Great take. Everyone once in a while, polarization is helpful. It feels like at least on this issue, the theocrats will make themselves into a nice punching bag.
I have to say, that from my point of view in the more liberal tribe, I appreciate Richard because he does actually think about things pretty carefully from points of view that I don’t otherwise encounter much, and doesn’t very often succumb to the temptation to bait the likes of me in framing ideas and positions. So, I do read him almost as regularly as I read The Bulwark as well as a lot of more liberal (mostly) Substack contributors. Thanks Richard!
In this particular case, I did have a hard time not thinking that some of what he was saying here was a bit tongue-in-cheek, especially the stuff about the establishment in law of such “Catholic” ideological extremism being helpful in keeping liberals (or at least elite liberals —who do, by the way, control most of our institutions and have since the “managerial revolution became a thing) on track to support increased biotech engineering of fetuses into “superbabies,” etc.
The fun thing about Richard is that for me, at least, many of his most salient observation do, at least initially. strike me as subtly “tongue-in-cheek,” which has perhaps the desired effect of giving me pause by getting me to think harder about what he’s saying. And often, I am happy to report, he succeeds. That’s a rare gift.
The single act that did the most to ensure access to genetic screening was Justice Thomas using the potential to preferentially abort members of protected classes as an argument against abortion.
Until then I think it wasn't totally settled which way the left would go but no one on the left is going to go near Thomas's pro-life argument. As long as people like him keep making it we don't need dumb rulings about IVF.
I highly advise reading the AL SCT opinions before opining on them - they aren't "anti-IVF", unless to be "pro-IVF" you have to think that clinics that don't secure embryos and let random people wander about taking embryos out of cold storage and dropping them on the floor is a good thing.
The case involved a question of statutory interpretation and all but the Chief Justice's concurrence are very reasonable opinions that come to different conclusions about how to interpret the particular statute in this particular context. (The Chief's is a rather unusual discussion of theology, in aid of understanding a particular word in the AL constitution.) It seems pretty clear that the media and the IVF clinics are peddling a narrative about these cases that serve their own interests (IVF clinics don't want to be liable for not doing common sense stuff like having locks on doors and freezers, apparently). In fact, this episode of deliberate misrepresentation of the 131 pages of court opinions may be evidence against your "the media is awesome" hypothesis.
People see through these kinds of arguments and understand the theocratic agenda here. We should have an honest debate, not pretend this is really a question of statutory interpretation. No one is that naive, everyone is a legal realist now, and this is an advancement in understanding.
Richard, my friends went through twelve rounds of IVF to get a single viable embryo. If it was destroyed due to malice or gross negligence (in this case) the idea that the death of probably their only chance at a child should be treated like a blood sample got lost is ridiculous.
The people who brought this lawsuit obviously support IVF, they went through it. They sought higher civil damages reflective of the precious nature of what was lost through this clinics recklessness and they deserved it. There is nothing about locking a door that should make IVF cost prohibitive.
I read the case and nowhere in it does the court find that IVF should be illegal.
The fact that the Alabama legislator is probably going to pass a bill soon is simply reflective of the fact that IVF is pro-life. It brings life into the world, which is the opposite of pro-choice (kills life). There is a reason pro-life people have more children then pro-choice people, its always been a litmus test for how your feel about children and parenthood.
I think you want pro-life to be anti-IVF because it makes you feel better about your anti-life position.
The case also brings up an issue I never thought of but is equally important. If we define a fetus as being alive only in utero, what of artificial wombs? If someone elects to implant their fetus in an artificial womb and then at some point in that process they are killed through malice or criminal negligence what penalty applies? We already prosecute people for murder if they assault a pregnant woman and the fetus dies while the woman lives. Should that be any different with an artificial womb? When is a child considered "born" in the case of an artificial womb?
These are all issues that need to be addressed by legislation, and indeed shouldn't involve legal activism as the court finding holds.
If you start with your assumption, don't actually read the opinions, it is no surprise you come up with this. You are usually better than this - do the work, don't just pontificate.
By the way, as much as I strongly agree with your position here, I think your use of the word "theocratic" is a bit over the top. There's a big difference between a religious conservative, who wants religion to play a large role in guiding public policy, and a theocrat who wants the executive to be viewed as deriving his legitimacy from being the ultimate authority on what God wants. There are basically no prominent Christian theocrats. The commenters here are probably religious conservatives. Duda is a religious conservative. Erdogan is a religious conservative. Khamenei is a theocrat. Christian theocrats are pretty marginal.
That said, even if it's a bit dishonest, it might be a useful political strategy to call religious conservatives "theocrats" if your goal is to get the left to adopt the opposite policy.
Generally agree. Except although your point about securing embryos is valid, I'm not sure if you're correct that IVF can be profitable under the legal constraints implied by this decision. I haven't seen anyone apply serious analysis to the matter one way or the other, though as a businessman I would expect that it makes sense to err on the side of caution and pause procedures until, at minimum, conducting a careful internal analysis.
But it bears keeping in mind that Alabama is an unusual state, and it tends to generate histrionics when people worry that Alabama politics are the wave of the future. To be sure, the right sometimes observes Woke craziness in left-leaning states and worries that it might soon come to their won, but this makes far more sense because culture is drifting inexorably leftward. Alabama's culture converges towards California's culture; California's culture takes nothing from Alabama.
One unusual thing about Alabama is that its state constitution is not only the longest state constitution of the 50 states by a factor of 4, but the largest written constitution on earth, of any kind. I've never seen explained exactly why this is: maybe the ease of amending it by way of popular referenda? But this is naturally also going to produce unusual results at times.
It was just such a referendum that caused this issue. Which leaves a judge in the position of trying to interpret what the population of his unusual and highly religious state intended when it approved that referendum. But it's a fair assumption that the motivation was highly religious. It seems a big stretch to argue that a judge is intentionally pushing a "theocratic" agenda on an unwilling population, as we might if this same decision happened in a less religious state. Though it's also a fair guess that most of that population had given little thought to IVF one way or the other; few do until dealing with personal fertility struggles.
He quotes another commentary which points out that even if AL does nothing legislatively (which seems unlikely), AL IVF clinics can easily adapt, using the example of LA clinics which adapted to a law there that made destruction of embryos a problem by bringing the embryos into LA only when they are needed for implantation.
It's quite obvious the point of the ruling was to punish the clinic for gross negligence, which newsflash destroyed embryos these people wanted to make into children.
Sure, but you still need to consider precedent. Mistakes happen -- what's the right degree to punish them to make sure clinics are more careful about this sort of thing without chilling the industry out of existence? I'm not sure, I don't hear anyone asking those questions but it's the point I was driving at in my post above.
There probably is a certain irony here in that if you strip away the religious markers, the left (though perhaps not libertarians like Richard) is generally going to applaud the idea of successfully suing clinics like this for gross negligence.
It's easy to imagine another world where this case takes places in Massachusetts, the judge issues an unusual opinion that quotes Das Kapital and discusses the nature of capitalists valuing profit over life itself, and he awards the plaintiffs with a huge settlement that causes clinics in that state to suspend operations and Republicans to question if this might chill the industry out of existence.
I think the odds that a clinic that followed ordinary procedures would be successfully sued under this law is approximately zero. It's obviously being used to drum up hysteria, and I feel bad for parents in Alabama that are having their implantations postponed unnecessarily so some people can raise a political fuss.
