I keep trying to post this in the Balloon Juice comments but it keeps getting too long.DougJ on Kinsley and Douthat (always looks like I’ve typed it wrong) wanking about IVF and stem cell research:
(as they would be under new laws) or destroyed (as they currently are
in many cases), then do they have to kept frozen forever? Isn’t that
even stranger and more science-fictiony (one argument people seem to
make against stem cell research is that it’s strange and
science-fictiony)?
I think Kinsley is right about the politics of this, that screwing withIVF
will just piss off people who are trying hard to get pregnant and thus
will further ghettoize the conservatives who push for it. But Douthat
may be right that conservatives will push for it anyway.
Well, the fundie argument against IVF is that it’s strange and science-fictiony too, so I don’t see that being the block here. I don’t think conservatives will push too hard for this, because despite what the Pope says about IVF being all wrong and sick and shit, it’s a$3 billion industry knit into our national obsession with women and sex, families and babies, who has how many kids and when, blah blah blah octuplets. That’s not a can of worms you want to open as a party not precisely attractive to chicks at this point.
Also, not to be crass about it, but most people who can afford to go into this stuff headfirst right now arewell-off enough to qualify as the potential Republican base. Whether everybody who’s undergoing fertility treatments at the moment is rich or not (some just get lucky with their insurance), they’re still high enough up on the economic scale not to be written off lightly. If I had to take a guess as to why the fundie Republican base would get nowhere with demonizing women trying to get pregnant, I’d go with “fear of them closing their wallets” over “fear of looking like compassion-less assholes.”
A.