Eggs Are People, Too
Interesting story on Salon, "Clump of cells or 'microscopic American?'"
In in vitro fertilization, a woman is given a drug that causes her to produce many eggsa during ovulation. Then, during voulation, she has several eggs removed from her ovary, which are then combined in a test tube with her partner's (or a donor's) sperm. This shotgun approach can result in many fertized embryos, some of which are inserted back into the woman in the hope of a successful pregnancy. Frequently the process leaves behind several unused embryos. With the donor's permission, these can be inserted into another infertile woman and lead to a successful pregnany for her.
Here's what we're talking about:
This is an 8-cell embryo - a fertilized egg that has divided 3 times, whcih is the point when it is ready to be put back in the woman's fallopian tubes.
The process has been know as "embryo donation." The Department of Health and Human Services has now adopted a policy of replacing the term embryo donation with "embryo adoption. Get it? The woman is no longer the recipient of a potential baby, she is adopting an actual baby.
The idea, of course, is political. If they can get Americans to think of it as adoption, it's a small step to convince them that embryos (and fetuses) are children.
I know the fundamentalists want us to believe that the ava and sperm are actually little humans, too, but evn they will sometimes admit that that's a little farfetched, and difficult to control. A single ejaculation of sperm would mean the murder of hundreds of millions of tiny humans.
Nightlight Christian Adoptions has a program called Snowflakes that finds adoptive parents for embryos. Since 1997, they have matched 207 genetic families with 136 adopting families, with a live-birth success rate of 35 percent.
That means that each of the 207 genetic families must have donated ten or more embryos, which means Snowflakes has been the group home of something like 2,000 children, 65% of whom they have allowed to die. That's 1,300 dead kids. Are they ready to take responsibility for that?
And I still don't understand why, if fetuses are babies, a pregnant woman is not eligible for Welfare (AFDC) or a simple dependent income tax deduction. Apparently that arm of HHS and the IRS do not consider an unborn fetus to be a child.
8:47:09 AM 
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