I’m about as pro Trump/gop as it gets and pro-life. I go to Catholic Church.
If you guys ban IVF I will vote democrat the rest of my life. I can not think of a stupider and more self destructive policy.
Pro life needs to accept that it’s not democratically popular. If you convince a politician to endorse an unpopular policy one of two things will happen. It will get overturned in plebiscite and/or that politician will eventually lose.
You have to win hearts and minds. Politicians can’t do that for you. They can make things easier day by giving you school vouchers so you can send your kids to schools that teach abortion is wrong. Or a bigger child tax credit. You know popular stuff within their control. But they can’t pass and make stick a law with 60%+ of the population against it.
Here, perhaps, is a good example of how the MSM narrative that "pro-lifers want to ban IVF" is causing you to misinterpret what I actually suggest in the article.
First, pro-lifers do not generally have a problem with IVF in general. We have a problem only with forms of IVF that deliberately kill embryonic human children (or dump them into permanent deep-freeze). I would like to see that specific practice banned. It is not essential to IVF, and IVF would be just fine without it. I have no interest in banning IVF, and I think very few pro-lifers do.
(The Catholic Church, for its part, views the use of IVF as a serious sin, but it's the sin of decoupling procreation from its sexual meaning, not the much more serious sin of murder.)
But I only mentioned IVF one time in this article, and I wasn't calling for a ban. All I said was that pro-lifers may need to fight the incoming administration attempts to *expand* embryo-destructive forms of IVF. For example, Mr. Trump has expressed a desire to require insurance companies to cover IVF, specifically (not just fertility treatments broadly), without regard for the destruction of embryos. That would be very bad! From both a traditional Republican "we shouldn't overregulate the insurance market because it will drive up prices for everyone" perspective, and from a pro-life "we shouldn't encourage forms of IVF that destroy embryos," we should fight that proposed insurance mandate.
But fighting a proposed insurance mandate for embryo-destructive IVF is a loooooong way from trying to ban all IVF.
I am strongly in favor of the embryonic destruction form of IVF.
In addition to the fact that it is a more effective form of IVF, it opens the possibility for polygenic scoring. That will be the single greatest boon to human civilization in history. The dramatic reduction of nearly all forms of biological infirmity and perhaps even the enhancement of human intelligence. My father and I both have had to deal with type 1 diabetes from birth. Polygenic scoring with four embryos reduces that risk 75%, and it’s only going to get better. I’m not giving that up because of your superstitious nonsense.
Yeah, a woman murdering the baby in her womb is macabre. It says something terrible about that woman. A person ensuring the health and capabilities of their children is doing a glorious and godly thing.
From the secular perspective, this is murder. There's nothing superstitious about that. Embryos are humans and you are not "reducing the risk" of diabetes; you're simply killing people with diabetes.
It is *also* eugenics, which has its own dark history. After all, if we're going to kill people who have diabetes as embryos to "reduce biological infirmity," why don't we kill people with diabetes as newborns, too? Why don't we kill *all* the lebensunwertes leben?
It does, as you say, say something terrible about you that you support this. I am, frankly, much more sympathetic to the woman grappling with pressure from her family and boyfriend to abort than with this cold-eyed extermination of defectives.
You nevertheless might *possibly* be right that this is popular, although I doubt that such an explicitly eugenic argument enjoys broad popular support. It nevertheless must be opposed by all people of good conscience, and I don't think it's *so* popular that it's beyond the reach of politics.
You are getting too autistic about this. A woman raw dogging some dude and killing a growing baby inside her is a very different thing than people trying to bring life into the world on purpose making embryos in a lab.
If you can’t understand that you’re lost. There is a reason 88% of Americans including a majority of people against abortion disagree with you.
2) Eugenics is awesome! You’re typing this on a device made possible by eugenics making people high iq enough to invent it.
Killing people is bad, and up until recently killing people was the only way to practice eugenics (there was also letting weak children starve to death, which sucked too). IVF has finally solved this problem, a blessing of unbelievable proportions of there ever was one.
“Why don’t we?”
Because it’s messy and ugly and where do you draw the line. Turns out you don’t need to draw the line at all”embryo” to draw the line before auschwitz. Normal non spergs can get off the slippery slope before that.