You might be right. I won't pretend to know. I also don't know how much work "followed ordinary procedures" is doing in that sentence. At some point, no matter how careful I am as an owner-operator of a clinic, employees are going to violate procedure.
If you violate procedures and a baby dies in the hospital, its a crime.
It's the same logic. We can debate what ordinary procedures should be, but they certainly exist. There are many cases every year where such negligence is at issue.
I just don't think "have a lock on the door" is that onerous a requirement.
You're crazier than a loon. Throwing human embryos out like trash, as happens almost every time in this Orwellian procedure, is inhuman and debased. I encourage you to grow in your understanding of civilized humanity
Infanticide has been the standard 'birth control' practice throughout most of the world, for most of human history...not to mention pre-history. Especially of obviously defective infants.
Many/most people aren't willing to risk getting stuck with a severely defective kid if there is any option available to avoid it.
And if you try to take away those options, a lot of people will just not risk having kids at all.
It's unpleasant in the extreme to think about. But it's not Orwellian. Not unless you think human existence has always been Orwellian.
I don't think making the positive case for infanticide is a good defense of abortion.
I agree that people are much more likely to be sympathetic to parents who abort a severely defective child, but I am fairly sure that those abortions are a small minority of the total number performed. The vast majority of abortions are done simply for the woman's convenience. From a cursory search, it appears that fetal abnormalities only account for 1-3% of abortions. The most common reasons by far, always greatly eclipsing fetal abnormalities, are things like "Can't afford a baby," Not ready for child," and "Done having children."
I wasnt trying to use infanticide to justify abortion, so much as pointing out that allowing abortion and/or infanticide has basically the default throughout history.
So the current availability of abortion is just a continuation of that, rather than some Orwellian aberration.
You can continue stamping your foot and petulantly yelling about how you think things ought to be...or you can think tactically and try to have a meaningful impact.
Most of society does not consider IVF to be murder.
Most of society is against a total abortion ban.
Most of society wants exceptions for rape, fetal defect, etc.
If you insist on all or nothing, you are going to get nothing.
A healthy newborn baby murdered by me, Hat McCullough the baby-killer (pardoned by the governor of Colorado), presumably also "shouldn't even be a thing" in your book. But if you have to choose between me murdering one such baby, and a million embryos otherwise discarded, which is the lesser evil?
IVF and genetic enhancement of course will reduce infant mortality and infant murder in the long run. So if you wouldn’t sacrifice the baby to save the million embryos you better support it!
IVF is ultimately playing God. If Karen waited to have children until her 30s and is having a hard time, that's something we should address on a cultural level, not with technology that enables bioengineered human trafficking. Likewise with surrogacy, a mother that does not carry her child through pregnancy and experience childbirth will have substantially lowered bonding with that child which equals higher rates of abuse. Children are not accessories that someone should be able to purchase.
Republicans glomming onto IVF are entirely missing the plot. We need to encourage young, smart, and ambitious Americans to get married and have children during the years the human body is made to, not enabling young women to freeze eggs for 20 years while they pursue their boss girl programming. Yes, we are coming for your birth control next!
If you wanted to have good eyesight, you shouldn't have spent so much time staring at screens indoors rather than outdoors in the sun. So eyeglasses, contacts and Lasik surgery shouldn't exist. Households with lower SES presumably have higher rates of abuse, so they should be prohibited from having any children at all.
Strictly as a positive rather than normative manner, you aren't going to succeed against birth control.
We'll succeed against birth control by raising awareness of its actual long term medical effects, e.g., permanent endocrine disruption leading to higher likelihood of cancer, diminished fertility, and disordered brain chemistry that leads women to prefer the company of cats and never-ending coursework or professional striving to the natural calling of motherhood. Your eyesight comparison is a strawman. We're talking about the creation of life itself, not medical interventions for the living.
The economic factor is interesting, because it actually doesn't make much sense to allow and promote IVF yet be opposed to prohibiting certain groups from reproducing. The proliferation of IVF will eventually create the same result anyway: the rich and intelligent will wait later and later to have children via IVF, paying no mind to the wider societal trends that are causing decreased fertility. The poor will outpace them substantially, but the progressive dysgenics brought about by a toxic environment will eventually take their toll with mass infertility worldwide. Then, only the enlightened wealthy will be able to continue their test tube lineages in a new transhumanist aristocracy to rule over the dysgenic masses.
I don't think that Hanania commenters are complete retards. I think most Hanania fans support birth control. The ones who do not are vocal. These anti birth control people here in the comments, as strongly as I disagree with them, are pretty smart. The pro-lifers who take the ideology to its logical conclusions tend to be the smart and autistic ones. As a pro choice person, I appreciate the reductio ad absurdum.
I wasn't even arguing in favor of birth control. Trailrunner22 is just correct about how overwhelmingly favorable people are toward it. Ross Douthat is smarter than ringleader and he's aware of the political odds stacked against him.
If you read about the consequences of mass birth control, you'll see why public opinion will turn against it as more people are made aware of it. Prepubescent girls are shoved birth control pills at the first sign of a pimple and then end up having lifelong fertility issues after being on it their whole adolescence and early adulthood.
The first generation of these girls are facing massive issues now, and it will only lead to more skepticism and inquiry over the real purpose and harms of birth control. By and large, it's not the poorest and dumbest people using birth control, but the smarter middle class that are striving for upward mobility. The unfortunate reality is that even if they can obtain it, they will have no one to leave that better life to.
"Will" turn against it? It's been around for a long time (not one generation), and it's not like information was hidden. If it hadn't happened by now, it's vanishingly unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.
I strongly agree. I do want to say that there are two arguments here. The first is the normative one, that these extreme pro-life anti-IVF people are wrong on the merits, and the second is the positive one, that there is no hope of them winning so they should just give up. I agree strongly with both of them. I do also very much support the intellectual integrity that you are showing here, distinguishing and not conflating these two arguments. Because a priori the morally correct position could be the hopeless one.
Seems to me that the way to address this is would be to help Karen have kids through IVF and to allow birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but have tax incentives and other incentives like that to encourage people to get married young and have kids and families. It would also help to have TV shows with educated and affluent people who have kids young.
What’s “playing god” is the government going around telling people what they can and can’t do with their bodies because of a few fertilized cells without a heartbeat or nervous system. I understand wanting to ban third trimester abortions but absurd to ban IVF and birth control.
I do believe that if the proper incentives for families and pro-family social mores were restored, IVF would mostly be a nonstarter because people wouldn't care. It would be more or less only families that legitimately had serious infertility issues from a young age. Nevertheless, IVF is dramatically different from birth control. It is literally human trafficking. People sell embryos. A government is well within its rights to regulate and even ban IVF with the consent of its people.
I agree with having good incentives for families and pro-family social mores. But I still support IVF and genetic enhancement.
IVF is not "human trafficking" anymore than organ donation. The term "human trafficking" refers to the trafficking of *human people*, not cells or clumps or cells or blood or organs which are certainly life but not personhood.
If there is a democracy and most people vote to ban IVF and the government bans IVF, I don't like this but this is the democratic process, I agree. But fortunately, that's clearly not the country we live in. As Trump said, even the vast majority of pro-life Americans are pro-IVF. No country in the world has an IVF ban. Costa Rica's was lifted a while back. Alabama is trying to ban IVF and there is huge backlash and they look poised to reverse course.
