This ain't it, chief.
That's rattlebrained, Mr. President. The heck are you doing coming out here with a take like that?
Well here's a take from me, free of charge:
Killing babies in order to make babies is wrong.
I'm going to guess Trump doesn't know the science, so let's dig in.
In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is used for couples that are having a hard time conceiving. Around 10% of couples haven't made a baby after two years of trying, and that's an absolute gut punch. To up their odds, doctors will try hormones and medications, but IVF is a way to bypass the middleman and make sure sperm meets egg in a clinical setting.
The problem?
Beyond the whole playing God thing (what a thing to breeze past!), they don't just fertilize one egg. A woman getting IVF may expect to have 12 eggs taken out of her ovaries. Those will be fertilized and grown in the lab. Around 55% of the newly-formed babies won't make it more than a week. Of the rest, there's a good chance one will be viable and put back inside the woman to grow.
The rest are either discarded or frozen - sometimes for decades.
Trump is spouting off about this because of the Alabama Supreme Court, which just protected these IVF babies with legal rights as human beings ... because they are human beings.
Everything else is a distraction.
- What about the couples that can't have a baby? Do you want them to be childless?
- It's not even a baby at that stage!
- Women naturally get rid of unviable embryos or embryos that don't implant all the time and this is no different! (The hacks at NPR literally made that case this week)
- Are you going to arrest people for miscarriages, too?
All distractions. The only question - THE ONLY QUESTION - that matters is this:
What is the unique creature created through the IVF process?
If the answer is "human," literally nothing else matters. You'll go to prison for years if you destroy eagle eggs, regardless of whether they are fertilized. But if you toss a newly-formed human being in the trash, it's okay?
At the moment sperm and egg meet, there is a new person. If we're just mindless meat machines and humans aren't anything special, then there's really no morality to it all and killing whomever you want whenever you want works under the law of the jungle. A petri dish is a petri dish.
But that's not how people work. You're not just an eagle. You're human. You are special. You are aware of things that no other creature is aware of and you can laugh/love/create/destroy in ways that no other creature can do. This is why the Right fights so hard to protect human rights from the encroachment of government tyranny.
But now the Constitution bros are out here clapping like seals for Trump without addressing the question of baby murder in the room:
The founders of this nation called it "self-evident" that a Creator made us and gave us rights above the animal kingdom. If so, every human life is sacred. It is something you cannot trade away. A man may give his life willingly for others, but you cannot take life in order to make it. Many evil things have been done with that justification, and every single time it's led straight to hell.