It’s a fucked up world where you have more sympathy for raw dogging sluts using abortion as birth control, but hate people trying to bring happy and healthy lives into the world and make it a better place.
Most peoples view of abortion isn’t based on some spergy “logic” about when the soul enters the cells or some nonsense. It’s about the underlying intentions and effects of the action itself has on the person and society.
I agree that pig embryos aren't human; they're pigs. Horse embryos aren't human; they're horses.
Human embryos, however, are clearly humans! Members of our species, organisms in their own right! I think the inquiry should end there. Human beings have rights. Do not kill them. Some people try to argue that some human beings don't have value yet because they don't have personhood or ensoulment or whatever. I don't think those arguments belong in the public sphere.
You mentioned, however, that you are Catholic, and it surprises me that you are unaware that the faith you profess insists that all human beings are persons with a right to life from the time of fertilization forward, condemns IVF as a mortal sin, condemns eugenics as an offense against human dignity, and condemns embryo-destructive IVF as murder. None of these seem compatible with what you are saying.
> Killing people is bad
Well I'm glad we agree on this, at least. I suppose you have some reason for believing that embryos aren't people? Some reason that isn't fundamentally a theological argument?
> A woman raw dogging some dude and killing a growing baby inside her is a very different thing than people trying to bring life into the world on purpose making embryos in a lab.
True! A woman raw-dogging a dude is how babies are ordinarily made, and it's rarely done while premeditating murder (though all too many of them still, horribly, follow through on it).
Creating a bunch of babies in a lab with the intention *beforehand* to kill the "unfit" is an order of magnitude more cruel, not to mention creepy.
The way you talk about women in your post ("slut"? really?) makes me wonder whether you identify as pro-life because you believe in human rights or because you hold women in pitiless contempt. The pro-choicers are always telling me that people like this exist, but I rarely meet any.
> Normal non spergs can get off the slippery slope before Auschwitz.
I think our last sleigh ride down this trail provides good evidence that we very much cannot. There is no limiting principle here.
> You’re typing this on a device made possible by eugenics making people high iq enough to invent it.
If a full-blown, highly effective eugenics program had been up and running near the dawn of the computing era, a number of foundational figures in the field would have died. Alan Turing comes to mind. (At the dawn of the computing era, homosexuality was considered highly dysgenic.)
> There is a reason 88% of Americans including a majority of people against abortion disagree with you.
I don't think this is true, but I haven't been able to find current polling on "is eugenics good?"
19 hrs ago·edited 19 hrs agoLiked by James J. Heaney
I think if you asked "Is eugenics good?" most people would say no. This, however, is mostly because we've been taught that eugenics is bad.
However, if you asked if parents should be allowed to destroy embryos with genetic disorders, I think fewer people would say no. This is because while we've been taught that eugenics is bad, we haven't really been taught why.
"Eugenics is awesome! You’re typing this on a device made possible by eugenics making people high iq enough to invent it."
With all due respect, what alternate timeline are you typing from? Because the guys who invented the computer were not produced via a breeding program.
"Most peoples view of abortion isn’t based on some spergy “logic” about when the soul enters the cells or some nonsense."
This is actually true--most people's position on abortion isn't based on any kind of logic.
"It’s about the underlying intentions and effects of the action itself has on the person and society."
This part is wrong. Most people base their position on abortion on either how much they want no-consequences sex or how much the unborn child looks like a born child.
“Eugenics” is just the genetically superior outbreeding the genetically inferior. It doesn’t have to be a government breeding program. For 99.9999% of human history it was just called “evolution”. The smarter and stronger would have 40% of their kids die instead of 60% for the less worthy or something along those lines, and this would improve genetic stock over time.
Gregory Clark detailed this pretty well in his work showing the IQ increase in Europe starting around 1000AD due to a higher survival rate of successful yeomen farmers and merchants leading to demographic replacement of the lower orders via differential child mortality. Dead children literally made us smart enough to have an Industrial Revolution.
After the Industrial Revolution we had so much surplus that the children of the weak stopped dying, which potentially could have caused dysgenics.
Hitler took this idea (in a very confused a contradictory way) too far and got lots of strong smart white people killed for no good reason. Though it’s hard to blame eugenics because Stalin believed the exact opposite and Churchill loved eugenics too.
So we all decided rightly that “eugenics” shouldn’t be used to justify death camps and wars of aggression.
