BOO!
“Okay, no abortions for anyone!”
BOO!
“Okay, abortions for some, small flags for others!”
YAY!
so we’re not supposed to get all concerned and talk about a bill that’s actually been proposed and in committee 'cause there’s some feeling it won’t be enacted.
good to know - quick, close down all of the gun control threads, and all of the abortion rights threads, stat!
I understand what you’re saying, but in the case of adoption, someone has entrusted a child, who has already born, to others. So, I can see some scrutinty there. Course I do think that some of the laws are ridiculous(in Indiana, gays can’t adopt).
A few months ago, there was a bill which I thought the general public would find so outrageous it would never make it out of committee. Unfortunately, I was wrong; it did; and as a result, our state representatives got a nice pay raise. DancesWithCats has been on about this several times.
Actually, I find I’m almost rooting for this one to pass. I rather like picturing the results when a nice Wiccan or pagan couple applies to have a child under this law. I can just picture the people in favor of it stammering, “but those aren’t the sort of faith-based activities we meant!”
Personally, I’m not in favor of single parents, and, if I shared the mindset of the woman who proposed this bill, I could provide some pretty reliable statistics showing that single parenthood is a far greater predictor of poverty and crime than race. The thing is, I’m not going to impose my morality on everyone else because I don’t want others imposing their morality on me. I also know that assisted reproduction takes a long time and sometimes things go wrong. A friend of my brother’s didn’t plan on becoming a single parent before she was 30; unfortunately, her husband dropped dead of a heart attack while playing deck hockey when he was 30, leaving her a widow. Jesus had a few things to say on this subject, including something about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in someone else’s. Maybe someone should drop a note to the woman who proposed this bit of legislation’s preacher about that.
Things are crazy in America when it comes to assisted reproduction; I’ll be the first to admit that. There was a court case recently near me involving the father of a child, the surrogate mother of the child, the egg donor for the child, and, peripherally, the father’s fiance. If memory serves, the egg donor was suing for custody. Simply making it illegal for people of category X to become parents, or possibly, the way this bill’s set up, people of classes X, Y, and Z to become parents isn’t the answer as far as I’m concerned. One of the finest people I know is gay. He and his partner would make fine parents, as far as I’m concerned. One of the worst pieces of scum I know also happens to be gay. The same qualities which have led him to badly hurt people I know lead me to believe he’d be an awful parent. A woman in my city recently killed her husband in an argument about making dinner. Should she and her husband have been allowed to have children? How about the family who starved their youngest daughter to death? They’d have fit the qualifications under the proposed bill before their youngest daughter was born, and they apparently treated their other children all right. It may be trying to solve a problem which needs to be solved, but it’s the wrong solution at the wrong time, at least in my opinion.
CJ
Well, if you want to be totally fair, why not make parents who wanna make a baby the old-fashioned way subject to the same scrutiny? What’s the difference If you’re gonna raise a baby by adoption, in-vitro fertilization, or the beast with two backs?
How do these statistics look when you parse out those who are single-parents by choice from those who are single parents by circumstance? Not trying to be snarky here, but I’m wondering how much due diligence you’ve put into your claim.
“We meant parents should be people of proper religions, not cults.”
People dumb enough to back a law like this are shameless enough to drag out an excuse like that.
Nah; I’d wager that such a move would increase the collective national IQ by a few dozen points. 
Excuse me. I’m on your side when it comes to opposing the imbecility of this bill. I’m sure there is a very large difference between people who undergo IVF and other procedures rather than becoming pregnant by accident. I was throwing out one possible rationale behind its stupidity.
CJ
Why stop at “artificial reproduction”? Why exclude pregnancy resulting from sex? Why not require all couples wishing to have children file parentage petions and get screened? Hell, one could even prevent people with certain genetic disorders from breeding or encourge people with desirable traits to breed in hopes of passing them on to their offspring. And to guard against “unauthorized reproduction” every female could be subject to a mandatory tubal ligation as a teen and every male would get a vasectomy. Then years later if a married couple is deemed fit to breed they can have the surgeries reversed. Any pregnancies that slip through the cracks can be deal with a forced abortion and permanent irreversible sterilizations for the offending parties.
