The GOP is discovering that there is a real danger in pandering to the extreme right wing religious faction within their party because those people are insatiable in seeking to carry out their fanatical beliefs to their logical conclusions. The strategy works as long as their followers do not take things too far.
Take the case of abortion. For many on the right, the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision, that said that women had a right to terminate their pregnancies before a certain period, became a rallying cry and when the US Supreme Court did just that, they were ecstatic. But among those calling for the overthrow were those who believed that life begins at conception and that anything that prevents a fertilized egg from further growth is tantamount to murder. These people were energized and proceeded to pass state laws that prevented abortion under any circumstances, even in the case of danger to the life and health of the mother and even if the fetus had such problems that it did not have a viable chance of survival, or would suffer from all manner of serious abnormalities.
But while these people are a significant force in the GOP , they are minority nationwide. There is a whole spectrum of people on this issue. It was always the case that there was a majority of people who felt that abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances, although they were not unanimous on where the line should be drawn. But it is clear that that line is not that far from what Roe drew. But rather than negotiating about the line, the extremists took their position that life begins at conception to its logical conclusion and demanded the outright. banning of abortion This has caused a serious backlash as popular movements to restore abortion rights kept winning referenda quite easily even in so-called red states, and anti-choice extremist candidates fared poorly at the polls.
The recent unanimous decision by the Alabama supreme court that embryos created during the IVF process are really ‘extrauterine children’ and that hence the destruction of them was criminally culpable came as a bombshell. The IVF process is not foolproof and requires the production of many embryos of which only a few become viable for continued pregnancy. The remaining embryos are necessarily destroyed but the Alabama decision requires that every single unused embryo be preserved forever, upon pain of criminal prosecution. As a result, the main IVF clinic in the state immediately halted work on treatments, creating despair for the many people who had been hoping to conceive children. Fertility doctors have also expressed concerns about the ruling
The chief justice’s opinion was largely based on biblical reasoning,
By citing verses from the Bible and Christian theologians in his concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker alarmed advocates for church-state separation, while delighting religious conservatives who oppose abortion.
Human life, Parker wrote, “cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”
…Parker argued in his opinion that the court was merely enforcing the Alabama state constitution, which was amended in 2018 to recognize “the sanctity of unborn life.” That principle has “deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God,’” Parker said, quoting the Book of Genesis.
Parker sprinkled his opinion with a litany of religious sources, from classic Christian theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, to a modern conservative Christian manifesto, the Manhattan Declaration, that opposes “anti-life” measures.
He also quoted a Bible verse that is legendary within the anti-abortion movement, in which God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
…The Alabama ruling could influence decisions in other state courts and legislatures, particularly in the 11 states that already have fetal personhood language in their laws, Ziegler said. But because it’s about the interpretation of a state law, she said the case is unlikely to make its way to the Supreme Court.
Parker has strong connections to the religious extremist New Apostolic Reformation which argues for something called the ‘Seven Mountains Mandate’ that says that Christians obligated to try and take over every aspect of civic life.
The Seven Mountains Mandate urges adherents to establish what they consider to be God’s kingdom on Earth by taking control of seven areas of society: family, religion, government, education, arts and entertainment, commerce and media. Once relegated to a fringe of the Christian conservative movement, it has gained followers in recent years as the ranks of nondenominational, neo-charismatic Christians have grown in the U.S. It also has earned greater media attention since House Speaker Mike Johnson assumed his elevated role, due to his connections with leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement that espouses Seven Mountain theology.
The Alabama decision has proven to be highly unpopular, even more so than the decisions to ban abortion, because people sympathize with those who have been struggling to have children, and oppose taking away their chance to do so simply because some judges and lawmakers think that saving fertilized eggs takes priority.
The GOP is now scrambling to find ways to avoid an even more severe backlash over the IVF issue than they face with abortion. They have started falling over themselves to state their support for IVF treatments and the Alabama legislature is seeking to pass laws to protect IVF clinics .The Alabama attorney general said that he would not prosecute IVF clinics and families and subsequently an explosive device was found outside his office. Florida legislators are already uneasy that the Alabama IVF virus will spread to their state.
But there is a limit to how much Republicans can bob and weave around this issue because they are on the record as saying that life begins at conception and they even introduced a resolution H.R. 1011 in the House of Representatives that defines personhood as beginning at conception.
Life at Conception Act
This bill declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being.
Nothing in this bill shall be construed to authorize the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child.
As of February 11, 2024 this bill has 166 co-sponsors, all GOP, including the speaker.
Joe Biden and the Democrats are going to use this issue to bludgeon Republicans like they have done with abortion, and even serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), after being initially silent, now says that he strongly supports IVF treatments.
Treating embryos as persons is the logical end point of the arguments used to oppose abortion so it should be no surprise that religious zealots ended up here, and Parker is simply being consistent. The GOP can’t stop the slide to the bottom. Kevin Drum nails the central question that the GOP faces and that is whether they think an embryo is a person or not, not whether they support IVF or not.
The sole question is whether an IVF embryo is considered a person. This has the effect of restricting access to IVF because it can turn negligence into murder. No one wants to take the risk of performing IVF if a wrong move means you could end up in court looking down the barrel of a wrongful death or manslaughter charge from an overzealous district attorney.
So the question for Republicans isn’t whether they love IVF, it’s whether they think life begins at conception, even if that life is being stored inside a hospital freezer at -320°F. The Alabama Supreme Court says yes. Nikki Haley says yes. The Catholic Church says yes. Many fundamentalist Christians say yes.