But lo and behold we now have the technology to do everything eugenics promised us AND MORE! X1000. And all without any killing or war or force or any other nonsense. It’s literally just science + human freedom!
Or we can take door number 2, where mutation load gets worse every generation and the low iq third world outbreeds us and floods our borders and makes the entire world into the third world and civilization collapses. But hey, at least we followed the orders or some child molesting faggot priests.
The claim that pro-lifers want to "ban" IVF has largely arisen from a situation in Alabama. The state supreme court had ruled that IVF couples could sue for the wrongful death of their embryonic children who had been wrongfully and negligently destroyed. In the case in question, the IVF clinic had left unlocked the door to its cryopreservation room, allowing a psychiatric patient to wander in from the adjoining hospital and smash some vials containing their frozen embryos on the floor. The clinic responded by temporarily shutting down, apparently to pressure the legislature to give it new protection from all legal liability -- which the witless legislature promptly did, giving IVF clinics blanket immunity from all civil or criminal liability no matter how negligently, incompetently, or maliciously it destroys embryos. Pro-lifers (and anyone actually realizing the implications of this exemption of the clinics from all decent standards for medical malpractice claims) objected. As for what some might call the "normal and natural" embryo losses that routinely occur in IVF clinics, they are already covered by the standard IVF consent forms -- 17 pages of contract in which the parents agree in advance not to hold the clinic liable for such destruction. That was never what the Alabama dispute was about. Suits against IVF clinics for outright negligence that destroyed embryos (failing to maintain or monitor the freezers, etc.) have proceeded, and won big civil payouts, in staunchly pro-abortion states like California -- so now the supposedly pro-life state of Alabama is the one place in the country where grieving parents of these embryos have no recourse. Trump (as usual) misperceived the issue and decided he might like to protect the clinics nationally, because "we need more babies." What the negligent clinics are doing, though, doesn't have a lot to do with producing live babies.
I don’t know… I think you could have held back on topic #6 a week and posted it exactly as-is and we would have been plenty happy with that walk-through! Thanks as always for a more-detailed-than-promised summary!
I’m about as pro Trump/gop as it gets and pro-life. I go to Catholic Church.
If you guys ban IVF I will vote democrat the rest of my life. I can not think of a stupider and more self destructive policy.
Pro life needs to accept that it’s not democratically popular. If you convince a politician to endorse an unpopular policy one of two things will happen. It will get overturned in plebiscite and/or that politician will eventually lose.
You have to win hearts and minds. Politicians can’t do that for you. They can make things easier day by giving you school vouchers so you can send your kids to schools that teach abortion is wrong. Or a bigger child tax credit. You know popular stuff within their control. But they can’t pass and make stick a law with 60%+ of the population against it.
Here, perhaps, is a good example of how the MSM narrative that "pro-lifers want to ban IVF" is causing you to misinterpret what I actually suggest in the article.
First, pro-lifers do not generally have a problem with IVF in general. We have a problem only with forms of IVF that deliberately kill embryonic human children (or dump them into permanent deep-freeze). I would like to see that specific practice banned. It is not essential to IVF, and IVF would be just fine without it. I have no interest in banning IVF, and I think very few pro-lifers do.
(The Catholic Church, for its part, views the use of IVF as a serious sin, but it's the sin of decoupling procreation from its sexual meaning, not the much more serious sin of murder.)
But I only mentioned IVF one time in this article, and I wasn't calling for a ban. All I said was that pro-lifers may need to fight the incoming administration attempts to *expand* embryo-destructive forms of IVF. For example, Mr. Trump has expressed a desire to require insurance companies to cover IVF, specifically (not just fertility treatments broadly), without regard for the destruction of embryos. That would be very bad! From both a traditional Republican "we shouldn't overregulate the insurance market because it will drive up prices for everyone" perspective, and from a pro-life "we shouldn't encourage forms of IVF that destroy embryos," we should fight that proposed insurance mandate.
But fighting a proposed insurance mandate for embryo-destructive IVF is a loooooong way from trying to ban all IVF.
As for popular stuff: heck man you should see my pet pro-life issue: https://decivitate.substack.com/p/how-to-claim-your-unborn-child-on
I am strongly in favor of the embryonic destruction form of IVF.
