The only thing you’re missing here is that for the true believer types in Alabama and elsewhere, you need to specify white babies.
Well, that’s not what I noted. I noted one organization that reaches that conclusion. There’s another significant group that overwhelmingly supports the “life begins at conception” position but also supports IVF, and two guesses who it is (hint: because of Trump they don’t appear to have an official platform anymore).
That’s a little tricky, though. IVF might theoretically be possible without creating extra embryos, but in practice I think it’s not gonna happen, without significant tech advances. And keeping those embryos on ice indefinitely is a pointless endeavor–the chance they’ll ever be implanted is essentially nil. So while in theory IVF can be considered separately from the deliberate destruction of embryos, in practice it can’t.
But at the very least, someone who wants to make that separation can do so: they can advocate for homicide prosecutions against those who dispose of embryos, without advocating against IVF, and see where that gets them.
I suspect you’re right. Which means that, in their case, the inconsistency is due to ignorance rather than hypocrisy,
Yeah, but those embryos aren’t technically aborted. And some people are really reluctant to discard the embryos even if they are “done.” So they sit around.
So is it okay, since frozen sometimes work, if frozen embryos sit forever? Kind of an edge case.
If life begins at conception, what difference does this make?
That might be an edge case; but AIUI, that’s pretty rare. Most of the time, once IVF is successful, the remaining embryos are destroyed. Those who wish to be consistent should be advocating the criminalization of such destruction. And if that meant that the IVF industry left their state–well, them’s the breaks.
I believe that many people, including Republican leadership, know what would happen, and due to their electoral ambitions, they won’t take that consistent position.
This definitely seems possible for regular folk. For folks in positions of power, however, I suspect most of them know better.
At the upper levels, I don’t think it’s driven by either of those beliefs. I think it’s driven by a belief that getting people worked up about abortion will get them votes.
IUD’s also sometimes prevent implantation; though current ones are apparently designed to also prevent fertilization. However people wanting to make a fuss could pick on the possibility that an occasional egg in an IUD-wearer might get fertilized but then be prevented from implanting.
And there are certainly people arguing for that.
Some of them aren’t wild about prevention of ovulation or even barrier methods either, because the availability of those encourages non-reproductive sex. But that rests on a different (and IMO equally wrong) argument.
My claim that at the upper political levels the motivation is purely or primarily to get votes applies also to other anti-abortion positions. So if it’s off topic, that isn’t why.
In addition to that, blastocysts judged not to be healthy enough don’t get implanted. While in theory I suppose clinics could just not screen them, I suspect there’d be a lot less demand for the procedure if parents were told ‘we’ll have to try to implant every living blastocyte, even if we’re capable of telling that the results will be one hell of a pregnancy leading almost certainly either to a spontaneous abortion or to a fetus born dead or dying, quite possibly along with major risks to the mother’s life and/or health’.
In practice, there’s no way that they’ll sit “forever”. The power will go out, the river will flood, there’ll be a fire, the company will go out of business and nobody will pay the electric bill. Not implanting them means that they’ll never be born. (Keeping them when there’s a reasonable expectation that someone might want to implant them in the foreseeable future is another matter, of course; and is one reason to have the procedure done.)
Because frozen isn’t dead? The argument is that an embryo could be frozen, then implanted and grow. So how could it be dead? So how could any frozen embryo be dead? In fact, inspecting the embryo could kill it, which would make YOU the murderer.
The embryos are disposed of at some time. But they don’t have to be. I am just saying how to meet the letter of the law. I know the process.
Got it in one - swissshhh - nothing but net!! That and owning the libs - if being pro life makes the libs mad, that’s great! If being for IVF AND pro-life pisses off the libs, that’s great, too (but hey, let ME have IVF as a choice when I need it!). The fact that these two things may not be congruent and may inconvenience them would not cross the pro-lifer’s mind. If a lib gets owned by some action or statement, that’s really all that matters here - dealing with the real-world consequences of these stances is for later.
I mean that’s true to a degree (and is 110% true for the current GOP frontrunner who has as little of a personal moral objection to abortion as he does against spray tan). Though the very rich old white men who donate to the GOP are overwhelming driven by desire to control the reproductive rights of people who are not rich old white men.
