Alabama Declares Frozen Embryos as Children

[ysabetwordsmith]

Frozen embryos are children, Ala. high court says in unprecedented ruling

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people and someone can be held liable for destroying them, a decision that reproductive rights advocates say could imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) and affect the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on treatments like it each year.


I cracked up laughing. See, here's the thing about frozen embryos: storing them isn't cheap. Alabama is going to hemorrhage money. After all, if the parents can't afford to pay the fertility clinic for maintenance, and the clinic isn't providing that service for free, who's on the hook for those "children" now? Alabama Family Services.

Of course, in theory, they could hire surrogates to birth the babies, but that's expensive too. Then AFS would have to pay someone else to raise them, since they're unwanted. That's if you can pry the parental rights away from the people who provided the genetic material, which is not easy, as demonstrated by many previous divorce battles over embryos. More money down the drain.  Let's not forget, Alabama is Deep South which is dirt-poor compared to the North already. 

Congratulations, Alabama, you just punched the Tar Baby. Have fun with that.
 

Comments

Re: Yes ...

[see_also_friend]

>>But being terrible with money definitely is not helping.<<

That's not Alabsma or the South, its everyone.

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Not quite everyone. Granted there are some forms of financial incompetence or outright chicanery that are widespread, but there are also people who make a hobby of going to every town meeting and saying, "That proposal would lose the town money, and here is the math to show why." They drive everyone else batshit, but I think it's awesome.

Then there are the permaculture and homestead fans who look at articles claiming that factory farming is more efficient at producing food, they frown and go, "Mmm ... that doesn't sound right," then do the math to disprove it. Hell, Paris used to feed itself with market gardens a century or so back. They used the manure from all the city's horses to make produce grow like crazy.

Admittedly, I wish we had a lot more mathematicians in politics, but few of them have the tolerance for that much illogic and nonsense.

Re: Yes ...

[see_also_friend]

>>Not quite everyone.<<

I still find it more efficient to assume incompetence of the masses, and revise my opinion upwards if needed.

>>Then there are the permaculture and homestead fans who look at articles claiming that factory farming is more efficient at producing food,..<<

Well, this is a cultural perspective.

Monoculture and factory farming are more efficient if the end goal is the biggest possible profit every year, with the clock resetting annually, and a bad year being an acceptable outcome (instead of a kill-all famine).

Permaculture is probably the best in terms of using everything, and also far outperforms everything else in terms of sustainability.

Homesteading is a balance of the two, and it curbs some of the more destructive tendencies of factory farming by ensuring that the people making the decisions get to deal with the outcome of all of the decisions, both good and bad.

>>Hell, Paris used to feed itself with market gardens a century or so back. They used the manure from all the city's horses to make produce grow like crazy.<<

I didn't know that. I wonder why they stopped?

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>I still find it more efficient to assume incompetence of the masses, and revise my opinion upwards if needed.<<

Well yeah, I do that too.

>> Monoculture and factory farming are more efficient if the end goal is the biggest possible profit every year, with the clock resetting annually, and a bad year being an acceptable outcome (instead of a kill-all famine). <<

I would say rather, they allow you to produce the most food for the least work when you don't care about the damage done.

Intensive gardening requires considerably more effort but you can grow a LOT more food. I mean think about all the empty space in a tractor-tilled field vs. something like square foot gardening where every square inch is used or a food forest with its many layers.

>> I didn't know that. I wonder why they stopped? <<

Various reasons. Changing society, crowding, but a big part was industrialization meant fewer horses and thus less fertilizer. The market gardens relied heavily on a constant stream of nutrients.

Re: Yes ...

[see_also_friend]

>>I would say rather, they allow you to produce the most food for the least work when you don't care about the damage done.<<

Different arrangement of priorities. After all, in traditional systems record profits 9 years out of 10 mean very little when everyone starves in the 10th year. (While capitalist monoculturists don't worry about the future and expect to be able to import food from elsewhere.)

>>Intensive gardening requires considerably more effort but you can grow a LOT more food. I mean think about all the empty space in a tractor-tilled field vs. something like square foot gardening where every square inch is used or a food forest with its many layers.<<

I'm assessing effort by how much work it would take me to do. I can feasibly have a permaculture yard or a homestead with just myself or a few people and no expensive machines... but a big monoculture farm spreading over miles? Fughedaboutit.

Yeah, acre by acre weeding by hand is more effort than driving a machine around a field, but the options don't scale proportionally.