Can’t women just carry all the fertilized eggs and give birth to them all? There’s people who would love nothing more to adopt a baby.
As long as it’s perfect and doesn’t have any problems. Preferably of a certain skin color, though another one may be acceptable if it … has future socioeconomic advantages. Otherwise, they’re the mom’s problem, she shouldn’t have been irresponsible and had so many eggs fertilized and delivered them all; not society’s problem to pay for those kids, she needs to get her shit together and figure out how to pay for them herself.
And don’t even fucking think about welfare, we know that’s why she popped out all those kids in the first place.
Got it, life begins at conception, except these ones because inconvenient to the rich, so pick the best of the litter, assign it humanity, and toss the rest with last week’s Chinese.
The conservative comments I’ve seen justifying the opposition to Duckworth’s bill is that it was filled with non-IVF stuff. The examples given were the fact that it picks a federal department to handle regulations, and that it allows fertilized embryos that aren’t used to be destroyed on a national level. You know, protecting IVF facilities from exactly what started this whole thing. It makes me think that many people just don’t understand how IVF works.
I know this isn’t your point, but there actually is a program to gestate fertilized eggs that are unused, it’s called embryo adoption (although I believe no legal adoption is required because the ownership of the embryo is transferred before implantation, so there is no state or case worker involvement). I had briefly considered it before deciding on fostering instead. No shade to those who want to adopt, and to be clear, fostering is NOT an alternative to adoption - it just wasn’t where my heart was taking me.
The only Republican who objected to the bill on the floor was Cindy Hyde-Smith. She said:
the legislation is an overreach full of “poison pills” that would go far beyond ensuring access to IVF.
“It would legalize human cloning. It would legalize commercial surrogacy, including for young girls without parental involvement. It would legalize gene edited designer babies and lift the federal ban on the creation of three parent embryos,” she said.
It doesn’t say anything about cloning, surrogacy, etc. It does allow for a regulatory expansion of the definition. But, that bill is 32 years old and I don’t recall any of those other things being legalized as a result.
I can’t determine from the bill whether it guarantees access to IVF treatment for minors without the permission of their parents.
However, I am inclined to disbelieve Hyde-Smith. I have been conditioned by years of lies such as minors getting sex reassignment surgery without parental consent. Given the source, I will maintain disbelief until shown otherwise.
That one reference to “young girls” in the Hyde-Smith quote seems to reference surrogacy (which isn’t in the bill).
The definition of “patient” does not explicitly rule out minors. Seems like an easy fix if that were an actual concern.
(As a practical matter, I have trouble imagining a 17 year old who even knows that she needs IVF to conceive, and a clinic that would be willing to do this without parental consent. It’s not like abortions where the biology is that it was too easy to get pregnant.)
I wanted to answer this one more time in a less “rambley” way. (I’ve been thinking about it.)
To say a human zygote is a human person is scientifically reductionist in that it scientifically says: all that is needed to be a person are some human cells.
It is not metaphysically reductionist because it assigns this expansive soul to the zygote.
Unfortunately, the idea of soul now becomes purely ornamental because it is not tied to anything scientific significant enough to support its “weight”. It therefore becomes irrelevant. This is the path that science goes down first toward deism, and then atheism.
At age zero, a human does have complex behavior that can be said to both enable and show that the person has a soul. The metaphysics is no longer purely ornamental (at least arguably) and both science and metaphysics are enriched.
Well, perhaps it is more metaphysical to is say all it takes to be human is to have human parents. To make being human a result of passing some test of behavior/action/condition is to risk excluding humans wrongfully from humanity. It isn’t like that hasn’t been a problem before.
We shouldn’t say: I believe he has a soul because he passes this test. But we should be able to say: I see him do this, and with my belief in the soul I now better understand how he is able to behave this way. That applies to a newborn human baby. I don’t think it does to a zygote, which I believe behaves pretty much like any other mammalian zygote, at least for a while in development.
And to say a zygote has a human soul because it has human genetics is itself a different kind of test. What if we subtly change the genetics of the egg so that the zygote is not longer scientifically human?
I do think it is reasonable to say this: we do not know for sure whether a human zygote has a soul. However, it gets a soul at some point. In the face of this uncertainty, we should behave like … However, I personally do not think this involves enough certainty to justify government coercion. But maybe it does. We (collectively) could have that argument. But it would be a very different one than is currently had about these issues.
There are people like you who are interested in adopting and not holding out for a perfect infant, no problems, no past problems, willing to give kids a decent shot at a good life, because they just want to help someone else.
Then there’s people who are you know there are people who would love to adopt kids that when you point to kids in the foster system who would love to have stable parents and a shot at a good life but had a troubled past and are trying to get past it, or who are 8, 10, 12 years old, the same people are oh, no, I can’t do that because and then a list of lame bullshit excuses because they literally want nothing more than a perfect baby, practically fresh out of the womb, that they can screw up themselves take care of and love like they want.
I have zero problem with people like you who are interested in adoption. I’ll mock the ever loving shit out of the 2nd group, though, especially when they espouse pro-life positions and then refuse to do anything else to help someone else’s kids after they’re born because fuck you, assholes, if you didn’t want kids you shouldn’t have had sex, live with your consequences and you figure it out yourself and bullshit like that.
You are simplifying your “2nd group”. This 2nd group is made up of 10 different subgroups, some of which you would empathize with and some you would not.
Probably, but I think the size of the group of people who preach you should adopt and then will go to great lengths to either distance themselves from the idea of adopting themselves or adopting non-infants is much larger than the others.
The questions to be asked in Kansas (when the bill passes) are mentioned in the link in the first quote. Also of interest are the questions that were removed from the bill. The bill does allow for “declined to answer” responses.
I’m not opposed to polling to obtain such information (it’d be nice if the results were used as a guide towards improvements in education and/or social services), but mandating that everyone explicitly be asked every question (as opposed to allowing them to opt-in to a survey, with the provider having discretion about whether/when to ask about participating) is inappropriate.
I do appreciate the attempt to expand mandated surveys to vasectomies and ED treatment. If the state feels obliged to invade patients’ privacy, they shouldn’t be exhibiting gender bias in attempting doing so.