Ah, I see. Your “those embryos aren’t technically aborted” referred to ones theoretically kept on ice forever. I thought you were talking about what actually happened and drawing a distinction between abortion and destruction of embryos.
Yup. This seems to be a “have your cake and eat it too” situation, in which the leaders of the conservative movement in the US are going to come up against the principles of their most hard-core enablers, and voters will have to decide what to do about it.
It may be cynicism on my part, or it may be genuine terror on behalf of the next generation who’ll live in the nation created by these activists; but I’d like everyone right now to understand the implications of these hardline pro-life views, and I’d like the Republican party to be less effective at obfuscating those implications.
I don’t think any of them set out intending to criminalize IVF, nor understood enough about it to foresee that complication.
They’re just doubling down on the core dogma of “life begins at conception”, consequences be damned.
What’s going to happen here is that they’re going to keep bulldozing through the double-down approach, completely indifferent and ignorant of the legal, financial, and human havoc it will create.
What happens when we reach the decision point of embryo-owners not wanting to continue the pregnancy, and being unwilling or unable to pay $500/year to continue storing it? And the storage provider goes out of business and can no longer store it?
The only way out is for Alabama to shoulder that cost forever, or threaten the embryo-owners with jail time unless they either come up with the money to store or implant the embryo. And if the implantation fails (as it usually does), it will be construed as grounds for a murder investigation, because there was motive and opportunity for someone to cause the implantation to fail.
It’s going to get ugly, and the pro-lifers do not care about that in the slightest. They will be absolutely overjoyed to get a court ruling that a bankrupt embryo-owner who is out of options for storage must implant an embryo under direct monitoring of child protective services. Not because a child will be saved, but because this will achieve their ultimate goal: end-to-end policing of pregnancy from conception to birth, wielding the threat of criminal prosecution.
Now I’m wondering if there’s an opportunity to make some money off these people.
Offer a long-term storage service for the unused embryos, predicated on the notion (like with after-death cryopreservation) that, at some point in the future, a technology will arise that will make it possible to grow all of them into fully-grown humans. We’ll store your babies until then, and then decant them into this wonderous future!
Clearly any frozen embryos/blastocysts/cell clumps/fertilized eggs no longer required for implantation must be turned over to the custody of the state’s child protection services as abandoned children.
Oh, sure, nationalize my whole industry before I even get started!
And yet, teenage sex is bad. I don’t think that people in the pro-life movement give that much thought to worrying about consistency.
Unless your last name is Boebert.
Back to the OP, the whole “life begins at conception” thing is absurd on multiple levels. First of all, we know when life begins: It begins almost four billion years ago. The sperm cell and the egg cell that unite at conception were both already alive, and themselves arose from other living cells, in an unbroken chain all the way back those billions of years.
So the question should really be “When does personhood begin?”. And conception is a nonsensical answer to that one, too, since it implies that, given a pair of identical twins, only one of the two is a person.
It’s quite possible to have a sane definition of “personhood” that starts before birth, but still after the point that IVF clinics deal with.
Not to mention Chimeras which are actually two people I guess.
I think not if the teenagers are married (to whoever they’re having the sex with).
Furthermore, Tyler Arnold at the National Catholic Register estimates that, “somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million embryos created through IVF were never born.” As a point of comparison, abortions destroy just under a million embryos per year in the US according to the article.
Ok, what about the embryos that are frozen? What happens to them?
Even when they are frozen, most end up abandoned. From 2004 to 2019, there were fewer than 8,500 live births from donated embryos. The United States has permitted IVF treatments since the early 1980s and estimates suggest there are between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million embryos currently frozen.
So Catholic Church leadership has a reasonably consistent position, which they’ve devoted serious thought to. That said, has anybody heard of an IVF clinic being picketed? I sure haven’t. This Catholic priest chained himself to an abortion clinic, so it’s not like the Catholic Church opposes nonviolent direct action.
The Catholic Church makes a serious moral argument against the destruction of human embryos and fetuses. I disagree with it, but it is serious. I haven’t seen the same level of care or compassion among the wider set of Protestant opponents to abortion. (Disclosure: lapsed mainline Protestant.)
They also put serious thought on thinking about those ‘reasonable’ positions in the past.
It was not “Consistent”.