First the crazy: Alabama has been calling embryos and fetuses ‘people’ for a long time. The latest ruling says that even frozen embryos are ‘people’. This ruling says:
“We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982)”.
source: archive: https://archive.is/fBJnL | https://premierchristian.news/en/news/article/created-by-him-to-reflect-his-likeness-alabama-judge-quotes-bible-in-embryo-lawsuit-ruling
USA Today points to Gorsuch as opening the gates to highly religious rulings:
The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause typically limits the role religion can play in government, but the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 changed the longstanding process by which it reviewed conflicts between government and religion. The decision to change that process was written by Justice Gorsuch, who said the court needed to rely more heavily on “reference to historical practices and understandings.” Parker, the Alabama judge, specifically referenced Gorsuch in his concurrent opinion.
source: archive: https://archive.is/cPjgw | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/22/ivf-opinion-from-alabama-justice-was-overtly-religious/72689378007/
Slate points out that by the Court’s own logic, both the ‘parents’ and the clinic should be charged with murder (as well as the person who actually dropped the embryos).
source: archive: https://archive.is/7l3vx | https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/abortion-bans-alabamas-anti-ivf-ruling-fail.html
WITH ALL THAT:
Perhaps it is a good thing that the whole nation now has a reason to take a long hard look at what it means to be a ‘person’. I’ve seen studies saying anywhere from 20%-60% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion; most before the woman realizes she is pregnant. This paper says maybe as low as 10%, but only if you aren’t paying attention: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5741961/
The spontaneous miscarriage rate varies between from 10% to 20% where 10% refers to late recognition of pregnancy and 20% refers to research involving routinely testing for pregnancy before 4 weeks or 4 weeks after the last menstrual period
This chart says there’s a 30% chance of miscarrying in the first week, with reduced risks after that: https://datayze.com/miscarriage-chart
Per Alabama, is God that invested in killing ‘unborn’ ‘people’? Given how likely it is for an embryo to naturally abort, can we ever claim “beyond reasonable doubt” that a pregnancy was ever viable?
The above Slate piece suggests the unborn be treated as property. That might work for cells you want to keep, but note that there’s a Supreme Court precedent that discarded cells are NOT a person’s property and can be commercialized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks#Consent_issues_and_privacy_concerns).
If we try to define when life begins, the Religious Right is sure to get deference. Look at how they’ve put “heartbeat bills” in place for embryos that don’t HAVE HEARTS! Personally, I don’t think setting a time constraint should be involved in defining life, but we’re here to chat and discuss.
Lastly, CNN offered an opinion that we could choose to be more like South Korea which ruled (as summarized in Op-Ed):
If embryonic or fetal life has value, the state shouldn’t start with criminalization. Instead, the government may have a constitutional obligation to advance its interest in protecting that life in ways that don’t limit reproductive liberty, by protecting pregnant workers, delivering better prenatal care or safe housing and reducing the rate of maternal mortality.
source: archive: https://archive.is/GV0M0 | https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/21/opinions/alabama-supreme-court-fetal-embryo-personhood-abortion-ziegler/index.html
The extension of their arguments is firstly that women who wish to avoid the risk of being charged with manslaughter or murder in the wake of a miscarriage must abide by behavioural guidelines which are contrary to science. i.e., to rest indoors anytime she may be pregnant.
The intended effect being to remove women of childbearing age from the workplace & from public life.
Secondly: to severely undermine reproductive healthcare, such that clinics shut, specialists flee, research is stopped & general knowledge regarding reproductive health & access to care plummets.
The overarching ideology being the production of new labourers & to increase desperation, so that Capitalists can avail of ever-cheaper labour in order to lure factories to set up in the US. This is the endgame of “bringing back our jobs” + anti-abortion rhetoric.
Wait: didn’t the price of labor drop when the majority of women stopped staying home and started full time employment? As I understand it, decreasing the workforce raises wages, which should keep factories from moving in.
Further, if you’re going to put restrictions on me when I am or MIGHT be pregnant, I’ve got a massive incentive to get sterilized before I have to worry about that.
Not if their policies increase the rate of reproduction, no, or at least, not for some time, because they know that unwanted & unplanned pregnancies increase the desperation of the women, both in the immediate sense & in slashing the numbers of women who can access education > good employment > sufficient societal security to unionise.
They intend to make it ever harder for anyone, but especially women, to obtain sterilisation or other means of reducing risk of pregnancy. This is why they chase reproductive health in general, even things such as IVF.
You already know these people to be dangerous ideologues - I’d caution against underestimating them or their grotesque vision.
