Why do conservatives hate children?
Or rather, why can’t they just be honest about what they don’t like?
This is the summary of a new ad running against the Missouri stem cell research amendment:
The ad features a woman talking about her daughter, who needed money for college. She “sold her eggs to a fertility clinic,” the woman says. “The surgery was painful. They give you powerful hormones to produce more eggs. And now, she may never have children.” The ad ends with the warning that Amendment 2 will increase the need for human eggs for research.
As the KC Star’s Election Central (linked above) notes,
the ad never claims that egg donation was the reason that the daughter “may never have children.” But the implication is that the egg donation made her sterile.
Fertility experts at the University of Kansas, the San Francisco campus of the University of California and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said studies that followed women for more than 10 years have found no evidence that even multiple egg donation leads to future fertility problems. Many women donate eggs, have children, and donate again.
Indeed, the procedure involved here is the same one that thousands of couples have used in order to have children. Whether you are donating eggs to researchers, to another couple, or to yourself for in vitro fertilization, the process is what is described in the ad. And you don’t see too many protesters outside IVF clinics. Does the “Life Communications Fund” really hate to see women get pregnant? Of course not.
But the real hypocrisy is even bigger.
One part of IVF that no one likes to talk about is the stage called “selective reduction.” A dozen or so eggs are fertilized in the lab, then allowed to grow. Some don’t even start dividing, so they are discarded. Others grow too slowly, and are also tossed out. The best 3–5 eggs are implanted in the woman’s uterus after a week or so.
They do this because, even in natural pregnancies, the number of spontaneous abortions is enormous. Early in development, a lot can go wrong, and a lot of embryos die on their own as a result. Implanting multiple embryos hedges against that, and also protects against problems caused specifically by the manipulations involved in IVF.
Then, a few months later, the doctors check the developing embryos and remove all but one or two of them. This is called selective reduction or selective harvesting, and the procedure is medically no different than an abortion.
No one questions this practice. No one insists that all the fertilized eggs be implanted, nor that all the embryos must be brought to term. It is a central hypocrisy of the anti-abortion and anti-stem cell movements that they don’t parade pictures of aborted fetuses outside fertility clinics.
It is a central hypocrisy of any movement claiming to be pro-life that it would oppose putting those fertilized eggs to use in research that could yield cures or treatments for debilitating illnesses.
0 COMMENTS
“No one insists that all the fertilized eggs be implanted, nor that all the embryos must be brought to term.”
I bet they’ll start soon, now that you’ve let the cat out of the bag.
About the orignal ad: “The ad features a woman talking about her daughter, who needed money for college.…And now, she may never have children.”
Does the woman (and her husband) take no responsibility here? Don’t they feel bad that they didn’t pony up the money for an adequate education for their child?
Are we expected to not notice this misapplication of blame?
Josh said,
Implanting multiple embryos hedges against that, and also protects against problems caused specifically by the manipulations involved in IVF.
Then, a few months later, the doctors check the developing embryos and remove all but one or two of them. This is called selective reduction or selective harvesting, and the procedure is medically no different than an abortion.
“A few months later”? By that time, the embryos/fetuses would be in an advanced stage of development.
Though multiple implantation appears to be a common practice, I have never heard of “selective reduction (harvesting).” — it seems that such reduction would require surgery. Multiple implantation carries the risk of multiple births. It can be determined after only about two weeks whether an implantation was successful, so I don’t see the point of implanting more than one embryo at a time.
Hmm, you must have not been reading enough “pro-life” (gag) literature. I’ve seen plenty of screeds against selective reductions. But you’re right, it does seem hypocritical that the ‘lifers don’t regularly picket fertility clinics.
And it’s not done by surgery. It’s done by a needle guided by ultrasound. The dr. shoots some sort of chemical into the heart of the embryos that are being “selectively reduced” to kill them off.
It is typically done after 2–3 months. First trimester, so not at an “advanced stage of development.”
The chances of a single IVF pregnancy succeeding are fairly low (were as low as 20% per embryo, now closer to 40%). With those odds, there’s a decent shot that you won’t have to do any selective reduction, nature will handle it for you.
Multiple pregnancies can be dangerous for mother and offspring, so selective reduction is performed to protect the health of the mother and the children she gives birth to.
A quick Googlehunt suggests that KCl is injected into the developing heart, which disrupts muscle action. The embryo is reabsorbed into the mother’s body afterward.
Josh said,
It is typically done after 2–3 months. First trimester, so not at an “advanced stage of development.”
That is a fairly advanced stage so far as abortion is concerned. The Wikipedia article on abortion says that a study of 2002 US data showed that 86.7 percent of abortions were performed at 12 weeks or earlier. Abortion procedures usually involve removal of the fetus and usually do not include lethal injection of the fetus (though I have heard of lethal injection being used in late-term abortions instead of stabbing the fetus in the skull with scissors), so your statement that the procedure is medically no different from abortion is not correct in practice even though it may be correct in principle.
I was really surprised when I learned about this “selective reduction” (the Wikipedia article on in vitro fertilization does not mention it and needs to be corrected).
The chances of a single IVF pregnancy succeeding are fairly low (were as low as 20% per embryo, now closer to 40%). With those odds, there’s a decent shot that you won’t have to do any selective reduction, nature will handle it for you.
At a 40% success rate for implantations, multiple pregnancy is very likely when there is multiple implantation. It seems it would be a lot simpler and safer to just implant one embryo at a time rather than euthanize excess embryos/fetuses.
Larry needs to recheck his math. 2–3 months is 8–13 weeks. So yes, it is within the time frame that most abortions occur.
Larry doesn’t understand statistics very well. Assuming 5 embryos are inserted and selective reduction occurs only if 3 or more successfully implant (using the 40% rate), selective reduction will occur in less than 32% of cases. About 35% of the time, twins implant successfully, 26% just one embryo implants successfully, and almost 8% of procedures will fail to successfully implant. With only four embryos to start, the numbers are 18% reductions, 35% twins, 35% single, and 13% failure. With 3 embryos, it’s 6% reductions, 29% twins, 43% single, and a 22% failure rate. Using only 2 embryos, 16% are twins, 48% single, and 36% of the procedures will fail.
IVF is very expensive and time consuming, and I understand it is painful. Even after 5 procedures (assuming single insertion and the 40% success rate) 8% will not have had a succesful implantation.
Larry, from Wikipedia’s page on selective reduction (which is linked on the main abortion page):
“The procedure is generally carried out between 9 and 12 weeks of pregnancy. The most common method is to inject a chemical solution into the fetus or fetuses selected for either genetic reasons or for ease of accessibility. Generally, the fetal material is reabsorbed into the woman’s body. While the procedure generally reduces the over-all risk level for the remaining fetus or fetuses, selective reduction does have its own risks, including the possibility that one or more of the remaining fetuses will also die.”
Again, 9–12 weeks is equivalent to 2–3 months. According to Wikipedia, in the UK about 60% of abortions occur between weeks 8–12, and US numbers appear to be similar. Not a “late-stage” abortion by any stretch of the imagination.
Larry, think about what it means about the allegedly pro-life movement that you, a person who seems to read plenty of things about that part of the political spectrum, never heard about a practice that probably terminates more embryos than abortion clinics do. What does it say about their priorities? Is their interest in the fetuses, or in forcing reproduction on unwilling women? Does it make you respect “pro-life” activists more or less?
What about anti-stem cell activists? Do you feel like they are playing honestly?