Monday, February 26, 2024
GOP Created The IVF Ban - And They Have No Way To Fix It
For five decades, most in the Republican Party opposed the right for women to choose to have an abortion. Why? What was their reasoning? It couldn't be that they didn't believe women should have the same rights as men, since the Constitution guarantees equal rights for all citizens. The only justification they had was the belief that life did not begin at birth, but at conception (which meant the embryo was a child and aborting it was murder). But they didn't think that argument through to its logical conclusion.
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were "children". That's because in the process known as in vitro fertilization (IVF) an egg is removed from a women and fertilized with a man's sperm. This means conception has occurred.
This decision (which was correct if one believes in life beginning at conception) has had a chilling effect on IVF, and IVF clinics have stopped operating in Alabama. IVF is not foolproof and doesn't always work the first time. Many embryos are created so a woman can have a better chance at having a real baby born, and the extra embryos are frozen for future use if the first time results in failure.
But not every embryo survives the freezing and thawing process. If the embryo does not survive the process, has a "child" been murdered? Yes, if the Alabama decision is correct. And even if an embryo survives the process, not all will be used. What about the unused ones. If they are disposed of, has a "child" been murdered? Yes, if the Alabama decision is correct. Are the unused embryos to be kept in perpetuity? Wouldn't that be denying "children" the right to be born?
This is now a mess! The decision, based on life beginning at conception, is going to effectively ban IVF procedures in every state that bans abortion. And the Republicans have stated their desire to ban abortion in all 50 states because of their belief that life begins at conception.
Even most Republicans don't want IVF procedures banned. They know it is the only way for many families to have a child or children.
How are Republicans going to fix this mess? There is no fix if they truly believe life begins at conception. And if they don't, then there is no reason to deny a woman the right to control her own body.
This is not going to play well for them in the coming election. A majority of Americans already support the right to an abortion, and even more support the right to have an IVF procedure.
Donald Trump has been bragging to his followers that he is solely responsible for overturning Roe vs Wade (which led to abortion being banned in many states). He says he's responsible because he chose three anti-abortion Supreme Court justices. That makes him also responsible for banning the IVF procedure in Alabama (and in many other red states in the future).
The Republicans created this mess, and they have no way to fix it.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Trump's Policy Would Make Inflation Worse - Not Better
One of the biggest campaign promises for Trump and the Republicans is to lower inflation. They blame President Biden for inflation - even though the inflation rate has steadily dropped during his administration.
They claim the inflation is caused by the large national debt. They didn't believe that when they raised the national debt more than any other presidential administration by giving the rich (and corporations) a massive tax break and they were right in the past - the national debt has nothing to do with inflation. Inflation rises and falls in spite of how large the debt happens to be.
Inflation has two basic causes. The first is the cost of production. The second is corporate greed.
The crazy thing is that while Republicans claim they will magically reduce inflation, their favorite presidential candidate (Donald Trump) has already announced he will pursue a policy that would actually raise inflation.
He has said if elected, he will impose a 10% tariff on China. He imposed one on China during his first term, and then extended it to many other countries. He will likely do the same in a second term.
The problem with a tariff is that it is not paid by the exporting country. It is paid by the importer - and then passed on to consumers by raising prices. In other words, it is a tax on American consumers - and 10% is a rather large rise in prices.
Most of the inflation consumers are unhappiest about is the price of groceries. But what many of them don't realize is that much of the food in grocery stores is imported. About 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported - including 40% of fresh vegetables and 60% of fresh fruits.
A 10% tariff on imports would definitely cause inflation in the price of groceries.
The Republicans like to whine about inflation and blame others. Don't believe them. They have no cure for it. And their favorite presidential candidate would pursue a policy to make it worse.
Embryos Have Rights In Alabama - Women Don't
Having kids is nothing like they tell you it will be! How tiny they are, and how you can hardly see them without a microscope. How you can’t hold them, not even once. How they don’t have anything that could be regarded, even optimistically, as a laugh, or a face. Isn’t being a parent the best? Isn’t it laughably cruel that the Alabama Supreme Court saysthat this is already a child? That this cluster of hopeful cells that you have been dreaming could become a baby is actually a person already? You would be laughing, if you could stop crying.
What an appallingly cruel thing to say to people already going through so much to have a child, people who were prepared to endure the grueling in vitro fertilization process of treatments and injections and embryo development before their pregnancy could even begin. What a ridiculous thing to say to anyone with a modicum of sense.
Don’t believe the evidence of your senses. Embryos are children. Flour is cake. These acorns are an old-growth forest. This half-baked insulting nonsense of a ruling is justice.
You know what they always say about people: They are invisible to the naked eye and can be stored conveniently in vials in a hospital freezer. They are discernible only to God and the Alabama judiciary. You don’t need to feed them, ever. They don’t need books. They don’t need clean water or fresh air or sunshine — in fact, they couldn’t survive a minute outside the glass dish.
