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Nikki Haley sides with Alabama Supreme Court on IVF ruling: 'Embryos, to me, are babies'
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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politics
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Having gone through IVF, I 100% thought of those embryos as my babies. But it's still a pretty easy choice to save the already-born baby.
I don't know why you're getting voted down for sharing your experience. That's not how the voting should work IMHO.
I get that you get an emotional connection and can see them as potential babies, but not real babies right? Aren't a lot of embryos discarded once the ivf is successful? I haven't been through one so you tell me. Losing one or more of those would be very VERY less traumatic than losing one of my born kids. At least to me, losing an embryo, or a few thousand wouldn't even register.
Thanks. I understand the clinical difference between embryos and babies, yes. But emotionally you feel that connection after everything it takes to just have potentially viable embryos.
It's up to the individuals if they save or discard any unused embryos, if there even are any. It's pretty crazy how few potentially viable embryos you end with compared to how many were fertilized compared to how many eggs were collected.
It's months and months of other less invasive options to even get to IVF. And when you do get to IVF it can be months to years of giving your partner hormone injections and constant blood work to have a pregnancy, much less a pregnancy that makes it to full term and live birth. You can go cycles without any viable embryos. Or it can work on the first try. But in either case, it's already been a huge investment to get there.
So at that point, your emotional attachment is considerably different than for someone whose reproductive experience is simply having sex for a few months or unintentional.
Another factor here is the DNA health of the embryos, the younger you were when the embryos were created the healthier they are. When you're over 40 there are huge increases of various things like Autism and Down Syndrome. If patients had embryos from before that age but have since passed that age, and the embryos were improperly destroyed, you can't effectively remediate that with new cycles of treatment.
I don't agree with the Alabama court's ruling here, but these patients whose embryos were destroyed deserve restitution.
That's one of the shitty thing about politics these days, it's forcing every position into two extremes. Like here. I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider an embryo to be more than just any other mass of cells, mainly because of the potential it offers. But putting embryos on the same level as children who have already gestated and born seems bonkers to me, because so much development needs to take place and the results are not at all certain.
But anyone who tries to thread that line is going to get skewed by both sides. It's one thing to get meaningless down votes, of course, but another thing entirely to be a politician whose job it is to make these laws. How far would you go to try to make a sane law when you know neither side will ne happy, so both will work against you?
After the initial downvotes, I appreciate your discourse here. You're totally right about the extremes. I wholly agree that this was a bad ruling, and the predictable result is already happening. I just wanted to present it's not unreasonable for someone going through IVF to already think of their embryos as their babies, and that those same people can still rationally see the problems with rulings like this and be pro-choice.