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Joe Biden slammed an “outrageous” Alabama ruling that frozen embryos are people, imperilling access to IVF treatments in the state.

Republicans continue to win their war on bodily Autonomy.

#Joe Biden #Alabama #Frozen Embryos #IVF Ban #IVF #Bodily Autonomy #News

I wonder, in light of Roe's potential overturn, what happens to the fertility industry, which destroys thousands of embryos every year and currently has an estimated 1 million in storage.

Is the next step to demand women be forcibly impregnated?

What do these Christian nationalists do when they, or their wives, or their daughters find themselves unable to conceive without IVF? Do they think Alito's professed "domestic infant supply" increase will take care of that problem?

Or...do they bend their own moral rules when it comes to their own happiness and welfare?

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-04/pro-life-rep-tim-murphy-pressured-mistress-to-get-abortion

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/07/24/desjarlais-pro-life-congressman-who-urged-abortions-for-ex-wife-and-mistress-is-running-again

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/25/a-republican-theme-on-abortions-its-ok-for-me-evil-for-thee

I know personally, someone I know who tragically lost her daughter to a devastating genetic disease attempted IVF so she could have the embryo screened for the same mutation.

Well, that embryo turned out to have the gene for the disease too.

Did her vehemently pro life parents shame her? No, they didn't want the family to go through that, watching another sick child suffer and die. So they made an exception. For her.

Would they be so understanding if it was someone else's family? I doubt it. Because pro lifers seem perfectly happy to inflict that kind of suffering on other people, just not themselves or their loved ones.

It's not about empathy for the unborn. It never has been.

#roe v wade #roe vs. wade #abortion #women's rights #us politics #frozen embryos #unborn

Everyday there are women who get elective abortions. But then go on and have happy, healthy babies. Everyday there are women who don't seek prenatal care. And everything comes out perfect! Everyday there are women who use drugs up until they are pushing the baby out. And they still carry to full term. Everyday there are women who have three kids in foster care and are already expecting another one.

As if infertility hasn't taught me well enough just how unfair life can be. Lets pile pregnancy loss on top of that. I will never understand why women who battle and then win infertility also have to face pregnancy loss. It's probably one of the cruelest parts of life. I guess some people need to learn on extra more personal level just how unfair and cruel life can be. As I sit here typing tonight I now have more babies in heaven then I do earthside with me. I can't begin to tell you the torture of watching your positive pregnancy tests fade back to negative. And still having to do progesterone in oil shots. (they are shots to help sustain a pregnancy and are adminstired with 1 1/2 inch long needles intramusclarly) I still have bruises, lumps and sore spots but no longer pregnant. Was it worth it? Yes!! The chance of becoming a mom again made it worth it. Does it hurt like hell knowing now the outcome.. yes!

Women gear up for their frozen transfers researching meds, protocols, best vitamins etc. So much prep work. So many pills. So many shots. So many blood draws and uncomfortable ultrasounds. So much money. (After all none of this is free!) And there's crackhead susie up the street that got pregnant while trading sexual favors for herion and she gets to have her baby. Just so the baby ends up in the system and she just keeps having them. Why can't people like her have infertility? Now I'm not saying babies don't deserve to live, I just don't understand the process of life deciding who is deserving of a earthside baby, that's all.

#Infertility #frozen embryos #chemical pregnancy #pregnancy loss #secondary infertility #ttc with pcos #infertility sucks #baby loss

Egg update

One embryo transferred yesterday!

Four embryos in the freezer!

The remaining two didn’t divide/developer adequately.

#ttc #project fryd #ttc over 20 #ttc over 25 #ttc over 30 #egg #embryo #frozen embryos #embryo transfer #go embryo go

#my so called life #frozen embryos #jordan catalano #jared leto #thirty seconds to mars #30 seconds to mars

By casting excess embryos as ‘little frozen orphans’ that needed to be ‘saved’ these programs push an alarming view of personhood

Inge Oosterhoff at The Guardian:

As soon as they arrived home, Tyler, seven, and Jayden, three, rushed to a small green tent perched on the living room table and pressed their faces against its mesh windows. Inside, several gray cocoons hung immobile as the boys’ eyes eagerly scanned them for the slightest sign of movement. “We’re waiting for butterflies to emerge,” explained their mother, Alana Lisano. “It’s our little biology experiment.” Within seconds, the boys were off to play with their cars, having no patience for such waiting. But Tyler and Jayden, Alana told me, were like those butterflies not so long ago, suspended in a different kind of stasis for two decades. Technically, they existed long before Alana met her husband, Steven Lisano, in veterinary school. Before they got married, tried to get pregnant and learned that Alana’s eggs were of such poor quality that even in vitro fertilization probably wouldn’t help. And before they attended an event at their Fort Collins, Colorado, church in 2014, where a representative of Nightlight Christian Adoptions described to them how countless embryos were waiting for a chance to be born, like little frozen orphans, in fertility clinics and storage facilities all over the country. By then, the embryos that would become Tyler and Jayden had been in cryopreserved storage for nearly 18 years. Alana and Steven had never truly considered the implications of freezing embryos when you believe that life starts at conception. As veterinarians, they were familiar with the science. After all, embryo freezing was developed to breed livestock before being applied to early human IVF practices in the 1980s. They knew eggs were fertilized with sperm in a petri dish, left to develop into embryos over several days, and frozen in liquid nitrogen to potentially be transferred to a uterus at a later date. What they didn’t know was that Christian programs in the US allowed them to “adopt” frozen embryos, and possibly, if they were lucky, have them grow into babies that Alana would give birth to. [...]

