You would think the so-called "pro-life" movement would be thrilled to support something like in vitro fertilization (IVF). After all, IVF should be a good thing: It's the active choice to get pregnant and have a baby in spite of various health or physiological factors that were preventing couples (or women) from natural reproduction. It's expensive, and painful, and not always successful: but thousands of people choose it because they want to be good parents. In the opposition to abortion - that it's "baby-killing" or "ending God's gift" - the choice of IVF would reflect that positivity of life.
And yet, those anti-abortionists - you can't call them "pro-life" in most respects now they're not even "pro-fetus" - are perfectly happy nuking from orbit IVF as a medical option, just like they did in Alabama's Supreme Court ruling earlier last week.
It has to do - mostly - with how it's done: Harvesting multiple ova and fertilizing each one, freezing the embryos until one is needed, implanting it, and hoping it works. All those extra harvested eggs become troubling to the "pro-fetus" believers because in their world-view those embryos are now persons, and any potential destruction of those embryos would be an act of abortion. There's also the problem that an implanted ova may not take, which becomes in their minds an abortion as well.
I'd also argue the "pro-fetus" people are annoyed - jealous, really - by how instead of relying on God for the miracle of childbirth, people can rely instead on Science and fertility doctors to get it done.
There's also the rage against feminism, the fear that single women would choose IVF with a random sperm donor and avoid the emotional - and oft-times physical - complications dealing with men. God forbid the Patriarchy - "OBEY your husbands, ladies" - be denied or disturbed in any way.
But it all boils down to what these wingnuts REALLY want. They want control.
I mentioned before how I've seen them in-person protesting at clinics, driven by rage and shilling fearmongering images of bloodied fetuses. Eager to pass "moral" judgment on women and families they didn't know, just so they could have some insane level of control over how the world around them truly works.
In the Religious Right's obsessive need to end abortion as a choice, they will tear down everything else to impose their religious views - their control - on everyone else. They will deny rape and incest as a problem to ensure women can't get abortions from unwanted pregnancies. They will obscure the reality that pregnancies are not 100 percent safe, and deny how miscarriages, stillbirths, and ectopic pregnancies can happen in "God's perfect world." They will demonize women who suffer miscarriages and seek to jail any doctors foolish enough to provide any kind of prenatal care in these Red States under theocratic misrule.
The Religious Right are going after IVF because it's still a choice, one they can't control and one that dares question their foundational belief in personhood for embryos.
The Religious Right are going after birth control - something that actually stops fertilization, so it shouldn't affect "personhood" - because these wingnuts want their control over the reproductive act for every woman, even the ones - liberal Christians, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim - who don't subscribe to their religion.
The Religious Right will bust down the doors of every house in America to check on your uteri, women, never mind your personal rights. These same enforcers won't lift a finger to go after men who commit onanism and waste all that sacred sperm.
These same Religious Right will deny you any chance to get pregnant and have families on your own terms, through IVF or through personal use of contraceptives until you're ready - emotionally and financially - to have children. Because they want to control that part of your lives as well.
As much as they'd love to control your souls, and demand your fealty to their Church (not their God, because they will deny other Christians any say in what God truly is), they know in the end they truly can't. So they want control - political, physical, public - of everything else just so they can make themselves superior to the rest of us.
The Religious Right are doing all of this so they can sit themselves atop a throne to look down on the rest they view as sinners and un-persons.
Doing all this so they can judge us, before God judges them for the damage they've done to their neighbors.
God DAMN them, and for the Love of a true and just God drive every one of these Christianist absolutists out of our elected offices and courtrooms.
1 comment:
First:
https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2024/02/get-your-filthy-faith-out-of-our.html
and second, the vast majority of fertilized ova are aborted when they fail to implant in the uterine wall, so god is doing most of the abortions.
They can try to sue him, but so far nobody has been able to serve process on him successfully.
Even in Texas, he never shows up for his court date, so the lawsuits are all dismissed.
The right want to own women, full stop.
I guess there are women out there who go for that sort of thing, but I sure don't know any of them.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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