RFK Jr is saying in his confirmation hearing that he wants the FDA to revisit the safety of Mifepristone. And you’d have to be crazy naive to think that the people doing so will do it objectively rather than with a goal in mind.
Whereas health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities as they relate to women’s health care;
And finally, there is H.R.722 - To implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person. That may well die in committee.
Note that in HR7, as currently phrased and assuming I’m parsing it correctly, qualified health care plans under the ACA would not be permitted to cover abortions, although a separate abortion coverage may be offered.
I assume that’s going to pass the House, and that it would require some parliamentary antics to get it through the Senate.
They haven’t even introduced the text for it yet, but I’m guessing it will carve out IVF, because the GOP views those pre-born humans as acceptable to murder.
But there’s a logical inconsistency: if human life begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg, then the destruction of excess embryos created for IVF is homicide.
If that termination of life is homicide, then IVF isn’t viable.
For IVF to be viable, either there has to be tolerance for homicide in certain non-life-threatening circumstances, or the threshold for when termination of an embryo is homicide has to be moved, opening the door to the legality of abortion under certain circumstances beyond rape / incest / health of the mother.
(I think you probably could get there by going for ferritization and attachment to a uterus as being the defining moment…but that doesn’t overcome the fact that, even though I have extreme moral qualms with most abortions, the grey areas involved are such that the government has no business attempting to legislate the details…or that such a definition isn’t quite as simple as needed to satisfy the concerns of the more militant pro-life folks.)
Again, the solution is simple. We went over all this like a year ago!
“All embryos are ensouled pre-born human infants at conception, unless they’re unwanted, then throw the babies in the trash and let them die of exposure.”
I look at it as what will happen if this is left untouched? An embryo that is inside a woman’s uterus has a chance of being born. Assuming it implants, then if nothing changes, there is a high likelihood that it will result in a live birth. An embryo that is in a petri dish, if nothing changes, has zero chance of resulting in a live birth. It needs to be transferred to a uterus first.
So IMO, it should be about not doing anything to the embryo/fetus.
If technology advances to the point where an embryo can grow into a fetus, all the way to birth, in a facility, then I’d have to revisit it at that point.
If life begins at conception why can’t women get the tax credits and other government benefits and drive in HOV lanes that require 2 people in their car for their “babies” while they’re pregnant?
The way i am reading your argument is that the embryo isn’t valuable in and of itself, but pregnancy is good, and so we should help women who want to get pregnant and hinder women who want to avoid being pregnant.
Those embryos in petri dishes didn’t just naturally appear there. They were created, through intentional human actions. If the embryo itself is valuable, surely it’s wrong to create one knowing it is likely to die without a chance to develop into a baby. Sure, leaving the embryo on the petri dish is “leaving it alone”, but extracting eggs and combining them with sperm is much more about “creating embryos” than most acts of sex are.
I think you’d almost have to define life as starting with the embryo implanting in the uterus. If it’s at fertilization then a lot of birth control becomes abortifacient and that’s a can of worms that most politicians don’t want to open.
So in defining it in a way that makes hormonal birth control ok that makes it ok for IVF too, I think.
Personally, I don’t think of an embryo as a life right away. I think that it’s only when it has the ability to become a live birth if left untouched that it counts.
So I don’t have an issue with embryos left over from IVF being discarded, or a morning after pill (IIRC it works by not allowing an embryo to implant in the uterus). I definitely don’t have issues with birth control. I don’t think we should hinder women who want to avoid becoming pregnant - the question is what to do when someone is pregnant, and doesn’t want to be.
I definitely believe abortions should be legal when it threatens the physical wellbeing of the mother, or even in cases of multiple pregnancies where one threatens the viability of others.
But IMO, if you view a fetus as a life, then there shouldn’t be exceptions for rape or incest - if it’s a life, that shouldn’t matter. It would still be murder.
The problem with this view, as i see it, is that it makes “life” a property of the embryos environment rather than of the embryo itself. Put an embryo in a petri dish, and it isn’t alive. Put it in a uterus, and it is. It seems position the quality of “life” in the uterus rather than in the embryo.
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has asked for a study on the safety of abortion pills and he has not made a decision on whether to tighten restrictions on the pills, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News in an interview on Thursday.
Let’s be honest: We know what the study will find, and this will reduce abortion access in states where it is legal because leave it to the states doesn’t actually mean leave it to the states.
Legislation introduced in Missouri would create a list of “at risk” pregnant women in the state in order to “reduce the number of preventable abortions.”
House Bill 807, nicknamed the “Save MO Babies Act,” was proposed by Republican state Rep. Phil Amato.
The bill summary states that, if passed, Missouri would create a registry of every expecting mother in the state “who is at risk for seeking an abortion” starting July 1, 2026. The list would be created through the Maternal and Child Services division of the Department of Social Services, but the measure did not specify how the “at risk” would be identified.