Stop using abortion rights to wind up women
Recently, Alabama has made the news with their state supreme court decreeing that embryos made with in-vitro fertilization (IVF) are children.
The Democrat and Democrat-aligned response has been predictable: Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats sleeping together! Mass hysteria!
I'm coming at this from a different angle, with a much different set of life experiences, and so I've spent a good bit of time chasing my eyeballs as they drop out of my head and roll across the floor. (That shit's not funny. We get tree roaches coming in looking for snacks and I think we might have mice. If I wind up blind, you'll know why.) I really want to feel sorry for Alabama women who are having trouble conceiving. Here's what's going through my head instead.
To address the IVF issue directly: Why are we doing this?
Okay, right, some women are infertile. Okay, they're infertile. Why are they forcing the issue? If the reason they are infertile is genetic, they are likely passing that on to any future daughters, and those daughters may not be able to afford fertility treatment when it's their time to try. These women are literally passing the buck, taking on a debt their kids will have to pay later. You don't do that to your kids. That's messed up.
If there isn't a genetic reason, it's still a health condition and it is highly likely these women will suffer health problems during the pregnancy, also putting the fetus at risk. Or fetuses, and IVF and implantation carry a high risk of multiple pregnancy (twins, triplets, etc.), which in turn places the future babies at risk of premature birth and all the health problems that involves. Why are we cheering women on as they injure their own children? I'm not okay with policing pregnancies once they start but damn, why even start them with that much risk involved? That is a shitty way to start someone's life. Kids deserve better.
Get a Pet Rock. Damn.
And that's the ones who are using their own eggs. What I really don't get are the ones who use "donor eggs." That's not a donation. You are taking someone else's kids and passing them off as your own. I mean to write about this eventually, but in the past few years I've come to the realization that the term "egg" or "egg cell" with respect to the gamete produced by female humans is a misnomer. I use those terms here only because you'll know what I'm talking about, but what the ovum (plural: ova) actually is is the future child's first cell. That's why mothers pass on mitochondrial DNA and fathers don't.
When you get a donated heart, it takes over the duty of pumping blood that your own heart can no longer perform. "Donating eggs" does not do remotely the same thing with respect to reproduction. When you buy "donated eggs" you do not magically change them to have your DNA. Therefore, you are not reproducing. You are instead passing another woman's kids off as your own. You're being a surrogate, except instead of the mother paying you, you've bought the mother's kids. I don't get how this ever passed muster with any hospital ethics board, much less state legislatures or Congress. I suspect it's because most people don't really think about what is happening in reproduction. I know I didn't for a long time.
I'd be less upset about it if the genetic parents went on the birth certificate, but the kid doesn't even get that much. I know what it's like to be lied to about who your mother is. It enrages me that we find this socially acceptable, ever. And imagine what's in store for these kids' future descendants when they try to trace the family tree, especially if no one ever told the donor-made people how they were started. We can do DNA-based genealogy now. It's going to be a fucking mess.
Point is, YES. Ova and embryos are children. Very underdeveloped children. This shouldn't be controversial at all.
"But Dana, if the ovum or embryo is a child, that means abortion shouldn't be legal!"
Let's get the dumb thing out of the way right now: No one "aborts" an ovum. (Saying you are aborting a fetus, by the way, is another misnomer. Abort means “to stop,” in this case stopping the process of pregnancy.) But lots of women have periods. If we have to ban abortion because embryos are kids, we have to ban periods because ova are kids. No? Didn't think so. Get back on the logic rails, please.
As to embryos being children: Let me ask you something. Does a grown person have the right to grab you, shove themselves up into your uterus, and live there whether you want them there or not?
No. Of course not. That's insane. But that's what anti-abortionists claim we should allow an embryo to do. The only difference is the embryo gets into the uterus via the Fallopian tube. Everything else is the same.
WHO GIVES A SHIT WHAT AN OVUM OR EMBRYO IS. OF COURSE THEY ARE HUMAN BEINGS. The QUESTION here is whether they should have rights that born people don't have.
Anti-abortionists claim they simply want "unborn babies" to have the same rights as born people. They are lying through their fucking teeth. Or unwittingly stating an untruth, which to me is not the same thing, but the point is, they're wrong. No born person has the right to hook themselves up to you by IV and steal your nutrients. No born person can take blood from you without your consent. No born person can take organs from you without your consent. Not even temporarily. Since when is the uterus a special case? It's not. The end.
