Posted on 08/23/2015 9:44:25 AM PDT by Starman417
"Fertility clinics destroy embryos all the time. Why aren’t conservatives after them?" was the title of an article from Margot Kaplan in the Opinion pages of last Sunday's Washington Post. This is one of those pieces that contains enough ridiculous to write a thousand words or two to counter, but one sentence in particular really got me thinking (emphasis mine):
The disparity between how the law treats abortion patients and IVF patients reveals an ugly truth about abortion restrictions: that they are often less about protecting life than about controlling women’s bodies. Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people. But only abortion concerns women who have had sex that they don’t want to lead to childbirth. Abortion restrictions use unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for “irresponsible sex” and remind women of the consequences of being unchaste: If you didn’t want to endure a mandatory vaginal ultrasound , you shouldn’t have had sex in the first place .OK, I lied - there is one other point I couldn't let pass. Go back to the last sentence of that paragraph - how is it that leftists get so up in arms over the invasive, "mandatory vaginal ultrasounds", being part of the abortion process but have no problem with the invasive, mandatory... abortions?
Back to the main point - Kaplan is trying to equate IVF and harvesting organs from abortions as simply the "destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people." I understand that she is arguing against the part of the pro-life crowd's "Life begins at inception" argument. Which technically, is a point I was always taught in science class. But the way I'm reading her statement is that the two procedures are no different. Let's not forget that the source of this controversy is the fact that aborted fetuses are being used to harvest their organs. For example, kidneys are one of the sets of organ being extracted for research. According the handy guide I had posted in my previous post on the subject they start functioning around week 14. To take Kaplan's logical conclusion that the two procedures are no different that would mean that embryos are being grown for at least 14 weeks for the sole intent of killing them to extract their organs. Where are these organ farms and how long have they existed? We need answers! And is there any cutoff age for this involuntary organ donation, or do we occasionally see something like what the boys from Monty Python might have done? I know, using the "Live organ donor" skit isn't a fair comparison at all - the man in the skit making the organ donation actually personally consented.
Well, they do have the signed donor card...
OK, sorry for the snark, but thinking along those lines led me to a more serious point. As I had mentioned in my previous post asking where the groups opposing to cruelty to animals stand on this, abortion isn't a subject I write about. People's opinions are too strong to sway, and there is little I can add to the conversation that hasn't already been written. What has captured my interest though, is how this issue has been handled with the same intellectual dishonesty that the left uses too often with other issues. For example, on my Facebook Feed each time a new video gets released the recycled headline reads along the lines of "Group releases latest video attacking Planned Parenthood". Um, "attacking?" While the videos being released do not portray PP positively, there is no editorial content. They are simply showing PP's everyday business practices. if your best defense of your everyday activity is to claim that you're being attacked, then maybe what your doing is wrong? For example, if somebody asked me to express my opinions on President Obama's performance and captured them with a hidden camera, an ensuing story along the lines of "Hidden video exposes the truth - Brother Bob is an ***hole!" I wouldn't go into some PR blitz panic, try explaining that only 3% of my time is spent being an ***hole - you get the idea. My response would simply be, "Yes, it's what I do. Two minutes spent reading my site would tell anyone that"
What is most interesting is that the same crowd that loves to preach that "We need to have a national conversation on..." is trying at all costs to make this conversation about everything except what is actually being done. And this is what takes me back to the title of this post, and it is my challenge to the pro-choice crowd:
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
This has to be the dumbest argument to justify PP’s agenda to date.
Do clinics that perform IVF have to destroy embryos? Probably. These types if things DO have a limited timeframe for chances of success.
And when a woman ovulates once a month, what happens to those eggs if they aren’ t fertilized? Does that make a woman a monthly abortion muderer?
The differerence between IVF and abortion is that with IVF, the woman is TRYING to become pregnant, and HOPING that baby will make it to full term.
Abortion is the exact opposite.
> “Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people”.
False premise.
IVF is a procedure to help a woman have a baby, to fertilize a woman’s egg(s) outside her body. There is ***never intent*** to destroy the fertilized egg. If the procedure results in destroyed eggs, that’s the fault of the technology and procedure.
Whereas abortion is the ***intentional*** deliberate destruction of a fertized egg, a fetus, a child, a baby.
The two, IVF and Abortion are not comparable even if the results can be the same. It would like comparing the deliberate murder of a human being with the accidental death of a human being by car accident. Murder and car accidents result in deaths but they are not the same.
That’s not the false premise. IVF creates several lives at a time. When one pregnancy succeeds, the remaining lives are destroyed or sold off to research. The false premise is that the Catholic Church, Right to Life, American Life League, and recent Republican nominees have all opposed this practice as being murder.
