Life is defined as “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death”
None of these apply to embryos by themselves. Only when they’re implanted do they gain the capacity for these things.
If you couldn’t recognise the species even under a microscope, then no, it’s not a person.
Cryopreservation of embryos is the process of preserving an embryo at sub-zero temperatures, generally at an embryogenesis stage corresponding to pre-implantation, that is, from fertilisation to the blastocyst stage.
I remember when as a kid in the late 90’s, watching Stargate, I thought the US was cool. (Should’ve realised back then those were mostly Canadians in it, lol.) Now it seems like pure insanity over there.
This seems like it has ramifications far beyond IVF.
What happens to the morning after pill?
What happens when an embryo doesn’t implant correctly? Or when a woman miscarries at 10 weeks? Will the woman be blamed based on myths about what causes miscarriages? Will a woman who exercised strenuously be accused of manslaughter or murder?
For these people, the answer to all of those is: yes, outlaw birth control and prosecute women for miscarrying.
Fascism doesn’t have to make sense and the cruelty is the point.
However “these people” aren’t a majority. Even in the US, and even in conservative states, the Republicans have faced legislative loss after legislative loss due to the overturning of Roe v Wade. This is one of the reasons why it’s particularly important to go out and vote, because conservative institutions are acting even crazier than their usual electorate and need to be put in check.
Unfortunately, “these people” seem to have taken over the Alabama Supreme Court and, possibly the US Supreme Court (we’ll see how they rule when this gets to them).
Hopefully, since Alabama’s Supreme Court justices are elected, they will be voted out over this ruling. Also, hopefully rationality will prevail at the US Supreme Court.
conservatives like to squeek “that’s against god’s will” but when conservative needs a heart stent or pacemaker to keep him alive, then god’s will is not an issue. when conservative needs a kidney transplant, cancer treatment, or even glasses - there’s no questioning against how god created their bodies.
as always, there’s no biblical preachings when their asses and their life comfort are in question.
I have begun to interrupt myself on the many, many occasions when I realize the American Right does not care about ideological inconsistency and that I cannot better understand them or help anyone by recognizing them. It’s no fun but it’s less taxing than trying to understand their contradictory opinions.
By extension, even something as trivial as wearing clothes is against gods will. If their god didn’t want people to see everyone in their birth suit, then we would’ve had in built clothing that wasn’t form fitting and had a sac of air to turn everyone into a blob.
This just made me realize something. Hatred of knowledge is baked into the Bible.
Clothes weren’t a trivial thing for Adam and Eve. When they ate fruit from the tree of knowledge they learned that they should be ashamed of their nakedness and began wearing “clothes”. That was what tipped God off to the fact that they had eaten the fruit and is why they were kicked out of Eden.
So, according to the Bible, wearing clothes literally is against the will of God. Everything else we do with our knowledge is too since the ability to have knowledge derives from eating that fruit.
That’s some good pedantry. “The tree of knowledge” is common shorthand for “the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. For example, take christianity.com.
Edit: I didn’t mean to ignore your real point. It seems to me that “knowledge of good and evil” is what leads people to oppose things like IVF. They believe that they understand what is good and what is evil and are imposing their opinions on everyone else.
Your argument appeared to be predicated upon “knowledge”, not “knowledge of good and evil”, hence the need for clarification. There is of course more to knowledge than good and evil.
I read some bickering about this amongst conservatives, and the reasoning seems to be:
Conception should occur from sex because of the love between husband, wife, and God or something
Typically, they’ll harvest(?) multiple embryos, check if they are viable or have genetic abnormalities, then discard those that aren’t viable or will result in major disabilities. To them, this is killing those unviable/unhealthy “babies”. Sometimes the couple will freeze multiple embryos as backups, but not need them after a successful pregnancy (or more). Those microscopic globs of cells that they call babies are then “murdered”. Their point is that this results in more deaths than lives.
I’m curious what their opinion would be if a woman wanted IVF after 5 miscarriages, was unable to get the treatment, and went on to have 7 more miscarriages, still without having a successful birth. To be real, fundie couples who refuse contraceptives and are hell bent on having a child could go through many more miscarriages than that.
The proclamations they make are all to get their way and not about religion at all. These people grab at anything to pass laws they want.
Alabama claims destroying embryos is against God’s will yet not long ago they executed a prisoner using nitrogen gas which caused that person to suffer for several minutes before dying. The state claims it was a success. If they were so concerned with God’s will they shouldn’t have done that.
Scientific discovery, cars and antibiotics are not against Christian beliefs but I’m sure if a person singles out a single passage, then twist and spin it you could make life itself blasphemous.
These government folks passing crap laws are just using anything they can to get their way, similar to how children behave.
As always, the intent is to make it more difficult for normal people to exist. Healthcare suffers, women suffer, the poor suffer, and republicans cheer. All joking aside, both sides are just as bad as the other, right fellow Americans?
To save some people a click, growth hormone apparently used to be extracted from the brains of human cadavers in the UK and some children treated with this later developed Alzheimer’s, some of them as early as their 30’s.
Worth reading the whole article, very interesting!
what’s fun is for all this extra money we get a lower (and dropping) life expectancy and a higher infant mortality rate. that’s right, we pay more to bury our kids and then die sooner. FREEDOM BAYBAY!
oh it’s about the money. it’s about funneling money from both the government and directly from the citizenry into the hands of private medical death panel operators
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