MORE TO THE POINT...
I'm sure you've all read this far, if you're still with me, and now you're foaming at the mouth because women suffering from infertility should be an Untouchable Class for the purposes of criticism. I am unmoved. Making ANYONE an Untouchable Class sets us up for atrocities to occur. You've seen that with "trans women" who use women's privacy facilities, and Catholic priests who molest altar boys, and drag queens who are not vetted for sex offenses before being allowed to read to little kids in libraries. (We know this because some of them have been caught engaging in sex offenses or found to have a history of them after engaging in said readings.) Do you really think this time it'll actually work? I'm here to tell you it won't. I've seen how too many infertile women behave concerning issues of human reproduction and child custody when they think no one important is looking. One of them stole my son. I give my sympathy on a case-by-case basis, when I ever do. I can't see that ever changing. If I see you fuck up, I am calling you out. Not remotely sorry.
That said, I think it is supremely fucked up that Democrats and all similarly aligned have looked at this issue of Alabama making IVF more difficult to obtain and, instead of just addressing that issue on its face, they've looped it back around to abortion. Like, last I checked? Trying to start a pregnancy and trying to end a pregnancy are COMPLETELY OPPOSITE ENDEAVORS.
I know for a fact that Rush Limbaugh's definition of the word he coined, feminazi, as "a radical feminist who wants to see as many abortions performed as possible," is bullshit. I have never, and I mean ever, seen a radical feminist express any such desire. I know quite a few radical feminists. Doesn't happen. But I'm really wondering about Democrats at this point. Are there that many Democratic Party men having affairs and trying to hide them from their wives? What the fuck, guys? We literally almost never talk on a national level about any other women's issue in this fucking country EXCEPT this one. I want bodily autonomy as badly as the next non-comatose red-blooded American woman does -- and the comatose ones deserve it too! -- but seriously, this is weird. You're weird. Stop being weird.
What really chaps my ass is once again they're saying, "This situation just illustrates why it is so important to vote Democrats into office in November!"
FUUUUUCK YOOOOOUUUUU
Dear Democrats: ROE V. WADE WAS HANDED DOWN IN 1973. YOU HAVE HAD HALF A FUCKING CENTURY TO CODIFY ROE INTO LAW AND THIS IS WHAT YOU DO INSTEAD. Beat us over the head with Roe to scare us into voting for you. Like you LITERALLY have NOTHING else going for you.
Know what? I bet you're right. LITERALLY.
I could even argue that the Democrats' obsession with gEnDeR iDeNtiTy lost us Roe. They've got the courts agreeing now that things like breastfeeding and pregnancy are not sex-based (in other words, all people can do them, male or female), therefore discriminating against breastfeeding women and pregnant women isn't sex discrimination. Pointing out sex discrimination was one of the few reliable weapons we had against abortion bans and the Department of Labor's blasé attitude toward sexual harassment and sex-based pay disparity and NOW LOOK. And you want to lecture us about how we vote. Roe got knocked down ON BIDEN'S WATCH. And wasn't he talking about legalizing abortion at the federal level? When the fuck's that supposed to happen, again? January 2025 if Biden wins? Oh, yeah. Sure. You bet. Let's even have him sign the bill on the anniversary of Roe!
Fuck. There go my eyeballs again.
Okay. Whew. Caught 'em.
But seriously. I'm so tired. So fucking tired. And this is the only women's issue we discuss nationally, like I said, to any significant degree. If the talking heads mention anything else it is an afterthought or the news story is so egregious (as with Brock Turner getting six months for a witnessed rape) or so novel (as with "Octomom") that they can't really ignore it. I heard one mention of Women's History Month on March 1 that wasn't on social media. I'm seeing middle-aged women living in their vans with everything they own stuffed in, including the pet cat. I'm seeing teenage girls brainwashed into thinking they're not girls and getting their breasts hacked off. I'm seeing girls' and women's sports eroding because males are allowed in. I'm seeing the health of girls and women neglected unless they're pregnant, and often even then. I've seen mothers take up prostitution because they are only allowed TANF (welfare) for one year in their state of residence (fuck you, Arizona, with a rusty fencepost) and time's run out. Pick a fucking cause. A lot of the reason so many of us ever need abortions is because our lives are shit in particular ways that politicians could fix if they wanted to. They don't want to. The media don't care, either.
I can't see how voting for Democrats will fix this. It never has.
Don't look at the Republicans. We lost them a long damn time ago.
Now what?