidneys, approximately 490-500 of which they don’t need and won’t use.
[/QUOTE]

Most? You mean there are some that do? That’s awesome.

28

Yes, you can sell your kidney (though not on ebay). What you can’t do is sell someone else’s kidney.

29

How can they tell if it’s someone else’s? Do they have serial numbers or something?

30

[QUOTE=Miller]
I don’t see how the available supply affects the moral/ethical implications of the ban of such sales.
[/QUOTE]

You shorten your lifespan by selling a kidney, you lose a few days of post operation recuperation time when you harvest eggs.

31

If the eggs are really going for fertility treatments, aren’t they generally looking for a certain profile of donor who is NOT going to be an impoverished, underinformed, uneducated woman? The ads I’ve seen suggest they’re looking for college graduates and college students–not that these people don’t fall into the ranks of the poor, of course, but they’re hardly the vulnerable underclass I suspect Heaton means.

Poor women might feel seduced by the advertised price, but many of them may be hard-pressed to find a fertility clinic willing to pay for their product.

32

Yeah, seriously…the donor egg ads flourished in the pages of the local rags when I was attending Big 10 University. It was always for tall blondes with Ivy League or Prestigious State School educations, preferably in the midst of their graduate degrees or with plans for some sort of advance graduate work, in the pink of health with provable SAT scores 85th percentile above…and usually a call for blue eyes.

Except, most of the girls I knew who had all of the above characteristics really didn’t need the money, though I’m sure there are enough that do. No real demand for short hobgoblins with painful overbites who spent 32 years on the street as a teenage runaway.

33

I had no idea who she was until I read the thread. Her opinion counts why again?

34

[QUOTE=RickJay]
Because it is controlling a woman’s right to control her own reproductive organs.
[/QUOTE]

Your standard is capricious and flippant. The right to abortion is much more fundamental than the “right to control reproductive organs”

You are balancing interests, you are balancing the state interest in protecting a potential human life against the interests of the woman to decide the course of her ENTIRE LIFE. You can’t read statistics about teenage mothers (or single mothers generally) without believeing it is life altering. There are stages of a woman’s life where pregnancy (even if she is going to give up the baby) will impact her for the rest of her life (for example, I know a doctor that was going through her surgery residency who got pregnant, surgery residencies are grueling and her career could have been derailed by the pregnancy so she had an abortion). Carrying a baby to term is huge in time, resources and commitment. I have my own opinions about what is a good reason for an abortion and what are bad reasons but once I recognize that forcing someone to carry a baby to term can be an onerous life altering requirement with some very severe results, I cannot in good faith draw the line at anything short of extreme circumstances. These factors pretty much make it very, very hard for me to tell a woman she has to carry a baby to term (I don’t believe there is a huge movement to limit abortions where pregnancy threatens the mother’s health or where the pregnancy is repugnant (rape, incest)). There are instances when the state’s right in the unborn fetus trumps the woman’s right to eliminate the fetus from her body but they are very very rare indeed. But if the rationale were just “I have the right to do whatever I want with my body” I wouldn’t be as reluctant to say “no you don’t”.

The problem here is not the regulation of the ovary, it is the way Heaton depicts the restriction on paying for ova as a protective measure for poor women. I can understand making prostitution illegal to protect women (I understand that some people think that this is very patronizing), but when you want to outlaw harvesting ova for pay, you are not trying to protect the woman, you are trying to prevent those ova from being used in stem cell research.

I know a couple that has fertility problems and their insurance does not cover in vitro fertilization but the woman has healthy eggs and the man’s sperm is viable. The couple would be happy to let the hospital harvest a few of her eggs if they would grab a few for in vitro fertilization while they were at it. It seems to me that neither member of this pair are callous abortionists that want to grow clones and harvest them for organs but neither of them see either the raw ova or the raw sperm as a baby or human in any way and I agree with them.

35

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
Poor women might feel seduced by the advertised price, but many of them may be hard-pressed to find a fertility clinic willing to pay for their product.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but… when they need the eggs to produce stem cells for research, do they have any criteria outside of “live human containing viable eggs”? Heaton is specifically campaigning against a stem cell research bill.

