Frozen embryos are “children,” according to Alabama’s Supreme Court

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 416 points – Frozen embryos are “children,” according to Alabama’s Supreme Court
arstechnica.com

Frozen embryos are “children,” according to Alabama’s Supreme Court::IVF often produces more embryos than are needed or used.

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My wife and I had our son via IVF. We wanted every single one of our fertilized eggs to work, but they didn’t. We had one that did and we suffered every time one didn’t.

Fuck Alabama for adding on to the torment and emotional suffering families going through IVF and any kind of infertility suffer already. It’s just adding unspeakable cruelty again.

I've seen my sister going through this process for years. It's emotionally challenging, financially challenging, and risky to her health. She's had two ectopic pregnancies and had to be operated on twice. If she manages to have one baby she'll be happy, and there's no way it would make sense to implant all the other embryos given the health risk to her. So what would Alabama have her do?

I'm glad she doesn't live there.

Alabama would have probably let her die with one of the ectopic pregnancies tbh.

I have heard someone say in all seriousness that it's still murder to abort an ectopic pregnancy (which would just kill the mom and 'child' if allowed to continue)...

“But god can save her! If it’s part of his plan they will survive!”

/s if it wasn’t obvious.

I mean the odds aren't very different for the kid after the procedure. Why can't God save them after? Not even /s, why don't they ever have an answer for that? If we're relying on a miracle anyway, why would an infinitely powerful god need such constrained circumstances to make it work?

Murdering a woman to save a fucking zygote that will never become a human anyway. I'm starting to genuinely hate these people.

Friends of ours were going through something similar - they finally have a viable pregnancy, but it took many tries and failures. Fortunately we live in a state that isn't controlled by religious nut jobs.

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Then they should count as dependents, grant the parents tax breaks, be eligible for social benefits, receive child support payments, be counted as passengers when in mom driving in HOV lanes, etc.

Holy shit storing embryos frozen and counting them as dependants would be an actual life hack

Pretty sure that’s expensive as hell

That's why I freeze dried mine and keep them in the glove compartment for use in the HOV lane.

11k to 15k starting cost plus 400 to 600 a year.

So when talking about thousands of dollars of tax credit it might have a good ROI. The initial cost could probably be lower if the actual quality doesn't matter to you.

I was under the impression the yearly fee was much higher, but maybe I was co flaring it with the cycle cost of IVF which can reach 30k.

I love how the chief justice cites his god as his legal argument. What a sham. The god of the Bible has, thus far, failed to prove its legitimacy in any context, especially regarding a secular legal system.

I would think his reference to god would be a sufficient argument to nullify his decision? As you said the US justice system is secular.

Secular in theory, but lots of key elements have been taken over by religious nutjobs, so in practice it often isn't.

Nevermind forcing his god onto the rest of the population. If these yoyos get far enough, they'll start sending non believers to "reeducation camps."

I don't even care how retarded his logic is, it's inherently not allowed because we're supposed to have church state separation. That is the worst part to me.

I heard this somewhere: “You’re in an IVF clinic. It’s on fire and you enter a burning room. On a table is a large cooler with 5 thousand fertilized eggs, and there’s also a crying, injured five-year-old girl in the room. Which one do you save? You can only save one.” The answer for most people is obviously the 5 year old and it’s not a hard choice.

Every woman with a frozen embryo.

Get those child tax credits.

Don't have frozen embryos? Freeze some

Get those child tax credits

That is not legal. They have made embryos children when looking for people to put in jail, and not children when looking to give out benefits. Very convenient for the state budget!

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his religious beliefs and quoted the Bible to support the stance.

"Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself," Parker wrote. "Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."

wtf

Ironic that he quoted the Bible since the Bible is okay with abortion.

The Bible doesn't really say anything about abortion. The most convincing thing I've seen is that it values the life of a mother over that a fetus, but it doesn't say abortion is okay. Unless I'm missing something.

Not that it matters what this book says, I just don't think it helps at all to misrepresent it.

Numbers 5:11-22

If your wife is unfaithful, she should go to the priest and get a concoction to abort the pregnancy conceived with another man.

It does not say or imply that at all. Maybe in some translations/adaptations/interpretations, but not in most of them, and there is no full consensus.

20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”

It doesn't imply that at all? Please feel free to let me know what this passage is really about.

I'm guessing this is the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible. Which is not a consensus at all.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the Old Testament is written mostly in Hebrew and each passage has had thousands of interpretations and translations over time.