I hear you. We disagree on some first principles, and that's fine. This issue definitely isn't going away, so I am curious to see how things develop. I am skeptical that it will be used as a political fulcrum point to divide the pro-family camp. I think the better answer overall would be greater freedom of association whereby all people are free to easily live with a government that represents their respective interests well. AL could have their no-IVF state, and another state, or even all the other states, can have IVF.
I'm all for respectful disagreement on first principles and free association!
I'm skeptical that the anti-IVF position would actually win on the ballot in Alabama if it was put to a democratic vote. But yes, if the Alabama voters actually voted against it... we live in a democracy with the 10th amendment (and easy interstate travel ;) ).
As Richard says in this article, it's also politically useful to have some anti-IVF sentiment on the right and it's useful for this issue not to go away completely but for people like you to remain a vocal minority. So, thanks for that!
I would also like to say that "superbabies" is not a good phrase to use. We are looking at an increase 5-10 or maybe even 15+ IQ points per generation once we have IVG. Not some super-race. It's as Scott says here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-smith-on-jewish-selective . 10 points is the difference between Ashkenazi Jews and White Americans. I expect most people to support +10 IQ points per generation. I mean, the Flynn effect has gone that pace in most places. I know, the Flynn effect is often not on g and so on.
Just so we are clear where I personally stand on this, I certainly would be very happy to have lots of people with von Neumann level intelligence. Still, such a drastic change probably would be a hard sell to the public. It makes more sense to advocate for embryo selection, enhancement, and so on than for "superbabies". Those technologies operate within the normal range of variance between siblings, so people will accept them. Talking about "superbabies" is like saying "eugenics". https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics . It's bad politics.
It's also not really descriptive of how embryo selection works. Say we can do IVG and raise the mean IQ to say 130. That would of course be fantastic. If we have 1000 embryos, perfect polygenic scores, and select only on intelligence and no other traits we get about +30 points. 1000 embryos gives you a bit over 3 SD. Since half the variance in families and heritability being about .8 which is about .9^2, the SD is about .9*15/sqrt(2), which a bit less than 10. Then, still ~97% of people will have IQs at most 160. You will need another couple of generations and/or a massive number of embryos in IVG to get an average IQ above 160.
I certainly agree! Having 10 more IQ points does not make you a superbaby, but it is a very good thing. Because of network/hive mind effects, it's very very good if we all get 10 IQ points. Let me quote Scott from the piece I linked.
"The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history..."
Still, the fact remains the use of the word "superbabies" is not a political winner, and is also misleading. I wouldn't call an MD or a PhD with a 125 IQ a "superbaby" and I think it's a bad political strategy for the same reason Richard opposes "eugenics". I wouldn't call Ashkenazi Jews who average ~110 superhuman compared to White Americans who average ~100. But I am probably preaching to the choir here. You liked my comment after all. :)
Absolutely fantastic piece! In the paper you link to at https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1761917821712556385 it shows that only 17% of Americans have a moral problem with embryo selection for IQ, and less with age, 20% among the oldest group and <=15% among the youngest. This makes sense as the woke left and hardcore anti-IVF right are really both <=10% of the population. It's great to see so much support for embryo selection in the US. I would expect even more public support in places like Israel and Singapore, but it seems that even in the US the public support won't be an obstacle. I guess it is really not so surprising. The US, Israel, and Singapore are the only countries that have approved lab grown meat so far.
I also can't help but notice that Nazis like Nick Fuentes and some other twitter anons hate IVF, with Fuentes recently calling it a "sin", and are saying or at least implying that (((they))) are behind all of this stuff. See for instance this from some time ago https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/1590788232312414209 where Fuentes blames pro-choice on (((them))). Hopefully that's the death of the idiotic Godwin's Law argument against genetic enhancement. As if Israeli and Jewish attitudes, and Winston Churchill's attitude wasn't enough already. It's hard to tell what the actual Nazis would have thought of IVF, but it's not too crazy to believe that they would have thought it was a sin, and that ESIQ is bad. We do know that they believed that the notion of IQ was bad because it was an instrument of Jewish supremacy.
The fact that human life begins at conception isn't just a religious doctrine, it's a reality that we can observe at the cellular level specifically thanks to advances in science and technology. In the past, the anti-life position would've been more defensible as we largely didn't actually know what was happening inside the woman during pregnancy.
Many/most 'natural' fertilizations end in failure to implant, or miscarriage.
Often because they have genetic or developmental defects that render them non viable.
IVF and screening just makes the process more visible and open.
I'm moderately pro-life, but if y'all keep trying to do stupid crap like ban IVF and remove fetal defect exemptions for abortion restrictions...you are going to alienate the broader public and hand total victory to the pro-choice side.
How are you "moderately" pro life? Either the unborn are people or they aren't. Do you think of a fetus as something in between, some sort of schrodingers person whose personhood depends upon the whims of their parents?
I'm asking you to explain how it isn't a binary decision. If your response is to get upset, flip the table, and walk away, that clearly implies to me that it is in fact a binary decision, if framing it in those terms immediately causes you to shut down.
I mean, sure, reality is messy and we can rarely if ever get a perfect outcome. But saying that you're willing to compromise is different from saying what your actual belief is. My actual belief is that human life, and therefore personhood, which is synonymous with human life, begins at conception. My ideal outcome would thus be a total ban on elective abortions. But if the best that I could get was banning elective abortion after 6 weeks, I would readily agree to that, as opposed to having it be allowed up until point of birth or something.
That willingness to compromise for the least-bad outcome is a completely different thing from my core belief. What is your core belief about personhood?
Until you have had a subjective experience you are not a person, and have no objective moral value. Embryos that haven't developed even a basic brain structure clearly aren't having any. This is the strongest version of the claim.
Weaker ones would imply that some born humans are sub-people, and that we only use birth as a cut-off. I'm far closer to the former position, but highly sympathetic to killing retarded or otherwise defective fetii.
I think the steelman position is the second one, where you just admit that not all human life is equally valuable and some lives are of little consequence, with the unborn largely falling into that category. This may upset people emotionally, but logically, it is internally consistent and doesn't seem to have any real holes.
If you want to try this "subjective experience" angle, okay, now we have to define "subjective experience." Clearly an infant would fall into this category, or so one would think. But if an infant's experience counts as being a person, do we now have to extend personhood to animals? Because it isn't clear that an infant's "subjective experience" is really any different or more special than that of, say, a cat. Revealed preferences demonstrate that the reason we value the infant more is obviously its biological species, not the fact that it is merely capable of perceiving the world around it in some fashion, something which even ants can do. But if we admit that belonging to the human species is a core trait of personhood, now we're back to the fact that from a biological perspective, the human lifecycle undeniably begins at conception.
The Orthodox Jewish stance is that IVF is 100% kosher and a preimplantation embryo is like water, the fetus gradually acquires moral value from implantation. Some secular pro lifers who draw the line at the heartbeat at 6 weeks. And other ones who draw the line at 12 weeks. Germany for instance I think does. Like Jews, Muslims believe in ensoulment way after fertilization. While Iran and KSA only have abortion in special cases (they don’t ban it completely as Christian theocrats would), Turkey has on-demand abortion for 10 weeks.