But the only way to support IVF is to say no. So what do Republicans say?
The Daily Show‘s Desi Lydic commented on the Alabama decision
Just a reminder: the “unchangeable word of God” was completely different when Roe v. Wade was decided. Evangelicals were fine with it--they considered it a Catholic issue. Going after abortion was a strategic decision by folks like Falwell to mobilize people to help fight desegregation. See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/abortion-us-religious-right-racial-segregation
The Latest GOP RepubiCON push is that “Life begins before conception”. New laws will push for criminal prosecution for “wasting the seed” or “spilling it on the ground”, i.e. rubbing one out.
Total disregard for the definition of a citizen in the Constitution-- a person born in the USA.
just wait until the religious right say unfertilized eggs are “human” life.
then jail women for menstruating or miscarrying.
@3: ahem…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59214544
Here’s an idea: put all the extra IVF embryos into a thermos (called a Dewar flask in science) filled with liquid nitrogen and give it to the couple to take home with them. If they forget to replenish the flask with LN, or they drop it or break it or lose it, no state troopers are going to be coming around looking for the embryos. /s
@ahcuah:
Or, as Fred Clark put it, “The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal“.
Minor correction: there was one dissenting opinion.
More Republicans:
He believes in the reptilians!
“Meet Mark Robinson: The GOP’s Next Top Lunatic” | The Daily Show
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6QGt9M91k
This gubernatorial nominee is a godsend for the Democratic campaign.
Yes, it would help if the Republicans had more of their people under investigation for corruption and/or sexual assault but a honest-to-god crazy person generates more publicity.
Something that’s very clear to me: the Alabama legislature is only back-peddling because IVF is something that’s overwhelmingly done by white, older (meaning 20-year-olds are not seeking it), upper-class voters…in other word, their base. Alternately, those with “really good insurance” such as police officers, who skew right-wing and reactionary.
In their zeal to harm women, they forgot for a moment that their donor base was also harmed.
I’ve met people like that judge. The version I met weren’t religious but they really, really enjoyed picking an obviously wrong position and then starting an argument about it. The sole purpose was to look down their nose and sneer at anyone who disagreed with them. Because the facts didn’t matter to them, they got off on making people deal with obviously wrong BS.
The biblical truth about eggs and sperm was simple: microscopic things didn’t exist for them, ergo there is nothing further to say about it. No biblical stance has any meaning here whatsoever nor can it possibly have any meaning. If you accept the science that these things exist in the first place then you have no reason not to accept the rest of the science about it. But that doesn’t let them be such useless jackasses and get off on forcing other people to deal with made-up issues, so of course they commit what they call a sin by lying about it.
And they are lying about it, because the Bible actually is reasonably clear in a couple of places on when life starts: at first breath. In part, of course, because they didn’t have any idea of what was actually going on inside there.
If anything, standard ‘best practices’ in medicine have extended the concept of ‘alive’ and ‘viable’ far earlier than it was in Biblical times, since we can now keep significantly premature babies alive when that would not have survived until quite recently.
… a Bible verse that is legendary within the anti-abortion movement, in which God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”
Which implies individual existence pre-conception, the theological inferences of which every one of the hyperchristians seems determined to evade at all costs.
This phrasing seems to imply that there is a section of more moderate , reasonable GOP members who are only pandering to the nuts to get a few votes/hold onto power / not be primaried. I think those illusions were shattered long ago for me atleast (the selection of Betsy Devos was the last straw personally) -- For me now there are right wing nuts who can hide that fact somewhat and there are right wing nuts who cant be bothered to hide their nuttyism. Anyone else has already left the party.
Yeah exactly.
This comment on the Kevin Drum post also was accurate “But what about how old Joe Biden is? Isn’t he a day older than he was yesterday?”
They fucked around. They’re finding out.
Pierce @12,
It does not.
God is posited to be omniscient, so that God can know someone before they exist.
Many sophisticatificators would claim that God is also outside of time and space and perceives it holistically, thus knowing everything that ever was and ever will be in a way we saps in the bowels of spacetime who perceive durations and befores and afters can’t grok.
@ 15 Morales
But then this god knows of all abortions beforehand. And to paraphrase Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent abortions, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he both able and willing? Then how can there be abortions?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Is he able, but not willing?
Then abortions are blessed.
😉
Me too, in fact I think one of them comments here.
Mano, I love you, but in this case I have to correct you. This is not what the Alabama court ruled. They only ruled on civil claims.
Now, people are rightly panicked because the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court wrote a concurrence to the judgement in which he laid out reasoning much more explicitly and in a way that would clearly apply to the criminal realm as well, but at the end of the day, there was no ruling on criminal liability, only civil liability, and even if it’s hard to believe that the CJ would rule any other way than holding people criminally liable for destruction of embryos, without having the criminal liability question before the court there’s no guarantee that what we think will happen actually will happen.
Right now we only have a ruling on civil liability. It’s a frightening ruling. There’s reason to think that criminal liability could be next. Nonetheless, at present it’s only a ruling on civil liability.
I pointed this out also a few days ago.
The vast majority of IVF users are white, well off women.
IVF isn’t covered by a lot of insurance and not at all by Medicare and Medicaid.
IVF users are 85% white.
It costs an average of $60,000 for every live birth resulting from IVF.
So, yeah, this directly impacts mostly the GOP base in a state like Alabama.
The GOP couldn’t reverse this court decision fast enough.