36

[QUOTE=Rhubarb]
[RoseAnne Roseannadanna]
It just goes to show you, if it’s not one thing it’s another. Either some uptight, hoity-toity Hollywood actress is trying to tell me I can’t sell my own eggs, or some insolent young whelp on an internet “message board” is confusing me with Emily Litella.
[/RR] :smiley:
[/QUOTE]

–choking-- I sit corrected.

THAT was hilarious, by the way. :slight_smile:

37

[QUOTE=Leviosaurus]
Yeah, but… when they need the eggs to produce stem cells for research, do they have any criteria outside of “live human containing viable eggs”? Heaton is specifically campaigning against a stem cell research bill.
[/QUOTE]

I’m aware of that, which is why I specified the “used for fertility” in my post.

The quote in the OP indicated that Heaton was addressing a bill that regulated whether or not fertility clinics could pay women. It didn’t (or, perhaps more accurately, SHE didn’t) say anything about whether researchers might pay for eggs. I suppose fertility clinics could solicit eggs with no intention of using them for fertility treatment (that is, planning to resell them for research) and presumably this is really what Heaton is referring to? I think that’s a different issue–and a potentially troubling one. IMO That ought to be addressed directly, not through policies dealing with payments for any and all eggs.

FWIW, perhaps somewhat ironically, one concern of stem cell researchers is that the few dozen lines that are authorized for research with federal dollars aren’t very diverse. Odds are, if researchers are ever in the direct (or indirect) market for eggs, they are going to be looking for something other than those from blue-eyed women.

38

First, thanks for the shout-out, cmc.

Second, here’s a link to the ad: linkety-link. As you can see, it is indeed about the Missouri ballot initiative, and as cmc points out, Heaton’s line about creating a constitutional right for fertility clinics to pay donors is a flat-out lie. I really don’t understand how they get away with this crap.

[QUOTE=DiosaBellissima]
What stands out to me is that she says (or someone says- I’m too lazy to watch it again) that there are 25 deaths a year from the egg harvesting procedure. My response? “Twenty five! Oh noes! Like, 15,000 people die a year in car accidents. . . let’s ban cars too!”
[/QUOTE]

Finally, Diosa, I don’t blame you for not bothering to watch it again, but I thought I’d point out that the actual claim (made by someone named Jim Sweeney, who I assume is some sort of athlete, and therefore an expert on IVF and egg harvesting) is that 25 women have died and 6,000 have complained of complications. Total. Not per yer.

I was a bit curious about that claim, and did some digging. Here’s what I found. The claim seems to date back to a 1999 article in the Boston Herald: linky-poo. The article details the unexpected (and sometimes catastrophic) side effects of Lupron – a drug the FDA approved back in the 1980s for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer but which was by the 1990s being used off-label to treat women with dysmennorhea (heavy menstrual bleeding) and uterine fibroids. The article does not mention the drug’s use in in vitro fertilization, but it is apparent from a little bit of googling that Lupron is indeed widely used in that application as well. The Lazar article is cited in this fairly recent article, and in this 2006 testimony before Congress.

You can draw your own conclusions about this, of course, but I find it disingenuous at best to attribute 25 deaths and 6,000 complaints to the process of egg harvesting, when in fact those deaths and complaints are possibly (and only possibly, mind you, according to the Lazar article) attributable to one specific drug that is now commonly used in IVF but at the time the complaints were filed was not. I am unable to find any more recent data on complaints to the FDA regarding Lupron, specifically as it is used for stimulating ovaries for egg harvesting or more generally as it is (or maybe) still used for treatment of other gynecological ailments.

39

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
…The quote in the OP indicated that Heaton was addressing a bill that regulated whether or not fertility clinics could pay women. It didn’t (or, perhaps more accurately, SHE didn’t) say anything about whether researchers might pay for eggs…
[/QUOTE]
From the OP,

From Wikipedia

From Amendment 2

It’s not a bill, it’s an amendment to the Missouri state constitution, it’s about cloning and stem cell research, not fertility clinics.

CMC fnord!

40

Sorry – I need to correct a glaring factual error in my last post. By 1999, according the Lazar article, Lupron was being widely prescribed in treating infertility. I read over a bunch of stuff between the time I found the Lazar article and the time I made my post, and managed to get myself confused in the process. (It happens distressingly easily. :))

In any event, I’ll stand by my statement that the Heaton ad is disingenuous in its use of the 25 deaths/6000 complaints bit.