I’m pro choice but one can have moral problems with abortion without being a conceptionist who wants to ban IVF!
Observations that the religious also disagree about who counts as a person, why, and when, serve to reinforce my point. The questions surrounding personhood are an obvious issue of interest to everybody, both religious and secular. But the usual tactic of abortion advocates, Richard included, is to frame the issue as "theocrats" (pro-life) versus non-theocrats (pro-abortion), and to then dismiss the entire thing because "theocrats bad" without actually engaging in the core questions of defining personhood.
Look there are reasonable disagreements people can have about personhood and where the line should be drawn, but the vast majority of reasonable people believe that a preimplantation embryo is not a person. Very very few reasonable non-Christians think it’s a person. And plenty of reasonable Christians don’t.
This is dishonest. If you want to make the argument that embryos aren't people, make the argument. Don't define away the issue by claiming that "well all reasonable people already agree with me and anyone who doesn't is inherently unreasonable." That's not an argument. If your belief is that the pro-life position is too retarded to be worth your time, similar to debating flat earthers, then okay, just ignore the issue. Engaging with the topic by telling the other side that they're retards (or dismissing them as "theocrats" with no further comment) accomplishes nothing.
Don’t worry I am not one of those people who thinks Christianity is as bad as Islam. Maybe on bioethics. But even there, Christian societies tend to be more secular than Muslim ones (Islam is very legalistic and authoritarian so this is not a coincidence) and so tend to be better on bioethics.
But my point still stands that a hypothetical Christian version of Iran like Gilead from the Handmaid’s Tale would have an even more strict abortion policy than Iran does.
Gilead from the Handmaid's Tale is partly inspired by revolutionary Iran, but also the Soviet Union. Hence the revolutionaries getting purged by the new regime they've created. It's sort of designed to be a worst possible world nobody would want to live in (including devout Christians, most sects of which are being hunted down). I wrote about that aspect in my review:
The point of this post is clear enough, first-order secondary effects in politics etc. This comment is a data point, not a line of reasoning.
20 years ago I had no significant moral qualms about IVF. My wife, then a chemist and now a FT mom, also had no qualms about it then. With deeper thinking and the experience of 30+ friends who either tried IVF or had embryos frozen for 5-10-TBD years, between 2018-2022 my thinking and hers changed to a state of ‘have we ever really gone deep on this?’ At this point we both think ‘this is morally wrong,’ with a medium-high degree of confidence.
Beyond our friend’s experiences, including one very good friend who died in childbirth, we have no personal experience with using IVF. Our personal experience with creating humans is 2 wins, 1 loss during childbirth, 1 loss by miscarriage in the second trimester, and several losses by miscarriages during the first trimester.
The two of us have viewed surrogacy as morally suspect (within a range, based on circumstances) for 25 years, and evolved by 2022 to ‘this is morally wrong.’
There’s a big distinction between human life and personhood. You are conflating them.
A cell is also human life. Biologists define the cell as the smallest alive thing. So a single cell from a human is human life.
If I were to take a preimplantation embryo with 10 cells and split them into 5 and 5, would I be making a new human life? What if I grew both into identical twins, or clones? What if I just killed 5 of the cells and let the last 5 grow into a person.
Say we find a way to extract stem cells from an adult and make a clone out of this. Would killing these stem cells then be murder?
"Human life" here is just shorthand for "individual member of the species homo sapiens," or whatever more specific language that you might prefer. Pretending that people can't or don't differentiate between each whole creature of a given species and the cells which make up that creature is silly and dishonest.
I got sick a few months ago. I guess the virus there murdered lots of human lives. A cell is human life. But not a person. This is how biologists and ethicists view it, whether the cell is a preimplantation embryo or a cell in my body. A cell is human life but not a person. Whether that cell is in my body or a preimplantation zygote.
It sounds like conservatives should vocally endorse higher spending, higher regulation, higher taxes, and higher deficits, so that progressives would automagically adopt the opposite positions.
It's plainly obvious that surrogacy opponents like Louise Perry simply want to rig culture and policy to further their intragender competition interests. Adding costs to other women's reproductive freedom is good for women who thrive best as stay at home moms supported by a man with perhaps a hobby job.
People talk about selection for IQ and against schizophrenia. But what happens when someone commercializes it about things people (other than nerds and borderline autists like us) *really* care about, like height and attractiveness?
That’s much less good. But it’s not the government’s place to restrict that.
At least height is not good. Not clear what good it is if we’re all taller. It couldn’t hurt if we were all more attractive so maybe that one is more comparable to IQ and health.
I mean if things get bad enough you could always institute affirmative action for short people (lol). Would make more sense that other forms of affirmative action and would be more legal too.
The difficulties attached to LBAC are one more sign that the simulation is flawed and that nobody bothered to work out consistent solutions to the edge cases. Oh well.
I'd argue there should be a divergence in what citizens have the right to do (i.e. surrogacy) and what should be societally encouraged and promoted. While I agree with the case for maximizing citizen freedom, especially when it comes to control over children, there are various practices in regards to raising a child that deserve a lot of skepticism and perhaps even ostracization
Overall agree. However, there's something to keep in mind when it comes to the eugenic aspect of IVF and surrogacy; namely that they may not be so eugenic.
With regards to surrogacy, this will simply raise the birth rate of career-oriented women. And not just the moderately-career-oriented ones, but those so involved into their careers that they couldn't afford to take some time off to have children. And yes, I'm aware many rich women will just resort to it because they can, and that's cool.
As to IVF, it's fine — desirable, even — when used to screen out potential health problems along with other dysgenics; however, the widespread use of it for those with fertility problems will have the opposite effect, which is to spread weak-fertility predispositions.
> the country has a high degree of affective polarization, meaning that the two major political tribes dislike and try to distinguish themselves from one another.
> It did not take long for Republicans to distance themselves from the Alabama Supreme Court. Within days of the ruling that embryos count as unborn children under state law, polls circulated showing that this was a losing issue. Republicans soon fell over themselves assuring the public that they supported IVF, Trump told the Alabama legislature to take action, and it looks like they might do so.
Don't these kind of contradict? If prominent Republicans are falling over themselves to agree with the left because that's a more popular position, that indicates low polarization.
I'd take Richard's point to be that the politicians are less polarized than the base. GOP politicians, particularly in swing states, see that abortion is hurting them and are currently trying to find a way to thread the needle between winning over the base (for the primary) and winning over the median voter (for the general).
Great take. Everyone once in a while, polarization is helpful. It feels like at least on this issue, the theocrats will make themselves into a nice punching bag.
I have to say, that from my point of view in the more liberal tribe, I appreciate Richard because he does actually think about things pretty carefully from points of view that I don’t otherwise encounter much, and doesn’t very often succumb to the temptation to bait the likes of me in framing ideas and positions. So, I do read him almost as regularly as I read The Bulwark as well as a lot of more liberal (mostly) Substack contributors. Thanks Richard!
In this particular case, I did have a hard time not thinking that some of what he was saying here was a bit tongue-in-cheek, especially the stuff about the establishment in law of such “Catholic” ideological extremism being helpful in keeping liberals (or at least elite liberals —who do, by the way, control most of our institutions and have since the “managerial revolution became a thing) on track to support increased biotech engineering of fetuses into “superbabies,” etc.