This statement is false. Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into \are in fact/ people.
> “When one pregnancy succeeds, the remaining lives are destroyed or sold off to research.”
The premise is false and as I said the destroyed eggs are not because of intent but because of procedure. If the procedure were optimal, it would take only one egg to be fertilized and made successful. IT IS THE PROCEDURE.
It is also a fact, and a very prevalent one, that most eggs are not fertilized during normal sexual intercourse and the egg is lost in the woman’s period. By the logic of the premise you promote, God is a murderer because of this. Ridiculous.
IVF and Abortion are not comparable, not by a long stretch.
Actually we have been opposed to this too. Their ignorance is showing.
One must be careful not to confuse the human life embodied in the fertilized egg with the egg or the sperm which by themselves are only germ cells.
An unfertilized egg which is menstruated is expelled because God, Himself, in His Wisdom has designed human beings this way.
God gives life and life is God's to take at His will. A person lives only so long as God Himself has ordained - whether it is 5 minutes as a proto-blastocyst, or 105 years as fully formed human being.
Man is in no place to accuse God of murder. Any man who does so misplaces himself above God. God is incapable of being accused by any man of murder. Man chose death over life when he chose sin over obedience to God.
The lives of aborted babies existed as long as God granted them life. The abortionist, however, who aborts absent the medical need to do so to save the mother's life is no less a murderer and guilty of such crime, even as anyone who for instance shoots and kills a fully formed adult absent the need for mortal self-defense.
For the one who slays that human being, they are responsible for taking that life, and it is held to their account.
For the one who dies, it was their appointed time to do so.
Scripture says so:
"A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed." Job 14:5
"Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." Psalm 139:16
Those who perform IVF may only legitimately do so fertilizing and implanting one egg at a time. If the implanted fertilized egg implants successfully, life may be sustained to birth. If it does not, implantation was not meant to be. This is God's will, even as a spontaneous abortion occurs "naturally."
Creating and destroying "expendable" fertilized eggs, however, is murder, no different than non-maternal life-saving abortion.
FReegards!
For later....
Before you start writing as if the other person is stupid, you should learn some 7th-grade biology. By “lives,” I am not referring to “most eggs” which are “not fertlized.” So in no way is by my logic such that God would be a murderer.
Unlike normal conception, IVF discards are not merely eggs. They are fertilized, and hence, life is conceived. Then, because the woman only wants one pregnancy, they are deliberately and with FOREthought, destroyed. And that is why every major Christian group that bears any resemblance to traditional Christian values, from Right to Life, to the Southern Baptist Convention, to the Roman Catholic Church, to the American Life League abhors IVF.
The one sole exception are the 7th Day Adventists, who, in line with their hatred of all Christian history, decided to invent, without any biblical or scientific basis, their own notion as to when conception occurs. And this is why the nation’s largest fertility clinic is an offshoot of a 7th-Day Adventist hospital, Shady Grove Fertility Clinic. (They even have ‘shady’ in their self-description.)
Your annoying sermon is riddled with falsities. First, I was attacking the person’s ludicrous logic that IVF was equivalent to Abortion.
Second, the egg and sperm are not germ cells. They are not capable of germinating by themselves. They are carriers of genetic code, God’s written code of life. When they are merged in fertilization the result is a human life written in advance.
Third, I was being sarcastic in suggesting God was engaging in murder because the anatomy of a woman and man does not result 100% in conception even when both are fertile, even when the woman’s cycle has produced an egg ready for fertilization and the two have normal intercourse. The result is often that there is no conception and hence the couple must keep trying; and each ‘failed’ egg is lost in the woman’s period. This is similar to an IVF procedure where multiple eggs are taken because the fertilization procedures are not 100% reliable. Reliability in both IVF and natural intercourse is not 100%.
To think that discarding eggs during IVF that did not fertilize per a sub-optimal procedure is equivalent to murderous abortion is similar to bizarrely suggesting that God’s less that 100% reliable anatomical design and procedure for conception is equivalent to murder when a cell fails to fertilize and is ‘discarded’ during a woman’s period.
God performs miracles of conception where no conception is possible. But in the normal frequency of events a man and woman who try to conceive naturally and are unable, they must try several times before success is attained. The eggs that are lost or ‘discarded’ in the woman’s period because of failed conception are NOT an act of murder as abortion on demand is. The eggs discarded in an IVF procedure are also not murder as the person posting this garbage thread suggests. Abortion on demand is willful murder made possible by the woman in her fearful state of mind, by the system that avails itself to her, by the doctors and staff that perform it and by the business interests that promote it.