When trying to bring this sort of thing up with a mixed group of people, I use the term “Republican low-wage policies” to describe a whole set of policies, and now I’m going to have to add forced-births to the list. Decades ago, it was just an insistence on denying citizenship to migrant farm workers to suppress wages, then add to that ‘no child left behind’ making it harder to teach more to students that could achieve more, then the whole home-school/charter-school movement where funds that used to go to public schools getting split and diluted, and so on.
And yes, I can see how it’d be hard to get sterilized without the health care and career to provide and pay for it.
i smell a whole lot of child support not being paid
ivf clinics can get some cash from deadbeat ‘parents’?
Ooooh. I didn’t consider if frozen kids are considered ‘alive’. If they are frozen for 4 years, and you pay to keep them frozen for that time, does that mean you’d only have to worry about 14 more years of child support?
I’m voting in absentia for my 400 frozen embryos. They’re all 18.
The only realistic possible upside is it brings out more voters who vote left and overwhelm even the worst gerrymandering in the state which leads to a blue wave. That’s it.
And democrats likely still won’t legislate abortion rights once in office, because abortion is just too easy of an issue for them to use as leverage on voters. They proved that under Obama when they had a supermajority and immediately abandoned their promises to encode abortion rights.
Not to be too favorable to the Dems, but they had a supermajority for a single month this century, and even then several of their congresspeople were elected as ‘pro life democrats’.
Pro-lifers always vote.
Pro-choicers might vote.
I had forgotten about their failure to codify that into law, but in the same breath, I doubt the situation was so simple. That said, I may be cynical enough default to your viewpoint.
Self intrest is a powerful motivation for anyone, let alone a politician.
Anyway, thank you for reminding me!
I’m thinking the ruling HAS to lead to conversations and demands to change the law. Yes, there’s a religious right that wants women barefoot and pregnant, but this ruling is going to prevent rich white religious women from getting pregnant. They’re going to complain.
Tonight’s “Alex Wagner” show on MSNBC had guest Michelle Goldberg hypothesizing that even ultra-conservative Alabama politicians are probably going to back off this ruling. She supposed they might decide embryos don’t count as a people unless they are attached to a uterus in a particular way … but the rich white religious wives might still have a problem with that limit when such embryos spontaneously fail later on in the pregnancy and everyone is back to being a murderer. Of course, those women are unlikely to realize how likely that is until it happens to each one of them individually (if it happens to someone else, that other person is obviously a ‘bad’ person or it would not have happened – so the only one who can be ‘good’ and still miscarry is oneself).
So how do we get the courts out of our bodies?
It may help convince people to move away from Alabama?
Which could be good for them personally, but bad for the country as a whole.
So many people aren’t privileged enough to move away. It takes money to move states. A lot more money to move somewhere not-archaic.
Yes, this is the realistic answer here. So many are just flat-out trapped.
Then again, so long as they continue to vote for these Republican jokers who keep doing these things, that’s kinda on them?
The heart-breaking part is, as you say, the poorer people that are not doing that, yet have no other options offered to them.
So my comment would have been better phrased as “want to move”. But… there are no easy answers here. People are going to literally die no matter what.
True. Keep in mind that there is lots of voter suppression as well there. But yeah, it’s on the people voting R.
And not fighting back, I suppose, though what are you going to do, realistically?
Remember that rally in Charleston, NC - the one where people announced ahead of time that they were going to kill people? then they wrapped barbed wire around their bats? and then they actually killed people? Oh right, I forgot, the other side failed to secure a proper permit so… “many sides” we are told:-|.
So it is not merely “voter” suppression, but suppression done in many ways - e.g. fear.
For the record, I never felt that you were fighting back. Nor have I been really disagreeing with you.
And REALLY good point. One thing we fail to realize is how much tribalism affects people as well. No one wants to stand out and be cast out of their tribe. When that happened throughout history, those people died. So when your friends and coworkers say one thing, the most you can do for your own survival sometimes is simply stay quiet.
To add to that, you have hopelessness. What use is trying to make change when the odds are insurmountable. I really feel for people living there. So many people must feel hated by those around them, and they feel like there’s nothing they can do.
Oh, by “not fighting back” I meant people in states like Alabama not doing anything to challenge the status quo (e.g. vote Dem). But me not fighting back against you is also a true statement:-).
And then I didn’t want you to think I was “blaming” those who did not fight back - they have good reasons, including fear of retribution.
One of my heroes George Carlin basically advocated for giving up and not voting at all. The caveat is that back when he said that, the “both sides-ism” actually more or less worked, prior to Newt Gingrich pushing to weaponize tribalism in the Republican party (at least some people trace it back to that pivot point, though surely the roots go much further into the hundreds of years, or millenia before USA even started, or even prior to us becoming homo sapiens:-).