‘God’s plan’ for each embryo

Few Americans contemplate the fate of excess embryos until they start the IVF process themselves. Only then do they have to decide whether to freeze any remaining fertilized eggs for future use, as most patients do, before discarding them or donating them to science. Some might even opt to donate them to other patients. Whatever they choose, the decision is usually a deeply personal one. But if the anti-abortion movement has its way, they might not have a choice at all.

In February 2024, the Alabama supreme court cited biblical passages to argue that embryos should be legally recognized, not as personal property, but as “extrauterine children” with rights equal to those of children. The ruling upended the local IVF industry, as clinicians handling embryos feared being sued under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Several Republican leaders including Ted Cruz and Donald Trump quickly vowed to preserve IVF access, and Alabama lawmakers passed emergency legislation to protect medical staff from lawsuits. At the same time, prominent Christian right leaders and conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and Students for Life of America, celebrated the ruling. Some called to extend the legal rights of embryos and expressed their fervent desire to restrict IVF nationwide, arguing that the regular testing, freezing and discarding of embryos makes IVF incompatible with Christian values regarding the sanctity of “unborn children”.

The problem with this position is that IVF is immensely popular in the US, and is widely supported by Christians. Some consider it manifestly “pro-life” – after all, children are born from it. For those struggling to conceive, losing IVF as an option would be devastating, especially as domestic and international adoption of infants and toddlers has become increasingly difficult. This may be why Christian right leaders who oppose IVF have also begun to direct their followers towards a seemingly heaven-sent alternative: the relatively niche practice of embryo “adoption”.

Embryo “adoption” programs actively promote the view of embryos as “preborn” children, all equally deserving of a chance at life, and match mainly white Christian families who have excess embryos from their own IVF journeys to others looking to conceive. In casting the process of embryo donation as adoption, the practice takes a distinctly evangelical view of freezing and storing embryos, said anthropologist Dr Risa Cromer.

“Cryopreservation disturbs what evangelical supporters of embryo adoption call ‘God’s plan’ for each embryo,” Cromer wrote in her 2023 book Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics. What concerns them is the testing, discarding and indefinite storage of embryos; they don’t tend to view cryopreservation itself as especially problematic, as long as God’s divine plan for each embryo is allowed to manifest. In order for that to happen, all embryos in storage should be thawed and transferred “from cold freezers into warm wombs”. The more Christians partake in this mission, evangelicals believe, the more frozen embryos can be “saved”.

Dr Jeffrey Keenan, president and medical director of the non-profit National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC) in Knoxville, Tennessee, claims he has seen more than 1,000 babies born through its embryo adoption program since 2003. His hope is that “loving homes” are found for the estimated 1.5 million embryos currently cryopreserved in the US and that fewer end up in storage in the first place. “Ultimately, our dream is to put ourselves out of business,” he said.

[...]

The Christian right ‘end goal’

Brianna and Kathy Anderson flew out from California to Colorado to meet Tyler Lisano in the summer of 2017, when he was just three weeks old. Alana and Steven were waiting for them at a restaurant with Tyler in a car seat, covered with a blanket. “I couldn’t wait for her to pull the blanket back and see this baby that I’d thought about and prayed for for so long,” Brianna said. Holding him felt surreal, as if she was holding her twin brother, John. With Doug’s big eyes and round face, Kathy thought he looked just like her twins when they were born. Because Tyler was delivered through an emergency C-section, Alana was advised to wait two years before the next embryo transfer if she wanted to deliver vaginally. But, as Alana put it, “God had other plans.” She became pregnant with a biological daughter, Hannah, born in July 2019. They transferred the second embryo two years later, and Jayden was born in June 2021. When Brianna got married in San Clemente in the summer of 2022, Hannah, Tyler and Jayden walked down the aisle as her flower girl and ring bearers.

The Andersons and Lisanos are part of a growing cohort of Snowflakes families eager to spread the gospel of embryo adoption. But changing attitudes toward IVF among Christian leadership puts them in an uneasy position. During its annual gathering in Indianapolis last summer, months after the Alabama supreme court’s ruling on embryonic personhood, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) introduced a headline-making resolution about IVF: the “continued freezing, stockpiling and ultimate destruction of human embryos” outside the “embodied union of husband and wife” makes IVF treatment incompatible with core Christian values, it argued. Even among Southern Baptists, this was controversial. Several members whose own children or family members were born through IVF gave emotional testimonies, pleading with the more than 10,000 delegates present to vote against the resolution. It passed with a clear majority.

The Christian Right’s war on IVF, at least in some parts, is a very disturbing trend of where the “fetal personhood” movement is headed.

#IVF #Abotion #In Vitro Fertilization #Embryos #Frozen Embryos