Alexandra Petri is a humorist for The Washington Post. She wrote today about the crazy decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that a frozen embryo (a fertilized egg) is a child. Destroying the frozen embryo is murder.
She begins:
Having kids is nothing like they tell you it will be! How tiny they are, and how you can hardly see them without a microscope. How you can’t hold them, not even once. How they don’t have anything that could be regarded, even optimistically, as a laugh, or a face. Isn’t being a parent the best? Isn’t it laughably cruel that the Alabama Supreme Court says that this is already a child? That this cluster of hopeful cells that you have been dreaming could become a baby is actually a person already? You would be laughing, if you could stop crying.
What an appallingly cruel thing to say to people already going through so much to have a child, people who were prepared to endure the grueling in vitro fertilization process of treatments and injections and embryo development before their pregnancy could even begin. What a ridiculous thing to say to anyone with a modicum of sense.
Don’t believe the evidence of your senses. Embryos are children. Flour is cake. These acorns are an old-growth forest. This half-baked insulting nonsense of a ruling is justice.
You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary. You don’t need to feed them, ever. They don’t need books. They don’t need clean water or fresh air or sunshine — in fact, they couldn’t survive a minute outside the glass dish.
How did the Alabama judges know? God told them.
Trump came out against the Alabama decision, and most Republicans are rapidly backtracking. They say they want motmre children to be born, and IVF is good. Now that Trump has given his blessing to IVF, watch the Republicans pivot. only poor Nikki Haley is left out in the cold, because her snap reaction was to praise the decision.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So are those poppy seeds in my lemon-poppy seed muffin!
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Nikki Haley praised that decisions?
More evidence she’s just another Marjorie Taylor Greene and/or Lauren Boebert.
Oh, hell, anyong on the Freedom (fascist) Caucus also has scrambled brains infected by the malignant Trump fungus. If frontal lobotomies make a come back, the list of members in this group should go first.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/23/freedom-caucus-likely-to-play-a-bigger-role-in-new-gop-led-house-so-who-are-they/
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Was just browsing the Alabama decision and the facts of the case, and I was not expecting this:
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I expect Alabama will now charge the patient who wandered into the fertility clinic and removed the embryos with mass murder. Probably the death penalty, with the hospital and all the staff of the fertility clinic charged with aiding and abetting mass murder through their negligence. Clearly a big payday for the plaintiff’s lawyer. And death row will be very crowded once the people responsible for this mass murder are punished.
Which prison is the mass murdering patient being held (presumably without bond)? Did it say?
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These laws, continues to, objectify women, until we are, reduced, to, nothing but, INCUBATORS, or, contributing, OVA, and, there’s, nothing any of us, women can do, about it, as, the conservatives, take over the, U.S. government…
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I have a friend with a schizophrenic brother who also hears the voice of an imaginary being in the sky.
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On another and far more ennobling note:
Drop everything you are doing immediately and order a copy of
Greene, Gayle. Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm.
You can thank me later.
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Yes. Great book!
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Sooooooo good. Seriously. This is a brilliant and extraordinarily well-written book about matters that you care about a lot. My choice for most important, most engaging book of the season.
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American Alternative Factual Universes: Alabama
Alabama Jeebus,
with him you’d best align,
else the fundy Taliban
will smite thee down, supine.
Embryos are humans.
With sin a baby’s born.
Come meet the ‘bama bullies, folks,
where reason is foresworn.
The Goatherder’s Guide to the Galaxy as Law Library
Other states have lots of books
containing lots of laws,
but Alabama’s simpler cause
the Bible says it all.
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There are 165.28 million men in America. According to a recent study, 61 percent of them masturbate. A single ejaculate can contain 1.2 billion sperm. So, 165,280,000 x 0.61 x 1,200,000, 000 = 1.2098496^17 creatures just a short swim away from being humans. The Alabama Supreme Court should therefore immediately issue arrest warrants for 100,820,800 American mass murderers. Who knew there were so many? That’s larger than is the number of Trumpanzees!!!!
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Onanism.
Yes, those spilled seeds are would-be humans. Arrest all those men.
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haaaa!!!!
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Does that mean 39% lie?
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LOL.
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Oh.,,and The Seven Mountains Mandate…
You can believe whatever you like, Mr Parker. But let’s make sure you keep it among you and your friends. Okay?
Every day it’s a new nightmare.
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Santa Clara University
Reproductive Technology and the Vatican-
Instruction from the Vatican on, March 10, 1987, “condemned artificial insemination, IVF and surrogate motherhood under all circumstances.”
“This instruction was not only aimed at influencing the decisions of Roman Catholics, but also was intended to influence national legislation worldwide on biomedical issues.”
Evangelical opposition to IVF is very recent. In 2019 at the Global Gospel Coalition.org (2019), in the article, “Breaking Evangelicalism’s Silence on IVF,”
readers learn, “God bound sex and procreation together…no evangelical should separate them.”