The fun thing about Richard is that for me, at least, many of his most salient observation do, at least initially. strike me as subtly “tongue-in-cheek,” which has perhaps the desired effect of giving me pause by getting me to think harder about what he’s saying. And often, I am happy to report, he succeeds. That’s a rare gift.
Thanks agains, Richard!
The single act that did the most to ensure access to genetic screening was Justice Thomas using the potential to preferentially abort members of protected classes as an argument against abortion.
Until then I think it wasn't totally settled which way the left would go but no one on the left is going to go near Thomas's pro-life argument. As long as people like him keep making it we don't need dumb rulings about IVF.
Very good. Richard Hanania’s next piece: thank the Republican Party’s use of affirmative action for the coming superbabies!
I highly advise reading the AL SCT opinions before opining on them - they aren't "anti-IVF", unless to be "pro-IVF" you have to think that clinics that don't secure embryos and let random people wander about taking embryos out of cold storage and dropping them on the floor is a good thing.
The case involved a question of statutory interpretation and all but the Chief Justice's concurrence are very reasonable opinions that come to different conclusions about how to interpret the particular statute in this particular context. (The Chief's is a rather unusual discussion of theology, in aid of understanding a particular word in the AL constitution.) It seems pretty clear that the media and the IVF clinics are peddling a narrative about these cases that serve their own interests (IVF clinics don't want to be liable for not doing common sense stuff like having locks on doors and freezers, apparently). In fact, this episode of deliberate misrepresentation of the 131 pages of court opinions may be evidence against your "the media is awesome" hypothesis.
People see through these kinds of arguments and understand the theocratic agenda here. We should have an honest debate, not pretend this is really a question of statutory interpretation. No one is that naive, everyone is a legal realist now, and this is an advancement in understanding.
Not everyone is a legal realist, there is statutory interpretation. That makes it the job of the legislature to fix the statute.
Richard, my friends went through twelve rounds of IVF to get a single viable embryo. If it was destroyed due to malice or gross negligence (in this case) the idea that the death of probably their only chance at a child should be treated like a blood sample got lost is ridiculous.
The people who brought this lawsuit obviously support IVF, they went through it. They sought higher civil damages reflective of the precious nature of what was lost through this clinics recklessness and they deserved it. There is nothing about locking a door that should make IVF cost prohibitive.
I read the case and nowhere in it does the court find that IVF should be illegal.
The fact that the Alabama legislator is probably going to pass a bill soon is simply reflective of the fact that IVF is pro-life. It brings life into the world, which is the opposite of pro-choice (kills life). There is a reason pro-life people have more children then pro-choice people, its always been a litmus test for how your feel about children and parenthood.
I think you want pro-life to be anti-IVF because it makes you feel better about your anti-life position.
The case also brings up an issue I never thought of but is equally important. If we define a fetus as being alive only in utero, what of artificial wombs? If someone elects to implant their fetus in an artificial womb and then at some point in that process they are killed through malice or criminal negligence what penalty applies? We already prosecute people for murder if they assault a pregnant woman and the fetus dies while the woman lives. Should that be any different with an artificial womb? When is a child considered "born" in the case of an artificial womb?
These are all issues that need to be addressed by legislation, and indeed shouldn't involve legal activism as the court finding holds.
If you start with your assumption, don't actually read the opinions, it is no surprise you come up with this. You are usually better than this - do the work, don't just pontificate.
I read the opinion and the media’s reporting was completely accurate.
If you think that, you didn't understand them - try again. Really, up your game to your usual level!
Richard is an autist with a JD, he understands textualism and originalism very well. I would trust him here.
I hadn’t read it till now thank you Parker is a wonderful loon.
By the way, as much as I strongly agree with your position here, I think your use of the word "theocratic" is a bit over the top. There's a big difference between a religious conservative, who wants religion to play a large role in guiding public policy, and a theocrat who wants the executive to be viewed as deriving his legitimacy from being the ultimate authority on what God wants. There are basically no prominent Christian theocrats. The commenters here are probably religious conservatives. Duda is a religious conservative. Erdogan is a religious conservative. Khamenei is a theocrat. Christian theocrats are pretty marginal.
That said, even if it's a bit dishonest, it might be a useful political strategy to call religious conservatives "theocrats" if your goal is to get the left to adopt the opposite policy.
Generally agree. Except although your point about securing embryos is valid, I'm not sure if you're correct that IVF can be profitable under the legal constraints implied by this decision. I haven't seen anyone apply serious analysis to the matter one way or the other, though as a businessman I would expect that it makes sense to err on the side of caution and pause procedures until, at minimum, conducting a careful internal analysis.
But it bears keeping in mind that Alabama is an unusual state, and it tends to generate histrionics when people worry that Alabama politics are the wave of the future. To be sure, the right sometimes observes Woke craziness in left-leaning states and worries that it might soon come to their won, but this makes far more sense because culture is drifting inexorably leftward. Alabama's culture converges towards California's culture; California's culture takes nothing from Alabama.
One unusual thing about Alabama is that its state constitution is not only the longest state constitution of the 50 states by a factor of 4, but the largest written constitution on earth, of any kind. I've never seen explained exactly why this is: maybe the ease of amending it by way of popular referenda? But this is naturally also going to produce unusual results at times.
It was just such a referendum that caused this issue. Which leaves a judge in the position of trying to interpret what the population of his unusual and highly religious state intended when it approved that referendum. But it's a fair assumption that the motivation was highly religious. It seems a big stretch to argue that a judge is intentionally pushing a "theocratic" agenda on an unwilling population, as we might if this same decision happened in a less religious state. Though it's also a fair guess that most of that population had given little thought to IVF one way or the other; few do until dealing with personal fertility struggles.
Your point about uncertainty is a good one - David Lat has a very sensible take on the decision here: https://davidlat.substack.com/p/judicial-notice-022424-culture-wars
He quotes another commentary which points out that even if AL does nothing legislatively (which seems unlikely), AL IVF clinics can easily adapt, using the example of LA clinics which adapted to a law there that made destruction of embryos a problem by bringing the embryos into LA only when they are needed for implantation.
Thanks -- wasn't familiar with David Lat but subscribed now.
It's quite obvious the point of the ruling was to punish the clinic for gross negligence, which newsflash destroyed embryos these people wanted to make into children.
Sure, but you still need to consider precedent. Mistakes happen -- what's the right degree to punish them to make sure clinics are more careful about this sort of thing without chilling the industry out of existence? I'm not sure, I don't hear anyone asking those questions but it's the point I was driving at in my post above.
There probably is a certain irony here in that if you strip away the religious markers, the left (though perhaps not libertarians like Richard) is generally going to applaud the idea of successfully suing clinics like this for gross negligence.
It's easy to imagine another world where this case takes places in Massachusetts, the judge issues an unusual opinion that quotes Das Kapital and discusses the nature of capitalists valuing profit over life itself, and he awards the plaintiffs with a huge settlement that causes clinics in that state to suspend operations and Republicans to question if this might chill the industry out of existence.
I think the odds that a clinic that followed ordinary procedures would be successfully sued under this law is approximately zero. It's obviously being used to drum up hysteria, and I feel bad for parents in Alabama that are having their implantations postponed unnecessarily so some people can raise a political fuss.
You might be right. I won't pretend to know. I also don't know how much work "followed ordinary procedures" is doing in that sentence. At some point, no matter how careful I am as an owner-operator of a clinic, employees are going to violate procedure.