If we are being honest, they should probably be allowed to vote instead of women. (Do not worry about communicating with them! We know they would vote Republican, because Republicans are the people prioritizing their interests over those of folks who selfishly insist on taking up room on the planet, breathing and talking and writing letters to their representatives.) They are human in all the ways that matter — indeed, they are better, because they ask so little. Women, on the other hand, seem grumpy. Everyone who has a womb seems grumpy these days.
You underwent this process because you wanted to have kids? These embryos are kids now, in the eyes of Alabama law — and God, according to one judge’s concurrence, which is just as important. You could have sworn the reason this embryo was sitting here in vitro was because you wanted it to become a child, but this judge says that it is already just as good as a child. It’s so good, indeed, that protecting it from harm — even the harm that could happen in the complex process of trying to bring it to life in your womb — is worth shutting down every IVF clinic in the state of Alabama. Every subsequent step in the process — testing, implanting — everything that might result in its becoming what you naively thought was something distinct from an embryo, an actual child, must halt. Right now! Lest any harm come to children. The kind of children discernible only to these judges and, peering over their shoulder, God.
Another thing they never tell you is how deranging it is to try to argue against these absurdities. Someone points at a glass dish with a hopeful blob in it, and says this is a human child, and you say, “No, actually, that is not a child. That is something significant whose loss would be devastating because it could be a child nine months from now if everything goes well, but …” Ah, but in the eyes of God, this is the same! They say these things with straight faces. They say these things as though they were not destroying the very thing they claim to want to protect.
Because of this cruel, inane insistence on something that is palpably untrue, there will be fewer children. Three Alabama clinics that perform IVF have already halted it out of fear of legal repercussions. Would-be parents who had been planning the process in the hopes of meeting their children someday have been forced to abandon that hope. In the name of protecting unborn children! Not children, as you and I understand them — the kind of children who shriek with delight when you blow raspberries on their bellies, who need their diapers changed and have a favorite bear. The better kind, in the eyes of these judges. The kind that will never get to be born.
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Most Urgent Issues Facing The United States
The charts above reflect the results of the new Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between February 15th and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,421 registered voters, with a 2.6 point margin of error. The margin of error for just Democrats, Independents, or Republicans is about 4 points.
Today's GOP Prefers Theocracy Over Democracy
Robert Reich warns of the emerging Republican-imposed theocracy:
In a case centering on wrongful-death claims for frozen embryos that were destroyed in a mishap at a fertility clinic, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last Friday that frozen embryos are “children” under state law. As a result, Alabama in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics are ceasing services, afraid to store or destroy any embryos.
The underlying issue is whether government can interfere in the most intimate aspects of people’s lives — not only barring people from obtaining IVF services but also forbidding them from entering into gay marriage, utilizing contraception, having out-of-wedlock births, ending their pregnancies, changing their genders, checking out whatever books they want from the library, and worshipping God in whatever way they wish (or not worshipping at all).
All of these private freedoms are under increasing assault from Republican legislators and judges who want to impose their own morality on everyone else. Republicans are increasingly at war with America’s fundamental separation of church and state.
According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation — either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21 percent) or sympathizing with those views (33 percent).
This point of view has long been prominent among white evangelicals but is spreading into almost all reaches of the Republican Party, as exemplified by the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling.
It is also closely linked with authoritarianism. According to the survey, half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader powerful enough to keep these Christian values in society.
During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.
“We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”
A growing number of Republican voters view Trump as the second coming of Jesus Christ and see the 2024 election as a battle not only for America’s soul but for the salvation of all mankind. Many of the Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, carried Christian symbols, clothes, and signs invoking God and Jesus.
An influential think tank close to Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas into his administration if Trump returns to power, according to documents obtained by Politico.
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and remains close to him. Vought, frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.
Those policies include banning immigration of non-Christians into the United States, overturning same-sex marriage, and barring access to contraception.
In a concurring opinion in last week’s Alabama Supreme Court decision, Alabama’s chief justice, Tom Parker, invoked the prophet Jeremiah and the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote. “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
Referring to the Book of Genesis, Parker noted that “the principle itself — that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification — has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God.’”
Before joining the court, Parker was a close aide and ally of Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was twice removed from the job — first for dismissing a federal court order to remove an enormous granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state judicial building, and then for ordering state judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision affirming gay marriage.
So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has not explicitly based its decisions on scripture, but several of its recent rulings — the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe v. Wade, its decision in Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District on behalf of a public school football coach who led students in Christian prayer, and its decision in Carson v. Makin, requiring states to fund private religious schools if they fund any other private schools, even if those religious schools would use public funds for religious instruction and worship — are consistent with Christian nationalism.
But Christian nationalism is inconsistent with personal freedom, including the First Amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
We can be truly free only if we’re confident we can go about our private lives without being monitored or intruded upon by government, and can practice whatever faith (or lack of faith) we wish regardless of the religious beliefs of others.
A society where one set of religious views is imposed on a large number of citizens who disagree with them is not a democracy. It’s a theocracy.
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