In addition to the fact that it is a more effective form of IVF, it opens the possibility for polygenic scoring. That will be the single greatest boon to human civilization in history. The dramatic reduction of nearly all forms of biological infirmity and perhaps even the enhancement of human intelligence. My father and I both have had to deal with type 1 diabetes from birth. Polygenic scoring with four embryos reduces that risk 75%, and it’s only going to get better. I’m not giving that up because of your superstitious nonsense.
Yeah, a woman murdering the baby in her womb is macabre. It says something terrible about that woman. A person ensuring the health and capabilities of their children is doing a glorious and godly thing.
From the secular perspective, this is murder. There's nothing superstitious about that. Embryos are humans and you are not "reducing the risk" of diabetes; you're simply killing people with diabetes.
It is *also* eugenics, which has its own dark history. After all, if we're going to kill people who have diabetes as embryos to "reduce biological infirmity," why don't we kill people with diabetes as newborns, too? Why don't we kill *all* the lebensunwertes leben?
It does, as you say, say something terrible about you that you support this. I am, frankly, much more sympathetic to the woman grappling with pressure from her family and boyfriend to abort than with this cold-eyed extermination of defectives.
You nevertheless might *possibly* be right that this is popular, although I doubt that such an explicitly eugenic argument enjoys broad popular support. It nevertheless must be opposed by all people of good conscience, and I don't think it's *so* popular that it's beyond the reach of politics.
Thanks for posting your perspective all the same.
1). Embryos are not humans.
You are getting too autistic about this. A woman raw dogging some dude and killing a growing baby inside her is a very different thing than people trying to bring life into the world on purpose making embryos in a lab.
If you can’t understand that you’re lost. There is a reason 88% of Americans including a majority of people against abortion disagree with you.
2) Eugenics is awesome! You’re typing this on a device made possible by eugenics making people high iq enough to invent it.
Killing people is bad, and up until recently killing people was the only way to practice eugenics (there was also letting weak children starve to death, which sucked too). IVF has finally solved this problem, a blessing of unbelievable proportions of there ever was one.
“Why don’t we?”
Because it’s messy and ugly and where do you draw the line. Turns out you don’t need to draw the line at all”embryo” to draw the line before auschwitz. Normal non spergs can get off the slippery slope before that.
It’s a fucked up world where you have more sympathy for raw dogging sluts using abortion as birth control, but hate people trying to bring happy and healthy lives into the world and make it a better place.
Most peoples view of abortion isn’t based on some spergy “logic” about when the soul enters the cells or some nonsense. It’s about the underlying intentions and effects of the action itself has on the person and society.
> "Embryos are not humans."
I agree that pig embryos aren't human; they're pigs. Horse embryos aren't human; they're horses.
Human embryos, however, are clearly humans! Members of our species, organisms in their own right! I think the inquiry should end there. Human beings have rights. Do not kill them. Some people try to argue that some human beings don't have value yet because they don't have personhood or ensoulment or whatever. I don't think those arguments belong in the public sphere.
You mentioned, however, that you are Catholic, and it surprises me that you are unaware that the faith you profess insists that all human beings are persons with a right to life from the time of fertilization forward, condemns IVF as a mortal sin, condemns eugenics as an offense against human dignity, and condemns embryo-destructive IVF as murder. None of these seem compatible with what you are saying.
> Killing people is bad
Well I'm glad we agree on this, at least. I suppose you have some reason for believing that embryos aren't people? Some reason that isn't fundamentally a theological argument?
> A woman raw dogging some dude and killing a growing baby inside her is a very different thing than people trying to bring life into the world on purpose making embryos in a lab.
True! A woman raw-dogging a dude is how babies are ordinarily made, and it's rarely done while premeditating murder (though all too many of them still, horribly, follow through on it).
Creating a bunch of babies in a lab with the intention *beforehand* to kill the "unfit" is an order of magnitude more cruel, not to mention creepy.
The way you talk about women in your post ("slut"? really?) makes me wonder whether you identify as pro-life because you believe in human rights or because you hold women in pitiless contempt. The pro-choicers are always telling me that people like this exist, but I rarely meet any.
> Normal non spergs can get off the slippery slope before Auschwitz.
I think our last sleigh ride down this trail provides good evidence that we very much cannot. There is no limiting principle here.
> You’re typing this on a device made possible by eugenics making people high iq enough to invent it.