If you violate procedures and a baby dies in the hospital, its a crime.
It's the same logic. We can debate what ordinary procedures should be, but they certainly exist. There are many cases every year where such negligence is at issue.
I just don't think "have a lock on the door" is that onerous a requirement.
You're crazier than a loon. Throwing human embryos out like trash, as happens almost every time in this Orwellian procedure, is inhuman and debased. I encourage you to grow in your understanding of civilized humanity
Infanticide has been the standard 'birth control' practice throughout most of the world, for most of human history...not to mention pre-history. Especially of obviously defective infants.
Many/most people aren't willing to risk getting stuck with a severely defective kid if there is any option available to avoid it.
And if you try to take away those options, a lot of people will just not risk having kids at all.
It's unpleasant in the extreme to think about. But it's not Orwellian. Not unless you think human existence has always been Orwellian.
I don't think making the positive case for infanticide is a good defense of abortion.
I agree that people are much more likely to be sympathetic to parents who abort a severely defective child, but I am fairly sure that those abortions are a small minority of the total number performed. The vast majority of abortions are done simply for the woman's convenience. From a cursory search, it appears that fetal abnormalities only account for 1-3% of abortions. The most common reasons by far, always greatly eclipsing fetal abnormalities, are things like "Can't afford a baby," Not ready for child," and "Done having children."
I wasnt trying to use infanticide to justify abortion, so much as pointing out that allowing abortion and/or infanticide has basically the default throughout history.
So the current availability of abortion is just a continuation of that, rather than some Orwellian aberration.
We can and should do better.
This is even sicker than I thought.
On the contrary, I think it’s actually quite human and based.
If you had the choice to save 1 newborn human baby or 1 million discarded preimplantation embryos, which would you save?
That's not a choice. "Discarded pre implantation embryos" shouldn't even be a thing. Only in this culture of defining deviancy down is it.
You can continue stamping your foot and petulantly yelling about how you think things ought to be...or you can think tactically and try to have a meaningful impact.
Most of society does not consider IVF to be murder.
Most of society is against a total abortion ban.
Most of society wants exceptions for rape, fetal defect, etc.
If you insist on all or nothing, you are going to get nothing.
A healthy newborn baby murdered by me, Hat McCullough the baby-killer (pardoned by the governor of Colorado), presumably also "shouldn't even be a thing" in your book. But if you have to choose between me murdering one such baby, and a million embryos otherwise discarded, which is the lesser evil?
IVF and genetic enhancement of course will reduce infant mortality and infant murder in the long run. So if you wouldn’t sacrifice the baby to save the million embryos you better support it!
Enlighten us
Already did.
IVF is ultimately playing God. If Karen waited to have children until her 30s and is having a hard time, that's something we should address on a cultural level, not with technology that enables bioengineered human trafficking. Likewise with surrogacy, a mother that does not carry her child through pregnancy and experience childbirth will have substantially lowered bonding with that child which equals higher rates of abuse. Children are not accessories that someone should be able to purchase.
Republicans glomming onto IVF are entirely missing the plot. We need to encourage young, smart, and ambitious Americans to get married and have children during the years the human body is made to, not enabling young women to freeze eggs for 20 years while they pursue their boss girl programming. Yes, we are coming for your birth control next!
If you wanted to have good eyesight, you shouldn't have spent so much time staring at screens indoors rather than outdoors in the sun. So eyeglasses, contacts and Lasik surgery shouldn't exist. Households with lower SES presumably have higher rates of abuse, so they should be prohibited from having any children at all.
Strictly as a positive rather than normative manner, you aren't going to succeed against birth control.
We'll succeed against birth control by raising awareness of its actual long term medical effects, e.g., permanent endocrine disruption leading to higher likelihood of cancer, diminished fertility, and disordered brain chemistry that leads women to prefer the company of cats and never-ending coursework or professional striving to the natural calling of motherhood. Your eyesight comparison is a strawman. We're talking about the creation of life itself, not medical interventions for the living.
The economic factor is interesting, because it actually doesn't make much sense to allow and promote IVF yet be opposed to prohibiting certain groups from reproducing. The proliferation of IVF will eventually create the same result anyway: the rich and intelligent will wait later and later to have children via IVF, paying no mind to the wider societal trends that are causing decreased fertility. The poor will outpace them substantially, but the progressive dysgenics brought about by a toxic environment will eventually take their toll with mass infertility worldwide. Then, only the enlightened wealthy will be able to continue their test tube lineages in a new transhumanist aristocracy to rule over the dysgenic masses.
I don't think that Hanania commenters are complete retards. I think most Hanania fans support birth control. The ones who do not are vocal. These anti birth control people here in the comments, as strongly as I disagree with them, are pretty smart. The pro-lifers who take the ideology to its logical conclusions tend to be the smart and autistic ones. As a pro choice person, I appreciate the reductio ad absurdum.
I wasn't even arguing in favor of birth control. Trailrunner22 is just correct about how overwhelmingly favorable people are toward it. Ross Douthat is smarter than ringleader and he's aware of the political odds stacked against him.
If you read about the consequences of mass birth control, you'll see why public opinion will turn against it as more people are made aware of it. Prepubescent girls are shoved birth control pills at the first sign of a pimple and then end up having lifelong fertility issues after being on it their whole adolescence and early adulthood.
The first generation of these girls are facing massive issues now, and it will only lead to more skepticism and inquiry over the real purpose and harms of birth control. By and large, it's not the poorest and dumbest people using birth control, but the smarter middle class that are striving for upward mobility. The unfortunate reality is that even if they can obtain it, they will have no one to leave that better life to.
"Will" turn against it? It's been around for a long time (not one generation), and it's not like information was hidden. If it hadn't happened by now, it's vanishingly unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.
I strongly agree. I do want to say that there are two arguments here. The first is the normative one, that these extreme pro-life anti-IVF people are wrong on the merits, and the second is the positive one, that there is no hope of them winning so they should just give up. I agree strongly with both of them. I do also very much support the intellectual integrity that you are showing here, distinguishing and not conflating these two arguments. Because a priori the morally correct position could be the hopeless one.
Seems to me that the way to address this is would be to help Karen have kids through IVF and to allow birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but have tax incentives and other incentives like that to encourage people to get married young and have kids and families. It would also help to have TV shows with educated and affluent people who have kids young.
What’s “playing god” is the government going around telling people what they can and can’t do with their bodies because of a few fertilized cells without a heartbeat or nervous system. I understand wanting to ban third trimester abortions but absurd to ban IVF and birth control.
I do believe that if the proper incentives for families and pro-family social mores were restored, IVF would mostly be a nonstarter because people wouldn't care. It would be more or less only families that legitimately had serious infertility issues from a young age. Nevertheless, IVF is dramatically different from birth control. It is literally human trafficking. People sell embryos. A government is well within its rights to regulate and even ban IVF with the consent of its people.
I agree with having good incentives for families and pro-family social mores. But I still support IVF and genetic enhancement.
IVF is not "human trafficking" anymore than organ donation. The term "human trafficking" refers to the trafficking of *human people*, not cells or clumps or cells or blood or organs which are certainly life but not personhood.