My does not say this at all was too strong in light of the different versions, but you can make the Bible say a lot of things.

Look at other translations, including in languages other than English and you'll see that the "miscarry" is pretty unique to the NIV.

You can check out the Wikipedia article on this passage to get an idea as to how complicated it is.

The punishment section of the Hebrew version suggests many interpretations where words are euphemisms for things related to abortions. Her thigh might refer to her sexual organs, the curse an abortificent, etc. I think those meanings still exist in other translations.

It might, but that's not enough to say the Bible is okay with abortions, and the rest of the texts might contradict that interpretation anyway. The NIV is pretty unique in translating directly into miscarry. If I search for those passages in English right now on search engines, I'm not even guaranteed to end up on that version, it took me a few tries.

It always strikes me as interesting that if the Bible truly was divinely inspired that there really should only be one translation and one interpretation. It should be incredibly clear and concise to everyone.

Even if it was truly was, humans are still faillible:

  • the texts are transcripted thousands of times, and errors made during transcriptions are eventually reproduced.
  • the texts can be modified voluntarily during retranscriptions, maliciously or not.
  • parts of texts are lost and found again.
  • texts reference other extinct texts or what was considered common knowledge that was not written down. So we can only infer from there.
  • Hebrew uses an abjab alphabet, which means no vowels, so certain written words can be different depending on what vowels you ascribe to them.
  • texts are translated by people with biases and objectives as to what it should convey (like the US Evangelicals with the NIV).
  • etc.

So even if the original text was given divinely, it would end up being distorted.

This is why I'm not comfortable saying the Bible is okay with abortion. It can be interpreted that way, for sure, but it's not a definite statement.

It literally gives you a recipe for one

At least the other poster offered up what is effectively a completely made up verse.

"effectively made up verse" LOL

Ah ok, so are you the arbiter of which stories in the Bible are literal, and which aren't? Because that story seemed very fucking literal.

Anyway, this can't be the first time you've encountered a contradiction in the text of your holy book (assuming you've even read it), so I'm sure you've already got some pretty effective ways of ignoring the cognitive dissonance inherent in your worldview... So go ahead and have fun with that I guess.

this can’t be the first time you’ve encountered a contradiction in the text of your holy book

lol. I'm not a Christian. You're just exposing your lack of critical thinking by thinking that, because I don't agree with you, I must be the exact opposite. My child, the world is not black and white.

You're projecting your struggle with cognitive dissonance onto me, make no mistake about it.

Does Alabama not do the whole "separation of church and state" thing? Lol

No the religious zealots here do not. School coaches require prayer before practices and games, same sex couples get banned from prom, kids at school get tricked into going to fun after school events that turn out to actually be evangelism stunts. A lot of applications to educational programs, gymnastics programs, and jobs ask about "leadership" which is code for experience as a church deacon or active evangelist.

The USA has never done seperation of church and state.

If we did, half the govt would be arrested for extremism and most churches would be terrorist organizations.

Just shit on this person. What a fucking hick. Just straight up pull your pants down and shit on him.

In the Alabama case, a hospital patient wandered through an unlocked door, removed frozen, preserved embryos from subzero storage and, suffering an ice burn, dropped the embryos, destroying them. Affected IVF patients filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the IVF clinic under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The case was initially dismissed in a lower court, which ruled the embryos did not meet the definition of a child. But the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that "it applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation." In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his religious beliefs and quoted the Bible to support the stance.

absolutely wild case

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Women of America. Get a freezer. Freeze your eggs and transport them home. On all future taxes claim them as dependents in perpetuity. Fuck these asshats. Game the system and make bank!

We had I think six eggs harvested and fertilized, of those I think two made it to blastocyst, meaning the cells doubled as they should by day five. The four that didn't double correctly were discarded. Did we commit 4 murders? Or does it not count if the embryo doesn't make it to blastocyst? We did genetic testing on the two that were fertilized, one is normal and the other came back with all manner of horrible deformities. We implanted the healthy one, and discarded the genetically abnormal one. I assume that was another murder. Should we have just stored it indefinitely? We would never use it, can't destroy it, so what do? What happens after we die?

I know the answer is probably it wasn't god's will for us to have kids, all IVF is evil, blah blah blah. It really freaks me out sometimes how much of the country is living in the 1600s.

Whether you committed murder or not is directly correlated to the amount of money you have and whether you are in the in-group.