It’s the Catholic long game, echoing the Great Hunger in Ireland when the axis of economic libertarians and the Catholic Church created a situation where 1,000,000 Irish died of starvation. For the Koch-Catholic church connection, read, Playing God by McConahey.
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“And God said, ‘Sex is between one man and one woman and another woman.'”
–Moms for the Liberty to Take Away Your Liberty
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Amazing what a lotta PR makeup can do to lift up your public image. Some serious know how at work here. She’s still serving on the school board.
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OK, this last is one of the weirdest of the weird claims you make about the Catholic Church. Catholics and the Catholic Church did not create the Potato Famine, unless, you have secret information, Linda, about how the mold Phytophthora infestans took over and ran the Catholic Church in the 1800s. During the time of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, which included the period of the Great Famine, there were severe limits on ownership of land in Ireland by Catholics. A great deal of the land was owned by a few Protestant Lords who, throughout the famine, continued exporting crops from their lands rather than diverting these to feed the poor Catholics. 86 percent of the land was owned by Protestants, who made up only 10 percent of the Irish population. From the time of William of Orange on, Catholic land ownership declined to very low levels, and many Catholics in Ireland, though the majority of the population, subsisted on produce of tiny plots of land. Penal laws severely limited Catholic land inheritance and ownership. So, Catholics were already practically starving when the famine hit, and then it got worse, and PROTESTANTS did almost nothing to stop the mass starvation.
So, blaming this famine on the Catholic Church is just BIZARRE.
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Catholics and the Catholic Church did not create the Potato Famine, unless, contrary to my knowledge, the mold Phytophthora infestans took over and ran the Catholic Church in the 1800s. During the time of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, which included the period of the Great Famine, there were severe limits on ownership of land in Ireland by Catholics. Most of the land was owned by a few Protestant Lords who, throughout the famine, continued exporting crops from their lands rather than diverting these to feed the poor Catholics. 86 percent of the land was owned by Protestants, who made up only 10 percent of the Irish population. From the time of William of Orange on, Catholic land ownership declined to very low levels, and many Catholics in Ireland, though the majority of the population, subsisted on produce of tiny plots of land. Penal laws severely limited Catholic land inheritance and ownership. So, Catholics were already practically starving when the famine hit, and then it got worse, and PROTESTANTS did almost nothing to stop the mass starvation.
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As is said, the victor writes the history.
Sixty years after the fact, David Kertzer told a very different version than the Church’s PR about Mussolini, Hitler and the Popes.
Starting with irrefutable facts, not biased reporting, researchers studied fertility rates at the time of the Great Hunger in Ireland and other neighboring countries. Ireland had much larger family sizes which researchers attribute to religious beliefs, in Ireland’s case, Catholic. A disproportionate number of deaths in Ireland during the Great Hunger were children. How the Catholic children were viewed can be learned from the book, Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland. A book review is published at Sage Journal (12-11-2020).
Digressing- the point I made was in reference to the post about a huge number of embryos- Robert P George wants them adopted. Other right wing Catholics overturned Roe and politicized right wing Catholics are working to eliminate birth control for religious reasons. Over population with food resources in distress causes starvation. Secondly, poor children have felt victimization in the Catholic Church which has been widely reported including in Canada and the US., as example in their orphanages. The views of the leaders were strikingly similar to the inhumanity of libertarians.
Moving on to the areas that can be massaged to change/affix guilt – depending on the reference, there is the following, the Vatican gave nothing in aid to the starving in Ireland, the Pope gave some aid but, stopped over a dispute with “ungrateful” Irish bishops or, Catholics in other countries heeded pleas and privately gave. “Who helped the Irish during the Potato Famine.” Independent reports concur that the international religious group most prominent in aid was the Quakers (protestant).
The Irish Times is a publication that doesn’t sugar coat the Church’s role in Ireland at the time, “The Catholic Church ‘took advantage of the prevailing distribution to increase its land holdings.’ ”
Yes, men with economic views like Koch are protestant, Catholic, other or not religious. To quash dissent in Ireland, the
despot alignment was with the dominant
religion (see reference below). The American revolution in the US was carried out by an armed refusal to comply with British trade demands. No Church prevented them from raising arms.
Digressing- the Catholic Church/its organizations in the US hold wealth in no small part because of taxpayers. For example, research found there are parishes that generate more money from vouchers than the collection plates.
History Ireland reported from a document of the English, at the time- “Ireland can never be satisfactorily governed until the influence of the Roman Catholic Priesthood can be brought to act on the side of the government. The funds that the priests depend on must be derived from the government not the flocks.” The flocks were too poor to feed their children and support the Catholic hierarchy. A critic at the time described the situation,
“Adulterous connexion(sic) between the Roman Catholic Church and the state.”
