I just read the Alabama Supreme Court’s verdict on this case and holy crap the Chief Justice’s concurrence would have seemed over the top in The Handmaid’s Tale.
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I love that he is citing the 2022 constitution as if its some divine and historical document.
i’m just glad someone is attempting to legitimize the age old abortion internet question of; if you’re in a burning building with a tray of embryos and one live crying 3 year old which do you feel morally obligated to save if you can only save 1. and now we know the answer in alabama you better save the tray.
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Sperm are men. Duh. Now eggs….
Providers will stop doing the procedure because they don’t want the hastle of having to store them forever and ever. Store the eggs, maintain the records, find someone to take all of them over for you if/when you leave the practice, etc. And, if intentional destruction is murder, is negligence some lesser form of homicide? How many backup systems do you need in case of a power outage? What is your responsibility if a hurricane is rolling in and might flood your facility? What are the med mal and other insurance premiums going to be when you are taking on this kind of long term liability to so many “unborn lives”?
Now, some of these risks are already inherent in the IVF field but (1) extending the amount of the liability (more eggs and more time) will shift the risk/reward calculation and (2) being open to criminal liability is a game changer. Lots of people who will take financial risks won’t risk jail time.
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And since a big chunk of the IVF market is uppity women who think they want an education and an established, successful career before having children rather than marrying young, popping out kids right away, and staying home like God intended, we need to do what we can to discourage such heretical behavior. That it’s self-consistent with our slut-shaming abortion stance, all the better.
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Lock me up for child abuse.
Doug Jones beating Roy Moore must have just been Alabama’s dead cat bounce.
The problem is, you’re looking at it like a rational, logical person would look at it.
You have to throw all that out of the window and look at it as someone who genuinely believes that a woman’s only job is to be subservient to her man, pop out babies, and take care of the house. Women are never independent beings, nor should they have that agency.
IVF, birth control, abortion, all that gives them agency. See MrWookie’s post.
We’ve already seen doctors who are unclear on what their states’ laws actually say, so they refuse to perform lifesaving procedures until t’s almost too late. Extend that to IVF and the potential legal hassles of providing it become just too much for any practitioner to bear.
Bigoldnit provided some good examples.
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It took 5 women coming forward calling Moore a pedophile creep and a story about him being banned from the mall for cruising for teenage girls for Doug Jones to squeak out a 22,000 vote margin of victory, and even still Jones lost in 6 out of Alabama’s 7 Congressional districts.
Yes, she did. That’s because she actually answered the question.
All of the stuff you wrote is obvious and not something anyone really disagrees with, including me. It also wasn’t really a response to the question that I asked.
You could be right about this, but IVF is a lot easier to work around than abortion, imo.
First of all, as far as storage is concerned, one easy solution is to store the embryos in a non-crazy state. Yeah, this would probably increase the cost some, so maybe some people would get priced out. But unlike abortions, there is A LOT of money in IVF. I think big IVF will find a way to work around this a lot more easily than abortion laws.
None of the above is to say that I agree with these laws or think they are a good idea. I just think they will likely prove to only be a small impediment. Hopefully, I’m right, but I guess we’ll see.
Sure, there are probably work arounds. But every work around adds time, $, and risk to the procedure. Ex. storing the eggs further away increases transit time which increases the costs (as you said) (and also increases the risk of something going wrong in transit) of retrieving the eggs if a couple comes back in a few years and wants another round of IVF. And what do you do if/when Alabama passes a law saying all eggs that were initially fertilized in Alabama must be stored in a facility licensed in Alabama and makes it hard for out of state facilities to get licensed?
Some folks will be willing to work around the hurdles but others won’t. So fewer providers will exist. And the ones that remain will have to charge more because of the costs associated with the work arounds (so fewer people can afford the procedure).
Eta: and the real clustereff isn’t even the IVF procedure. It’ll be all the random legal nonsense that spins off from having established that these fertilized eggs have a right to life. As just one example, I think I could make an argument that, after a certain period of time, if a couple has not used the eggs, that some other couple should be able to adopt them and have them implanted. After all, if they have a right to life and the bioparents and allowing them to achieve that potential, isn’t it in the best interest of the child to be given to another loving couple?
There are already existing tissue banks across the country that deal with these issues without too much difficulty. They’ve already got freezers and protocols in place. They’re not storing embryos, but they easily could. Agree that it will increase the cost a bit, possibly the risk of errors slightly, but I’m not sure it’s that much.
Again, this is a bit different from abortion. For most abortion providers, abortion is one of a variety of women’s health care services they provide. With IVF, most of it takes place at dedicated, specialized fertility clinics where fertility treatments are pretty much all they do. And they make lots of money. Sure they might just not offer IVF and offer other fertility treatments, but their incentives are very different from the saints who run abortion clinics in underserved areas.
Here’s another thing to consider. Right now there is very disparate access to IVF. I’m generalizing a bit, but it’s something mostly well-off people do. I believe that holds true even in states which mandate insurance coverage of fertility treatments (part of the issue is those mandates don’t end up covering everything a lot of the time). So even prior to this development, it’s mostly people with significant means who are actually having IVF done. If you tell these people they have to add several plane tickets to their total cost, I suspect nearly all of them can and will do it. Some of them do it now already. For example I have a have a friend who drove 3hrs to a neighboring state because it had a more well-regarded fertility clinic. There was one that was perfectly reputable about 10 min from his house.
This is a bit different from abortions, where the trip out of state is a massive hardship, especially when things are so time sensitive. With IVF, generally the people getting it have the means and incentive to work around the problem themselves. Sure, this might be the deciding factor for a small number of people, but I really do think that number is small.
Yeah, I can see that and similar stuff happening. Maybe that alone will deter people from doing it, but I think most people for whom that is an issue will just buy some plane tickets. Does it suck that they would have to do that? Absolutely. Will it stop them? I suspect that in the vast majority of cases it wouldn’t (unlike abortion).
Just to be clear, I still think this legal interpretation is terrible, and obviously I don’t support it in any way, shape or form.
I’ve had a long day and I don’t want to snap at you because I know that overall you are on the correct side of this issue. That being said, I’m a little frustrated because one of the big dynamics that ultimately led to Dobbs was that all the little hurdles and precursor restriction that laid the foundation for Dobbs were minimized by a lot a folks (mostly wealthy and many, but not all, of them men) who downplayed the seriousness of each baby step because some abortions were still happening, some clinics were still open, and workarounds existed. That sense of complacency and optimism is kinda what got us into the Dobbs mess, so I just can’t be as blase as you when I see the vice get tightened yet again around reproductive freedoms. I hope you’re right, but the costs of being wrong just feel too high to me for me to personally be as sanguine as you are.
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I think I’m just being a realist. Don’t mistake my thinking that the consequences might not be so bad for thinking that nothing should be done or that this is acceptable. It’s not. It should be fought as hard as possible. I definitely don’t want complacency.
I guess if you’re saying that my merely posting that it might not be so bad could unintentionally inspire complacency, I’m not too worried about that. Hardly anyone reads this forum and I presume most here are not that easily swayed. I certainly wouldn’t want any politician saying, “Don’t worry, it really won’t be that bad.”
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Discouraging women from having children is just going to make the country even browner since we will have an even greater need to turn to migration for growth.
When you take this to its logical end, every time a fertile man gets an erection and there isn’t a breedable female available, potential life is destroyed.
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Saw a column a long time ago (think I was in high school) that the gleam in a man’s eye demanded completion of procreation. Otherwise why would god made the man have the gleam? Obv satirical and a little less crude than my phrasing.