Even before this I would get really pissed when people casually said "It will happen when the time is right. God has a plan, though it isn't one we understand." In Alabama I was recently at the dentist, getting my teeth cleaned to the tune of religious music, hearing the hygienist say this bullshit to me.

Tune in for the next episode of Conservative Politics! [Red state] says menstruating kills potential children? Find out next week!

Right, so pregnant or nursing once you’re menstruating! Otherwise you’re an illegal woman, not fulfilling your biblical purpose. Got it. This will be fun.

Alabama? More like Talibana, a’ight? Being ruled by religious extremists - in the 21st (ce) century - blows my mind. Are people still that backwards? Apparently, yes. Nothing wrong with a bit of private faith in the sky man if it helps you in life… but to be a fundamentalist is unforgivable.

So… all acorns are trees.

Just wait until everyone on the state gets IVF treatments but never implants them, dozens of dependants claimed on their tax forms for free!

Wait, if I move there, as a man, can I claim millions of dependents? I mean they're just unborn, they count right?

What about all of someone's future unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren? Public policy now requires fortune telling to see what deductions one is eligible for based on future events?

Someone should sue Alabama for keeping 'children' in a frozen state.

Monkey paw. "You're absolutely right, these eggs need to be implanted into women right away. Oh look right here, we have a whole prison population of slaves"

I recently read Neil Stephenson's book called "Fall", in which a significant chunk of the novel is set about 30 years in the future. At that point in time, large swathes of America are referred to as "Ameristan", because they are break-away territories ruled by evangelical warlords. It feels surprisingly prescient.

Neil Stephenson is a high effort author to read but the payoff more than makes up for it. I have yet to convince anyone else to read Snow Crash 😔

Even my dad couldn't convince me to read snowcrash😅 but maybe I'll find it as an ebook

It took me like 4 attempts and 100 pages before I was able to get into it but it dramatically changed my understanding of reality

I think about the Ameristan stuff and people being "facebooked" all the time since reading that book. In the time since I read it I feel like we just keep getting closer and closer to that reality.

More like the author read the writing on the wall for the past 50 years.

Not sure exactly what companies store these frozen embryos, but if the company closes or you pass. How are the embryos disposed of?

Does the company need to keep them frozen and alive indefinitely? Or is it murder if they are terminated by the company? What happens if the freezers/cooler breaks? Who is responsible for the now classified murder?

The woman. It's always the woman in christian fundamentalism.

This is according to a friend who had it done:

If the treatment worked and there were embryos left over, they waited X amount of time, I think a year or so, and if they don’t hear anything from you then they are destroyed.

My friend said she got a reminder but didn’t want to think about it, that it was too hard, so she never responded and assumes they’re gone. She said that to her, she never told them to do it, and that helps her if she ever thinks about it. She ended up having twins.

Should be a gofundme paid for by the morons who support this nonsense. It would be excruciating expensive, too.

In the UK you pay a monthly fee to keep a frozen egg.

This is an infuriating aspect of this case. The courts could have held the clinic responsible for this loss without declaring that all frozen embryos are children by invoking the "prime mover" concept. Other courts have used it in, for example, surrogacy cases. In short, that concept holds that it's the intent of the parent(s) that matters, as the prime movers in the process of bringing a child into the world, not just the mixing of some genetic material. Those destroyed embryos could have become children, as it was the parents' intention to do so. And if nobody intends to implant embryos, for whatever reason, without the intent to make a child, they're merely organic material, neatly sidestepping those questions.

But, of course, the court wanted to impose its religious orthodoxy rather than issue a sensible ruling. Now we have those thorny questions.

A group of Alabama residents decide to rob a bank. They put on their ski masks, grab their guns, run in, yell for everyone to get down and they start looking for the vault. They ransack every office, but all they find are some fancy coolers. Tired from the search and hot from wearing ski masks in Alabama, they open one of them up to find a bunch of cool refreshing yogurt. They drink it, cool off a bit, and then they go looking for the manager. They find this nice looking guy in a suit and tie:

"Hey, are you the manager of this bank?", they yell, pointing a gun at his face.

"Yes sir, I am", the guy is shaking and scared, but tries to keep calm.

"Take us to your vault, right fucking now!"

"Vault? Sir this is a sperm bank"

The biggest surprise to me is that Alabama has a Supreme Court.

So would they count as dependents for tax purposes?