If a full-blown, highly effective eugenics program had been up and running near the dawn of the computing era, a number of foundational figures in the field would have died. Alan Turing comes to mind. (At the dawn of the computing era, homosexuality was considered highly dysgenic.)
> There is a reason 88% of Americans including a majority of people against abortion disagree with you.
I don't think this is true, but I haven't been able to find current polling on "is eugenics good?"
I think if you asked "Is eugenics good?" most people would say no. This, however, is mostly because we've been taught that eugenics is bad.
However, if you asked if parents should be allowed to destroy embryos with genetic disorders, I think fewer people would say no. This is because while we've been taught that eugenics is bad, we haven't really been taught why.
"Eugenics is awesome! You’re typing this on a device made possible by eugenics making people high iq enough to invent it."
With all due respect, what alternate timeline are you typing from? Because the guys who invented the computer were not produced via a breeding program.
"Most peoples view of abortion isn’t based on some spergy “logic” about when the soul enters the cells or some nonsense."
This is actually true--most people's position on abortion isn't based on any kind of logic.
"It’s about the underlying intentions and effects of the action itself has on the person and society."
This part is wrong. Most people base their position on abortion on either how much they want no-consequences sex or how much the unborn child looks like a born child.
“Eugenics” is just the genetically superior outbreeding the genetically inferior. It doesn’t have to be a government breeding program. For 99.9999% of human history it was just called “evolution”. The smarter and stronger would have 40% of their kids die instead of 60% for the less worthy or something along those lines, and this would improve genetic stock over time.
Gregory Clark detailed this pretty well in his work showing the IQ increase in Europe starting around 1000AD due to a higher survival rate of successful yeomen farmers and merchants leading to demographic replacement of the lower orders via differential child mortality. Dead children literally made us smart enough to have an Industrial Revolution.
After the Industrial Revolution we had so much surplus that the children of the weak stopped dying, which potentially could have caused dysgenics.
Hitler took this idea (in a very confused a contradictory way) too far and got lots of strong smart white people killed for no good reason. Though it’s hard to blame eugenics because Stalin believed the exact opposite and Churchill loved eugenics too.
So we all decided rightly that “eugenics” shouldn’t be used to justify death camps and wars of aggression.
But lo and behold we now have the technology to do everything eugenics promised us AND MORE! X1000. And all without any killing or war or force or any other nonsense. It’s literally just science + human freedom!
Or we can take door number 2, where mutation load gets worse every generation and the low iq third world outbreeds us and floods our borders and makes the entire world into the third world and civilization collapses. But hey, at least we followed the orders or some child molesting faggot priests.
The claim that pro-lifers want to "ban" IVF has largely arisen from a situation in Alabama. The state supreme court had ruled that IVF couples could sue for the wrongful death of their embryonic children who had been wrongfully and negligently destroyed. In the case in question, the IVF clinic had left unlocked the door to its cryopreservation room, allowing a psychiatric patient to wander in from the adjoining hospital and smash some vials containing their frozen embryos on the floor. The clinic responded by temporarily shutting down, apparently to pressure the legislature to give it new protection from all legal liability -- which the witless legislature promptly did, giving IVF clinics blanket immunity from all civil or criminal liability no matter how negligently, incompetently, or maliciously it destroys embryos. Pro-lifers (and anyone actually realizing the implications of this exemption of the clinics from all decent standards for medical malpractice claims) objected. As for what some might call the "normal and natural" embryo losses that routinely occur in IVF clinics, they are already covered by the standard IVF consent forms -- 17 pages of contract in which the parents agree in advance not to hold the clinic liable for such destruction. That was never what the Alabama dispute was about. Suits against IVF clinics for outright negligence that destroyed embryos (failing to maintain or monitor the freezers, etc.) have proceeded, and won big civil payouts, in staunchly pro-abortion states like California -- so now the supposedly pro-life state of Alabama is the one place in the country where grieving parents of these embryos have no recourse. Trump (as usual) misperceived the issue and decided he might like to protect the clinics nationally, because "we need more babies." What the negligent clinics are doing, though, doesn't have a lot to do with producing live babies.
Excellently put.
I don’t know… I think you could have held back on topic #6 a week and posted it exactly as-is and we would have been plenty happy with that walk-through! Thanks as always for a more-detailed-than-promised summary!