Options:[ol][li]Recognize that the stupidity of the legislation makes it highly unlikely to pass or even get out of committee. Roll eyes and ignore it. Result: Proposed law fades into obscurity, probably; occasionally lack of attention emboldens legislators to pass stupid shit while public is apparently disengaged. Either way, the moronic lawmaker stays in place and continues proposing idiotic bills, wasting time and taxpayer money.[/li][li]Get “all worked up,” point out stupid lawmaker and stupid proposal, generate publicity about ignorant, offensive legislation, raise a stink. Result: Proposed law certainly fades into obscurity. Also, glare of public attention makes it more difficult for idiot lawmaker to continue antics; best case is that the fool is neutered and then voted out.[/ol][/li][quote=Weirddave]
As it is, this is all a big hoorah over nothing.
[/quote]
He chose… poorly.
This bill goes way over the top. It looks like a poorly disguised attempt to impose “religious values” where they are not appropriate. It should not be the government’s job to tell people they have to be married or have to get married. It is none of the government’s business if the prospective parent belongs to a “faith based” anything at all. It is way over the line. Some government regulation may be reasonable. However, this goes beyond reasonable.
I’m not quite getting what would happy if Llesbian lady Ms X and her gay friend Mr Y used the turkey baster method to get pregnant, but swore up and down they’d bumped uglies to make baby Z. Are they going to check all their receipts to see if either one bought a turkey baster 9 months before the birth? Lie detector tests?Or just take their word for it?
Basically I understand what making this law is about, it’s about seeing that children who are born through assisted reproduction end up in stable families with married, heterosexual parents. But as many people on these boards can testify, married, straight people can still be lousy parents.
As other have mentioned though, it is about making a value judement about a individual or couple and their abilities to parent by assuming facts about them not necessarily in evidence, rather than treating them as individuals.
Have EVERYONE seeking assisted reproduction, including straight, married, white christians, take parenting classes and undergo the same kind of psycho-social evaluations that are done before adoption, or have no-one undergo it.
To do otherwise is blatantly discriminatory and and treats people as objects which can be classified, rather than people who have different skills, needs and strengths.
First, asinine bill. No question.
I would fight anything that gives the power of choosing who is worthy to reproduce to gov’t. The legislator who proposed this, even in committee, should not be returned to office after this.
Having said that, I’m with Weirddave: This is only time to be pitting the single proponent of the bill, not the whole of the state gov’t of Indiana. And the sad part here, is that I believe Bricker is right - the law should be updated to deal with a number of the issues that surrogacy and fertility treatments can entail. As it is the situations are coming up, anyways, and being decided in the courts on a piecemeal basis. Precedent law is completely valid, of course, as a means of evolving the legal codes, but it’s often contradictory, and can lead to legal theories that no one wants to support.
Again, however, this is not the bill to use to start with.
I think I would at this point also like to point out that when it comes to legislation about who exactly has rights and what they are when it comes to complicated cases differ between countries.
In the UK, for example, gamete (egg and sperm) donation is anonymous and altruistic. You can’t pay off your student debts by donating eggs, and neither can prospective parents meet donors, for example. All one is told is the ethnicity, education and age of the donor, and obviously an attempt is made to match this to the requirements of the prospective parents. Donors have no rights to any child that may result, although after 18 the child has the right to know the identity of the donor.
Surrogacy must also be altruistic, and the surrogate is considered as the child’s mother, even if it is not genetically hers. She therefore has to sign away parental rights after the birth, and the type of surrogacy agreements commonly entered into in the USA would not be legal in the UK.
The consent of both parties is required before implantation of any stored embryos can occur, this has recently been upheld in the courts, and the embryos concerned were destroyed.
Basically there are many ways to skin a cat, different countries do things differently, so yes, some legislation is probably a good idea.
Ok, so the law effectively gets rid of many instances of surrogate pregnancy, doesn’t it? A woman who can’t carry a child to term due to a medical condition can’t have her unmarried sister or cousin carry a child made from her egg and her husband’s sperm according to the way that law is set up. That law scares the crap out of me! :eek: :mad: :eek: :mad: :mad:
Reading further, it seems that surrogacy itself isn’t legal in that state. :eek:
It’s NEVER sad when Bricker is right. 
Well, that’s a big suprise. I guess her staff is tired of hate mail and hate phone calls.
The system works!