All that I have managed to come up with so far - perhaps all that ever was really - is that while you can’t change everything everywhere, you can change yourself, and we are in fact responsible for doing at least that (although that interleaves with interactions with others b/c how will you improve yourself by just walling yourself off from society and reading all the time?). So, since I do not live in Alabama, I choose to be sad for them, but I will work wherever I happen to find myself at any given moment - and be glad that I do not live there.
So much this. Just moving one state in any direction can easily cost $20k, maybe $30k, and that’s if you live in a 400 square foot apartment and want to take more than a backpack and a suitcase with you.
“Just move” is often said by people who’ve never had to actually pay to move (and I don’t mean just into a college dorm room).
So, I live in Alabama and I’m not sure where any of these numbers are coming from. I agree with you in principle - that it’s unreasonable to tell people “you just need to move” - but for me has more to do with the fact that most folks that are most affected by these types of laws are already struggling, and job hunting in another state is difficult.
But moving just one state in any direction from Alabama still puts you in either: Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, or Florida. And housing prices aren’t dramatically higher in any of those states with the exceptions of metro Atlanta or possible the coastal or metro areas of Florida, or Nashville. Median housing price in MS is actually lower than in Alabama, somehow. And as for the cost of moving, most folks that would struggle with a move aren’t going to be hiring movers, they’ll be renting a Uhaul (about $400 one way) and getting friends/family to help them load and unload it.
That’s not to say that moving to another state is easy or even feasible for a lot of folks, especially folks that are already on the margins. I was just a little confused by the numbers in your post, lol.
Those numbers came from when I moved from Pittsburgh to northern Virginia in 2005. It was around $20kus for the whole thing (and yes, I had a 400 square foot apartment originally).
Ah yeah, location probably makes a big difference. Cost of Living is waaaay lower here, but so is median income so 🤷♂️
It will definitely drive doctors out, just look how Idaho’s maternity wards are doing
Yeah, or rather not doing, I remember hearing about that:-).
I also recall a story of a doctor in southern Missouri (east of Springfield iirc, so near Tennessee & Kentucky: think Lindsey Graham & Mitch McConnell) who succeeded in getting funding for a new institute / center… wait, let me rephrase this: he was a JOB CREATOR who BROUGHT IN HIS OWN FUNDING to start a whole new era of medical research in that part of the country, which is their stated dream right? (what Midwestern town doesn’t have as their top claim that they want to be the next “hub” for biotech/whatever?) He did not merely talk the talk, he SUCCEEDED in this endeavor.
And ofc he got death threats, for both him and his family. So, that was the end of that. He wanted to help them, but not at any cost. This was very early in the pandemic - one of the first stories like that (that I saw anyway) - but obviously it would not be the last.
Fast-forward to 4 years later, and the damage done to our entire nation’s healthcare system is incalculable. BUT NOT EQUALLY distributed - some areas are affected more highly than others. Some areas have roads, bridges, police, firefighters, teachers, doctors - you know, “infrastructure” - while other areas not so much. We are fast dividing into two Americas, and while we have always had facets (rich vs. poor, white vs. black, mean vs. women), I would be hard-pressed to think of a more noticeable dividing line b/t “has access to medical care” vs. “not” (plus the latter also has almost literal slavery - with more black people incarcerated under a for-profit prison system than were ever used as slaves).
And I could even halfway respect some of that - not the death threats to be clear but I mean like if they want to pass a law and convert themselves to all become Amish then that’s their own lives, so what right do I have to have any sort of opinion about how they want to be, you know? even if it means their own death, so long as it’s their personal choice - the main trouble being that these people are not content to merely make choices for their own selves, but have to impose it upon others. e.g. if they choose to “not pay for medical care” in their own, rural areas, but then they drive into the cities and demand medical care there - sometimes holding literal guns while they do it too. (after the repeal of Roe vs. Wade this attitude got a lot more obvious)
Anyway, yeah, it’s going to do a lot of harm. I suspect that was the point, behind one of Russia’s various disinformation campaigns, though “we” (Americans) are the ones dumb enough to have fallen for the tricks.
Any “good” that can be found in the logic of the ruling will be discharged by the fact that conservatives feel no need for their actions or beliefs to be logically consistent, only that they harm their chosen other.
Wealthy people that can afford IVF are now pissed off and likely to support Democrats?
No, wealthy conservatives are likely to travel outside Alabama for IVF, and continue to vote conservative.
Given that they’ve tried (and in some cases succeeded) to criminalize interstate travel for the purposes of abortion or transgender healthcare, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to ban interstate IVF services too.
They didn’t ban IVF, and don’t generally have a problem with IVF, they just have an uninformed and self-serving understanding of the process.
They think it’s just, “do fertilization in pitri dish, insert now-fetus-person into woman, get baby”. They have no clue about the success rates of implantation, complications, etc.
I’d still be pissed having to travel out of state so frequently