And now we know (actually I knew 20 years ago) that the abortion industry creates false memes of “Women’s Choice”, “Reproductive Rights” and so on, as cover, as a smoke screen to get at the organs and tissues of the aborted baby. This is not far from the evil child sacrifice rituals that are written in history and scripture. The purpose is to extend life in humans who are aging or dying, humans that are afraid of death and refuse to believe in the Savior. There are waiting lists for organs. Growing new ones for extending lifetimes of those on the waiting lists is one area of what they are after. But it does not prevent death.
The abortion industry is therefore a factory process kept hush hush to serve those who try to defy death. What many don’t understand is that the availability of an organ does not always result in life extension. What some don’t further understand is that beating one disease merely sets oneself up for the next disease. If for example, liver disease is overcome by treatment or replacement, there are myriad other diseases that will take the person down.
Life carries a death process with it. A death sentence is put on every head. Still there are billionaires in Silicon Valley that think they can defy death by drinking some exotic telemere potion or growing parts in labs. They will die surely but they will die worse than people of faith. Because to engage in the killing of the innocent so that one has a thought to live a little longer is to pronounce death on one’s soul and conscious. That is far worse than the death of the flesh. Steve Jobs died. And the homosexual fellow that took his place will die too. The founders of Google are also trying to defy death because they have fallen into the trap of thinking their fantasy immortality is a reality that they need only explore.
There is nothing wrong with trying to extend a lifetime and more importantly is the extension of the quality of life not just the quantity as measured in years and months. But murder is still murder. The allowance and toleration of this murder leads to the toleration of human prisoners for organ delivery purposes or organ harvesting for profit. It leads to offers of lots of money for child sacrifice, a living breathing child. It leads to Hell.
I don’t wish to engage in this subject any longer so don’t bother me with it. I hope that’s clear.
So you think your "sermon" is supposedly the last word? You are clearly a "Hostage" to your own ignorance.
My 34-year profession is concentrated in the life sciences and I hold individual undergraduate and graduate degrees in Biology, Chemistry, and Biochemistry. Let's start talking about what you obviously don't know, shall we?
First, I was attacking the person’s ludicrous logic that IVF was equivalent to Abortion
And my point is that in most cases, because life begins at conception, IVF results in multiple abortions. To fertilize a mass of eggs and then to dispose of a mass of fertilized eggs without implanting them is abortion. You may not like that, but that is a fact.
If IVF fertilizes one egg and facilitates implantation to the point of success that is fine. If the implantation of that fertilized egg fails, that is unfortunate, but morally that is also fine. To discard a mass of fertilized eggs which are never administered to the patient for implantation as is done today in IVF, is abortion. Do you get it?
Second, the egg and sperm are not germ cells.
"How germ cells become sperm or egg" Science,17, July 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6245 pp. 279-280, DOI:10.1126/science.349.6245.279-f
You need a refresher course in Biology.
Third, I was being sarcastic in suggesting God was engaging in murder....
Sadly, you are apparently too stupid to see that I was agreeing with you.
... each ‘failed’ egg is lost in the woman’s period. This is similar to an IVF procedure where multiple eggs are taken because the fertilization procedures are not 100% reliable. Reliability in both IVF and natural intercourse is not 100%.
It is obvious that you don't understand Biology at all. Eggs discharged through menstruation are not "failed." They are merely unfertilized, and discharged as designed to do.
This is in no way similar to IVF. IVF joins sperm and egg outside the body creating a fertilized zygote in a petri dish. One or some of these fertilized zygotes are destined for patient administration.
The others are discarded or sent for research. And that is the crime.
To think that discarding eggs during IVF that did not fertilize....
Read again what I wrote. That is not at all what I said.
"Creating and destroying "expendable" fertilized eggs, however, is murder...."
Bolded for you this time as I wrote it before, since you are such a careless reader.
...‘discarded’ during a woman’s period.
Read again. I said eggs are expelled at menstruation. I did not say they were discarded. One more time again, because your comprehension skills are sorely lacking:
"To discard a mass of fertilized eggs which are never administered to the patient for implantation as is done today in IVF, is abortion."
There is nothing wrong with trying to extend a lifetime and more importantly is the extension of the quality of life not just the quantity as measured in years and months.
Scripture is clear that no man has the power to extend his lifetime. No drug or medical procedure is capable of extending one's life one moment beyond what our Creator God has ordained. One may only improve the quality of life one lives by wise life choices, both medically and morally.
FReegards!
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