The question about what the church did in quashing dissent from the Irish against the overlords depends on who writes the story. One historical account In 1829 reported that bishops complained about priests, “the feelings expressed are extremely democratic.” A result of the complaint was a ban by the bishops of use of churches for political activities.
Bob, you should expect more of yourself than to be a person who ridicules and gaslights. If you are unable to be civil, you should refrain from reading and replying to what I write. You can rely on those at the blog as being equally able to make informed decisions about my sources and conclusions as you are.
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The next step will be for the anti-abortionist in every state in the Union wanting the same laws and court rules as Arkansas on this subject. And, the current Speaker of the US House of Representative, a staunch Bible thumper, will push for a national law to match that of Arkansas. I can see it coming now.
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Unfortunately probably won’t happen. But it would be wonderful if it did. A massive boon to Democrats.
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Agreed. Eventually the motives and desires become too obvious for people to ignore.
I’m hoping that Carlson’s Russia Interview/Travelog Experience will wake a few people up in the same way.
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Catholic activist and Princeton Professor of Jurisprudence, Robert P George, has written extensively and for a long time about embryos as human beings with rights.
The Alabama ruling is part of a plan to outlaw abortion in every state. Robert P George wrote- Adoption is the only ethical solution to the problem of spare embryos resulting from IVF. (Tim Busch’s National Catholic Register, 1-19-2024, “Defending Unborn Life in Political Action”
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I speculate that George anticipates that the process of adoption of embryos is so onerous that IVF will be abandoned which would bring him into conformance with Vatican instruction.
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I really, really wish journalists would stop saying that the embryos were “implanted” into their recipients. The correct term is “transferred.” Only the embryos themselves can implant into the uterus or not.
IVF is a game of survival. My first and only successful pregnancy started out as six frozen eggs, four of which survived the thawing process, then four fertilized with only two surviving to Day 5. Both survivors were transferred and only one survived to become my child. If this was a ruling in my home state, would my doctor and his staff be arrested for manslaughter because two of the four embryos did not survive past Day 3? I had a second transfer and the embryo did not make it past six weeks. One remaining embryo was frozen and luckily survived the thaw, but did not survive past seven weeks. IVF is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and the trauma from having lost so many embryos and pregnancies is devastating. The last two miscarriages were from the same cohort of eggs, and the second one was analyzed as having chromosomal issues. If there were more that were found to have the same, I would not have wanted to keep them frozen. But in Alabama, I would have to pay to keep them frozen or put them out for adoption so that another person could suffer the same loss and trauma I did. The implications of this ruling are devastatingly vast. How dare they make this decision for people.
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Thank you for writing your story.
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I share my story constantly with anyone who is interested in the process. I wish someone had told me about their journey when I was young enough to freeze my eggs. I ended up using donor eggs at great expense because I did not have an inkling I could be a victim of early menopause. With so many restrictions on reproductive health these days, I might not have ever become a parent if I was going through this now.
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Thank you, LG, for a dose of reality.
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Another thing to consider is that reproductive endocrinologists used to transfer multiple embryos beyond two in order to increase the chance of pregnancy. This practice was stopped after “Octomom” ended up carrying eight children.
I can see this ruling causing two scenarios: Potential parents will transfer as many embryos as they can in order to increase their chances of pregnancy while also increasing risks to the recipient OR they will only fertilize one egg with the hopes that it will survive past Day 5 and this would be the only one transferred, it if makes it that far. The chances of a full term pregnancy are much slimmer with one embryo and even slimmer with one fertilized egg. This procedure would be repeated over and over at great expense and physical, mental and emotional difficulty for the recipient in order to become a parent. As well, those who rely on surrogacy might have a harder time finding anyone who is willing to risk their lives with potential multiples or by going through this procedure and all its prep before and after-maintenance multiple times.
This ruling that was made by those who do not understand the process simply puts IVF out of reach of so many. I was horrified and shocked when I heard the news last week. Absolutely gobsmacked.
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Correction, I meant to say “with one egg,” not necessarily fertilized because once it gets past the zygote stage, it’s transferable. Some eggs don’t even present with viability during the process of fertilization to get to the point where they could be embryos.
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The idea that judges and legislatures meddle in medical and scientific decisions is horrifying.
When they are also bible-thumpers, it’s even worse.
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Tom Parker should be impeached and then found guilty for this egregious ruling based on religious beliefs. It does not serve the citizens of a country to impose a ruling that violates the separation of church and state. Congress gives the states and those who “rule” them far too much power over human rights. I can see giving states power over local commerce and environmentally-related issues as these can be location-specific, but the human rights of actual, breathing individuals should be protected on the federal level, full stop.
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LG, the ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court was 8-1. No doubt the justices thought they were in the mainstream of GOP thinking. They followed the idea of “fetal personhood,” which 125 Republicans in the US House support, including the Speaker.
A fertilized embryo is not a fetus.
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Thank you, LG, for sharing your important and moving story!
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