If there is a democracy and most people vote to ban IVF and the government bans IVF, I don't like this but this is the democratic process, I agree. But fortunately, that's clearly not the country we live in. As Trump said, even the vast majority of pro-life Americans are pro-IVF. No country in the world has an IVF ban. Costa Rica's was lifted a while back. Alabama is trying to ban IVF and there is huge backlash and they look poised to reverse course.
I hear you. We disagree on some first principles, and that's fine. This issue definitely isn't going away, so I am curious to see how things develop. I am skeptical that it will be used as a political fulcrum point to divide the pro-family camp. I think the better answer overall would be greater freedom of association whereby all people are free to easily live with a government that represents their respective interests well. AL could have their no-IVF state, and another state, or even all the other states, can have IVF.
I'm all for respectful disagreement on first principles and free association!
I'm skeptical that the anti-IVF position would actually win on the ballot in Alabama if it was put to a democratic vote. But yes, if the Alabama voters actually voted against it... we live in a democracy with the 10th amendment (and easy interstate travel ;) ).
As Richard says in this article, it's also politically useful to have some anti-IVF sentiment on the right and it's useful for this issue not to go away completely but for people like you to remain a vocal minority. So, thanks for that!
Unironically, yes. Read about it.
I would also like to say that "superbabies" is not a good phrase to use. We are looking at an increase 5-10 or maybe even 15+ IQ points per generation once we have IVG. Not some super-race. It's as Scott says here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-smith-on-jewish-selective . 10 points is the difference between Ashkenazi Jews and White Americans. I expect most people to support +10 IQ points per generation. I mean, the Flynn effect has gone that pace in most places. I know, the Flynn effect is often not on g and so on.
Just so we are clear where I personally stand on this, I certainly would be very happy to have lots of people with von Neumann level intelligence. Still, such a drastic change probably would be a hard sell to the public. It makes more sense to advocate for embryo selection, enhancement, and so on than for "superbabies". Those technologies operate within the normal range of variance between siblings, so people will accept them. Talking about "superbabies" is like saying "eugenics". https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-oppose-eugenics . It's bad politics.
It's also not really descriptive of how embryo selection works. Say we can do IVG and raise the mean IQ to say 130. That would of course be fantastic. If we have 1000 embryos, perfect polygenic scores, and select only on intelligence and no other traits we get about +30 points. 1000 embryos gives you a bit over 3 SD. Since half the variance in families and heritability being about .8 which is about .9^2, the SD is about .9*15/sqrt(2), which a bit less than 10. Then, still ~97% of people will have IQs at most 160. You will need another couple of generations and/or a massive number of embryos in IVG to get an average IQ above 160.
I certainly agree! Having 10 more IQ points does not make you a superbaby, but it is a very good thing. Because of network/hive mind effects, it's very very good if we all get 10 IQ points. Let me quote Scott from the piece I linked.
"The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history..."
Still, the fact remains the use of the word "superbabies" is not a political winner, and is also misleading. I wouldn't call an MD or a PhD with a 125 IQ a "superbaby" and I think it's a bad political strategy for the same reason Richard opposes "eugenics". I wouldn't call Ashkenazi Jews who average ~110 superhuman compared to White Americans who average ~100. But I am probably preaching to the choir here. You liked my comment after all. :)
Absolutely fantastic piece! In the paper you link to at https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1761917821712556385 it shows that only 17% of Americans have a moral problem with embryo selection for IQ, and less with age, 20% among the oldest group and <=15% among the youngest. This makes sense as the woke left and hardcore anti-IVF right are really both <=10% of the population. It's great to see so much support for embryo selection in the US. I would expect even more public support in places like Israel and Singapore, but it seems that even in the US the public support won't be an obstacle. I guess it is really not so surprising. The US, Israel, and Singapore are the only countries that have approved lab grown meat so far.
I also can't help but notice that Nazis like Nick Fuentes and some other twitter anons hate IVF, with Fuentes recently calling it a "sin", and are saying or at least implying that (((they))) are behind all of this stuff. See for instance this from some time ago https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/1590788232312414209 where Fuentes blames pro-choice on (((them))). Hopefully that's the death of the idiotic Godwin's Law argument against genetic enhancement. As if Israeli and Jewish attitudes, and Winston Churchill's attitude wasn't enough already. It's hard to tell what the actual Nazis would have thought of IVF, but it's not too crazy to believe that they would have thought it was a sin, and that ESIQ is bad. We do know that they believed that the notion of IQ was bad because it was an instrument of Jewish supremacy.
The fact that human life begins at conception isn't just a religious doctrine, it's a reality that we can observe at the cellular level specifically thanks to advances in science and technology. In the past, the anti-life position would've been more defensible as we largely didn't actually know what was happening inside the woman during pregnancy.
Many/most 'natural' fertilizations end in failure to implant, or miscarriage.
Often because they have genetic or developmental defects that render them non viable.
IVF and screening just makes the process more visible and open.
I'm moderately pro-life, but if y'all keep trying to do stupid crap like ban IVF and remove fetal defect exemptions for abortion restrictions...you are going to alienate the broader public and hand total victory to the pro-choice side.
How are you "moderately" pro life? Either the unborn are people or they aren't. Do you think of a fetus as something in between, some sort of schrodingers person whose personhood depends upon the whims of their parents?
I could elaborate, but given that you seem to think this is a binary decision with no room for nuance or complexity, I'm not going to waste my time.
I'm asking you to explain how it isn't a binary decision. If your response is to get upset, flip the table, and walk away, that clearly implies to me that it is in fact a binary decision, if framing it in those terms immediately causes you to shut down.
From a purely moral dimension, perhaps* there isn't a significant difference.
But the moral dimension isn't the only one that matters.
I'm moderately pro life because I'm willing to compromise to get as close as possible to my goal, given the opinion of the rest of society.
*I'm an atheist, so my stance on this is probably significantly different than yours.
I mean, sure, reality is messy and we can rarely if ever get a perfect outcome. But saying that you're willing to compromise is different from saying what your actual belief is. My actual belief is that human life, and therefore personhood, which is synonymous with human life, begins at conception. My ideal outcome would thus be a total ban on elective abortions. But if the best that I could get was banning elective abortion after 6 weeks, I would readily agree to that, as opposed to having it be allowed up until point of birth or something.
That willingness to compromise for the least-bad outcome is a completely different thing from my core belief. What is your core belief about personhood?
Until you have had a subjective experience you are not a person, and have no objective moral value. Embryos that haven't developed even a basic brain structure clearly aren't having any. This is the strongest version of the claim.
Weaker ones would imply that some born humans are sub-people, and that we only use birth as a cut-off. I'm far closer to the former position, but highly sympathetic to killing retarded or otherwise defective fetii.
I think the steelman position is the second one, where you just admit that not all human life is equally valuable and some lives are of little consequence, with the unborn largely falling into that category. This may upset people emotionally, but logically, it is internally consistent and doesn't seem to have any real holes.
If you want to try this "subjective experience" angle, okay, now we have to define "subjective experience." Clearly an infant would fall into this category, or so one would think. But if an infant's experience counts as being a person, do we now have to extend personhood to animals? Because it isn't clear that an infant's "subjective experience" is really any different or more special than that of, say, a cat. Revealed preferences demonstrate that the reason we value the infant more is obviously its biological species, not the fact that it is merely capable of perceiving the world around it in some fashion, something which even ants can do. But if we admit that belonging to the human species is a core trait of personhood, now we're back to the fact that from a biological perspective, the human lifecycle undeniably begins at conception.
