This is an absolute tragedy but is also very much a leopards ate my face moment.
Do not feel sorry for these people, though. People who can afford these treatments are wealthy and they certainly voted for the sort of politicians that would create this state supreme court.
Currently holding my newborn as I type this. Up until a few months ago, this little human being was a frozen embryo.
Both of my children were IVF babies, and I’m about as left leaning as they come.
Also, we’re not wealthy by any stretch. We ended up participating in a clinical trial that provided free IVF therapy (minus some misc costs).
I absolutely feel sorry for our fellow American citizens who are going through this horror, regardless of their political affiliation. Politicians are dealing in lives and livelihoods as if we average citizens mean nothing to them (spoiler alert, we don’t).
I should? I’m complaining about how people in a state voted in people who would do something as horrid and cruel as this is and I should expand my worldview? Maybe, just maybe, it is possible to look at the accomplishments of a group and judge them based on that. All of this “you should feel sorry for people in Texas” nonsense falls into this same category. Yes, I can feel sorry for individuals who are victim of these sorts of atrocities while still believing that Texas is a shithole state that shouldn’t exist. Alabama is no different.
Further, you take exception with my comment on wealth while admitting that you didn’t pay for it yourself. Seems pretty disingenuous.
Probably time to remind everybody the Judiciary branch can’t actually enforce its rulings. If they’re going to go full on religious crazy we can just start ignoring them.
Law gets enforced if power finds it useful to enforce. Ignoring it is not an option, for people actually in danger of having the law enforced against them.
Tinder in certain states will put up an alert, warning you that if female, by proceeding with the date, you may be liable to carry a child to term, and if male, will need to pre-deposit child support in an escrow account.
Isn’t classifying a gamete, but only the female gamete (egg/ovum), and not the male gamete (sperm), of being “children” and has personhood rights, a form of sexist law. I know the Land of freedom is no rookie in taking away freedoms of the marginalized, almost the norm, but now they are taking away male gametes from being recognised as persons. Imagine in one ejaculation in Alabama and having a murder count similar to Stalin or Hitler. The court will show it was premeditated because the person bypassed state restrictions pulling out during copulation, the accused thus commited mass murder. This goes against Genesis 38 and it’s Devine condemnation of coitus interruptus. Even the egg was unfertilized thus another death of a person was committed by the accused pullout game
Your argument holds no weight against a group of people (the current republican supporters) who have repeatedly proven to be misogynistic assholes who gladly vote for a rapist.
Cruelty is the point of their actions, not the side-effect - pointing out to them that their actions are unjust has no effect when that was their goal from the start.
My argument was not meant to hold weight, it was absurdist in its meaning by taking their arguments to the extreme and show its shortcomings. Trying to convince religious zealots that their religious reasonings is wrong is just going to make them double down and commit even more. That is why I make fun of their logic through comedy and hope even though I might not reach them I might put a smile on other open minded people.
I’ll need to do proper research, but to my understanding the embryo is an egg(ovum). I’m not sure at what point an ovum becomes an embryo, but I’m fairly certain it’s shortly after a sperm cell penetrates the outer layer and begins the mitosis.
An embryo results from the fusion of an egg and a sperm (both are called ‘gametes’), and although the embryo is initially more reminiscent of an egg than a sperm, it is not itself an egg (or a sperm). The person I replied to is conflating eggs and embryos.
So two gametes, male sperm and famale ovum, fuse to become a zygote or embryo. I just assumed their ruling meant the gametes because that is an ovum, and an embryo is a zygote
I haven’t read Alabama’s ruling, but if those embryos are legally children, then yes. Fortunately the destination state and the federal government do not agree, so you won’t have to worry about it unless you live in Alabama.
You know how I can confidently say that anyone who is against the right to choose hates women?
Because doesn’t matter how much they claim to love children, and how many shenanigans they pull like this one, I know for a fact that not a single one of them would ever in their whole life even entertain the idea of charging a man who masturbated with mass murder.
I'm not messing with that soft paywall. Are they saying that parents who let their frozen embryos go bad in the freezer are guilty of murder or manslaughter?
You don’t understand. This old book told me all the answers to life’s mysteries. WoOoOooo it’s infallible.
God it would be funny/sad if someone found a copy of Mike Pences auto biography 10,000 years after some cataclysm destroyed society. Than they started worshiping it.
My dad was one of those jerks that would build 30-40 priests on an Econ build and then push with them when you decided to try and crack that nut,
Poof there goes your army.
Not that he really knew what an Econ build was, or any of the other things. But he’d play this “I don’t know what I’m doing” act and get away with it, (and he wasn’t good enough to deserve a feudal rush. Just… annoying.)
It doesn’t matter if they aren’t Christ-like. Many, many Christians, including clergy and even pontiffs have committed atrocities. They still worshiped Christ, making them Christians.
If we were to play it your way, the Crusaders weren’t Christians, the Spanish Inquisition weren’t Christians, the Conquistadors weren’t Christians, etc. I don’t think that’s what you intend, but that is the problem with suggesting people who are not Christlike are not Christians.
Otherwise, we need to invent a new religion and put a huge percentage of people from the last 2000 years who thought they were called Christians into it.
If we were to play it your way, the Crusaders weren’t Christians, the Spanish Inquisition weren’t Christians, the Conquistadors weren’t Christians, etc
All of the above are Catholic, and the vast majority of Christians I know would agree that they aren't Christian.
Nope. That would be the orthodox christians you still find sprinkled around Palestine and Syria. The catholics are already roman “lets stabilize our empire with mixing religion and poltiics” brand of christians.
If you read the fallacy you’d realize that you fell into the false fallacy fallacy.
To quote your linked article:
No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect their generalized statement from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly.[1][2][3] Rather than abandoning the falsified universal generalization or providing evidence that would disqualify the falsifying counterexample, a slightly modified generalization is constructed ad-hoc to definitionally exclude the undesirable specific case and similar counterexamples by appeal to rhetoric.
There is plenty of countries with a christian background and still majority christian population, that wouldn’t even think to discuss such absurd policies. American nutjobs cannot be considered to be representative of christianity as a whole. Much of their nutjobbery is specific to them.
That is not the true scotsman fallacy though. I never said they aren’t Christians, i said that they are about as christian as, implying that they lack the qualities associated with it. Also i’m not a christian.
I’ve been thinking of them as antichristian. Not as in against Christianity, but as in antichrist …ian. From what I’ve heard the whole idea of the antichrist is supposed to be that Christians love the guy even though the guy goes against all of the lessons of Jesus, but he does the performative stuff. That sounds like what I see there.
It is absolutely an evil ideology and shut be utterly abolished along with all Abrahamic religions. Fuck the Constitution; they got this one dead wrong
to be fair, the (wrongful death*) lawsuit was because the hospital or wherever they were being stored at let the frozen embryos die off. It’s entirely reasonable to expect some kind of… protection… considering the reason for those to have been stored was so they might be able to have kids, etc.
*wrongful death is a bit much, mind you. But how far do you want to take the “guy beats a pregnant woman to kill the baby” types of charges? ultimately, I suspect, the issue here is that the religious nutjobs lack nuance. they see the world as black-and-white and can’t fathom a possibility where there were damages in this matter, but it wasn’t a “wrongful death” scenario.
From what I’ve previously read the agency that had the frozen embryos did not let them die off, they stored them properly in an industrial freezer kept at far below 0 temps. The issue was a person who didn’t work at the clinic snuck into the room with the fridge, opened it and then dropped the embryos and ran away (the article said the assumption was because the containers were so cold he got freeze-burned). There might be a case here that they didn’t do enough to stop the individual, or check on them often enough, I don’t know enough details to know, but it doesn’t sound like they just simply didn’t care or didn’t store them properly.
States have long had laws against forcibly ending someone else’s pregnancy and those have stood up even before Roe died. It’s not usually on the level of murder/manslaughter, but at a minimum it’s been treated as a destruction of property. You don’t have to treat the embryo as a person to charge someone with aggravated battery or something similar.
The main issue here is the broadness of this ruling (besides the whole quoting the Bible thing) which equates embryos with full-human life. It won’t change a whole lot in this case, the families could have still sued for negligence or destruction of property, or any number of other civil remedies of this was denied, but now it’s laid the ground work to do much worse things in the future.
Sorry for the confusion, the battery part of my reply was related to forcibly ending someone else’s pregnancy, which would have to involve some kind of battery unless it’s like poison or something, not related to the embryos in the freezer. There is no battery to those since they are not people.
I would suggest the facility was negligent in their security arrangements, as far as wrongful death (again, it’s a pretty dubious “if”, that it goes that far), it would be like somebody dying because the building wasn’t up to code when an arson came by.
My assumption is, though, that there’s a budget-rate warm body security guard; and between shit pay, shit training, shittier oversight… the guard couldn’t be arsed to care. (Alternatively, the guard was going to sell them for drug money.)
The good news for the facility… if their lawyers were any good in that contract they’d have gotten an indemnity clause and can pass that buck. (Liability is a bitch; and she hits hard. The security company will probably go poof unless they’re the size of G4S or Securitas)
In any case… personally, it doesn’t rise to wrongful death, but I can see a need for nuance. I would, personally, suggested the couple treat it as property, similar to a safety deposit box.
I don’t see how this isn’t prima facie evidence of a first amendment violation (presuming that the courts or state legislatures are bound by “Congress” being synonymous with “Government” as I believe it’s been interpreted)
telegraph.co.uk
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