He's moderate just like he says. He thinks the viability of a fetus is relevant.
The Orthodox Jewish stance is that IVF is 100% kosher and a preimplantation embryo is like water, the fetus gradually acquires moral value from implantation. Some secular pro lifers who draw the line at the heartbeat at 6 weeks. And other ones who draw the line at 12 weeks. Germany for instance I think does. Like Jews, Muslims believe in ensoulment way after fertilization. While Iran and KSA only have abortion in special cases (they don’t ban it completely as Christian theocrats would), Turkey has on-demand abortion for 10 weeks.
I’m pro choice but one can have moral problems with abortion without being a conceptionist who wants to ban IVF!
Observations that the religious also disagree about who counts as a person, why, and when, serve to reinforce my point. The questions surrounding personhood are an obvious issue of interest to everybody, both religious and secular. But the usual tactic of abortion advocates, Richard included, is to frame the issue as "theocrats" (pro-life) versus non-theocrats (pro-abortion), and to then dismiss the entire thing because "theocrats bad" without actually engaging in the core questions of defining personhood.
Look there are reasonable disagreements people can have about personhood and where the line should be drawn, but the vast majority of reasonable people believe that a preimplantation embryo is not a person. Very very few reasonable non-Christians think it’s a person. And plenty of reasonable Christians don’t.
This is dishonest. If you want to make the argument that embryos aren't people, make the argument. Don't define away the issue by claiming that "well all reasonable people already agree with me and anyone who doesn't is inherently unreasonable." That's not an argument. If your belief is that the pro-life position is too retarded to be worth your time, similar to debating flat earthers, then okay, just ignore the issue. Engaging with the topic by telling the other side that they're retards (or dismissing them as "theocrats" with no further comment) accomplishes nothing.
Iran has an actual theocracy. There is no Christian theocracy unless you count Vatican City.
Don’t worry I am not one of those people who thinks Christianity is as bad as Islam. Maybe on bioethics. But even there, Christian societies tend to be more secular than Muslim ones (Islam is very legalistic and authoritarian so this is not a coincidence) and so tend to be better on bioethics.
But my point still stands that a hypothetical Christian version of Iran like Gilead from the Handmaid’s Tale would have an even more strict abortion policy than Iran does.
Gilead from the Handmaid's Tale is partly inspired by revolutionary Iran, but also the Soviet Union. Hence the revolutionaries getting purged by the new regime they've created. It's sort of designed to be a worst possible world nobody would want to live in (including devout Christians, most sects of which are being hunted down). I wrote about that aspect in my review:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/12/31/the-handmaids-tale/
I agree that there is no Christian theocracy other than Vatican City. I was talking about a hypothetical Christian version of Iran.
A zygote is not a person and an acorn is not a tree.
The point of this post is clear enough, first-order secondary effects in politics etc. This comment is a data point, not a line of reasoning.
20 years ago I had no significant moral qualms about IVF. My wife, then a chemist and now a FT mom, also had no qualms about it then. With deeper thinking and the experience of 30+ friends who either tried IVF or had embryos frozen for 5-10-TBD years, between 2018-2022 my thinking and hers changed to a state of ‘have we ever really gone deep on this?’ At this point we both think ‘this is morally wrong,’ with a medium-high degree of confidence.
Beyond our friend’s experiences, including one very good friend who died in childbirth, we have no personal experience with using IVF. Our personal experience with creating humans is 2 wins, 1 loss during childbirth, 1 loss by miscarriage in the second trimester, and several losses by miscarriages during the first trimester.
The two of us have viewed surrogacy as morally suspect (within a range, based on circumstances) for 25 years, and evolved by 2022 to ‘this is morally wrong.’
There’s a big distinction between human life and personhood. You are conflating them.
A cell is also human life. Biologists define the cell as the smallest alive thing. So a single cell from a human is human life.
If I were to take a preimplantation embryo with 10 cells and split them into 5 and 5, would I be making a new human life? What if I grew both into identical twins, or clones? What if I just killed 5 of the cells and let the last 5 grow into a person.
Say we find a way to extract stem cells from an adult and make a clone out of this. Would killing these stem cells then be murder?
"Human life" here is just shorthand for "individual member of the species homo sapiens," or whatever more specific language that you might prefer. Pretending that people can't or don't differentiate between each whole creature of a given species and the cells which make up that creature is silly and dishonest.
I got sick a few months ago. I guess the virus there murdered lots of human lives. A cell is human life. But not a person. This is how biologists and ethicists view it, whether the cell is a preimplantation embryo or a cell in my body. A cell is human life but not a person. Whether that cell is in my body or a preimplantation zygote.
It sounds like conservatives should vocally endorse higher spending, higher regulation, higher taxes, and higher deficits, so that progressives would automagically adopt the opposite positions.
It's plainly obvious that surrogacy opponents like Louise Perry simply want to rig culture and policy to further their intragender competition interests. Adding costs to other women's reproductive freedom is good for women who thrive best as stay at home moms supported by a man with perhaps a hobby job.
People talk about selection for IQ and against schizophrenia. But what happens when someone commercializes it about things people (other than nerds and borderline autists like us) *really* care about, like height and attractiveness?
That’s much less good. But it’s not the government’s place to restrict that.
At least height is not good. Not clear what good it is if we’re all taller. It couldn’t hurt if we were all more attractive so maybe that one is more comparable to IQ and health.
I mean if things get bad enough you could always institute affirmative action for short people (lol). Would make more sense that other forms of affirmative action and would be more legal too.
The difficulties attached to LBAC are one more sign that the simulation is flawed and that nobody bothered to work out consistent solutions to the edge cases. Oh well.
I'd argue there should be a divergence in what citizens have the right to do (i.e. surrogacy) and what should be societally encouraged and promoted. While I agree with the case for maximizing citizen freedom, especially when it comes to control over children, there are various practices in regards to raising a child that deserve a lot of skepticism and perhaps even ostracization
Overall agree. However, there's something to keep in mind when it comes to the eugenic aspect of IVF and surrogacy; namely that they may not be so eugenic.
With regards to surrogacy, this will simply raise the birth rate of career-oriented women. And not just the moderately-career-oriented ones, but those so involved into their careers that they couldn't afford to take some time off to have children. And yes, I'm aware many rich women will just resort to it because they can, and that's cool.
As to IVF, it's fine — desirable, even — when used to screen out potential health problems along with other dysgenics; however, the widespread use of it for those with fertility problems will have the opposite effect, which is to spread weak-fertility predispositions.
> the country has a high degree of affective polarization, meaning that the two major political tribes dislike and try to distinguish themselves from one another.
> It did not take long for Republicans to distance themselves from the Alabama Supreme Court. Within days of the ruling that embryos count as unborn children under state law, polls circulated showing that this was a losing issue. Republicans soon fell over themselves assuring the public that they supported IVF, Trump told the Alabama legislature to take action, and it looks like they might do so.
Don't these kind of contradict? If prominent Republicans are falling over themselves to agree with the left because that's a more popular position, that indicates low polarization.
I'd take Richard's point to be that the politicians are less polarized than the base. GOP politicians, particularly in swing states, see that abortion is hurting them and are currently trying to find a way to thread the needle between winning over the base (for the primary) and winning over the median voter (for the general).