[Politics] Abortion Failure Megathread

[Psychic Robot]

1.9 million orphans are the direct result of pro-life policies

why do conservatives hate families

[KaNT]

No, he very specifically said that fertility treatments are a problem. He very specifically said that the method used for having children is a problem, and he used an example of someone who did not reduce their pregnancy at all.

He has a problem with fertility treatments, even though he won't give any fucking reason why:

I was talking about wotmaniac, not PR, and to my knowledge he has not said "I hate fertility treatments and all they stand for." If he has, I encourage you to correct me and point it out.

Surely if he explained why he opposes fertility treatments, you could quote that, instead of telling me how he obviously did it and it's so obvious that you don't need to point to it.

Wait... Why the fuck are you against fertility shit?

You really think people who can't have kids shouldn't be able to do something to get kids?

the issue is with:
- the methodology: "hey, let's mega-fertilize and hope something happens"
- distribution: the fact that we live in a world where the octo-mom can happen means that we really need to rethink how/what we're doing.

I don't have to. you kind of did it for me. Thanks for that.

People get fertility treatments all the time without having eight kids. Clearly if having eight kids is intrinsic to fertility treatments, then anything that has ever happened to one single person using a gun is intrinsic to all gun use.

The difference between gun usage and eight kids from IVF is that gun accidents are preventable. Multiple fetuses from IVF are not.

PS, I already refuted every ethical/moral issue in the article. It was so obvious and clear that I'm not ever going to quote it, or point to it, but I will keep telling everyone that I already did it as the reason I won't do it now.

Didn't you JUST get pissy with me over that same issue? As in, in the same god damn post?

[Username17]

The difference between gun usage and eight kids from IVF is that gun accidents are preventable. Multiple fetuses from IVF are not.

That's completely backwards. A fetus can be created or terminated at any time. A gun accident is by definition an accident. If you want to not have 5 fetuses growing inside you, you can just remove one or more of them. If you want to have retroactively not shot little Timmy in the face because you freaked out and thought he was an intruder, that's just too fucking bad because there is no time travel.

One of them is a changeable state, the other is an unforeseeable one-time event.

-Username17

[KaNT]

I said that gun accidents are preventable, not changeable. there is a difference. There is no way with IVF to say, I don't want to have 5 fetuses growing inside me. Please make sure that doesn't happen. A doctor can go in later and take the other 4 out, but he can not ensure that they are never there to begin with.

[Username17]

I said that gun accidents are preventable, not changeable. there is a difference. There is no way with IVF to say, I don't want to have 5 fetuses growing inside me. Please make sure that doesn't happen. A doctor can go in later and take the other 4 out, but he can not ensure that they are never there to begin with.

That's factually not true. If you were really concerned about never having there be more than one zygote inside you at a time, you could put them in one at a time. We implant several fertilized eggs at a time because implantation chances are fairly low on a per-egg basis and no one wants to wait several years for fertility to take.

But, and this is important, fertilizing twelve eggs and flushing eleven of them down the toilet because of implantation failure or spontaneous abortion is what normally happens for women who have trouble getting and staying pregnant. Their body is literally already doing this, which is why they are getting fertility treatment. The science is not adding destroyed fetuses, it is speeding up the process so that you can get a healthy baby while you're still young enough to take care of one.

Basically I haven't seen a single argument presented by Kant or Wotmanic that indicates that they understand reproduction at a better than a 5th grade sex education level. You get to attempt to engage with deep ethical questions about things when you demonstrate even a superficial understanding of how those things actually work and why they work the way they do.

-Username17

[wotmaniac]

Basically I haven't seen a single argument presented by Kant or Wotmanic that indicates that they understand reproduction at a better than a 5th grade sex education level. You get to attempt to engage with deep ethical questions about things when you demonstrate even a superficial understanding of how those things actually work and why they work the way they do.

-Username17

Listen up, you self-important, condescending ass, while I try this again:

We obviously have vastly different world views; and reconciliation has proven to be impossible.
You win.

See, I already conceded the argument to you; so you can get my name out of your mouth, thank you very much.

[violence in the media]

Yeah, let's punish people for sex. Because, you know, sex is wrong. Wait, what?

Yeah, I don't get the beef against consequence-free fucking either.

[tzor]

I still don't see what your problem is with fertility treatments. You fertilize a bunch of eggs and implant the ones that work. If too many take hold, you scrape them out. What is the fucking problem?

Protip: the human body already does this. To itself. All the time.

-Username17

And I expect nothing else from you Frank.

And the funny thing is that he is a doctor, he should know better.

The human female can at most generate two eggs at a time (and normally it is only one) so the max number of fertilized eggs that can be implanted at any one time is TWO. Identical twin production occurs at the blastocyst stage which is five days after fertilization.

But like Al Gore, Frank doesn't let facts get in the way of sciecne.

[tzor]

But, and this is important, fertilizing twelve eggs and flushing eleven of them down the toilet because of implantation failure or spontaneous abortion is what normally happens for women who have trouble getting and staying pregnant. Their body is literally already doing this, which is why they are getting fertility treatment.

Frank, please stop lying. The average woman releases twelve eggs per year. If all those eggs were fertalized and if all those eggs failed to implant you might be right but that is a huge number of if's you have to get to be able to say that.

Is infertility a medical problem related to the woman only?

• No, infertility is a medical problem that is related to both men and women. Men and women are affected almost equally.
• For men, declining sperm counts, increased testicular abnormalities, and a decreased reach of climax are recognized as causes of infertility.
• For women, the most common causes are tubal blockage, endometriosis, and waiting until later in life to try to get pregnant.

[sabs]

Wow, Tzor. When ever I think you can't possibly become more stupid and evil, you go and prove me wrong.

One of the common fertility problems amongst women is attachment, the embryo just doesn't attach to the wall and manage to last. This is why they like to do anywhere from 2-6 embryos at a time, hoping that one or two will catch. Yes, sometimes that means more than that catch, but it's actually an INCREDIBLY rare thing.

For men, weak sperm fertilize eggs /badly/ creating an embryo that isn't as survivable, and so again they use multiple embryos to up your chances of it working. At 6k+ a treatment, plus over 10K per egg collection, doing one at a time every 3 months for god knows how long isn't really viable. And the drugs used to make a woman viable for implantation are no joke.

Yes, Octomom is stupid, but how many multiple births from IVF are there each year?
For example, in 2009 in the UK/Whales there were count them.. 5 births with 4 or more babies. 172 Triplets (of which less than a 100 were from IVF), and 13,000 twins, of which 1500 were from IVF. That's out of 500,000 births.

That's in the UK. So where is this epidemic of multiple births?
The live birth rate for IVF is 27-33% That's abysmally low as it is, and you want to make it lower for what reason again?


the 4+ is a blip, it's not even statistically significant.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you take an introductory-level course on nuclear physics or just a PHY 101 course one of the first things that you learn is that the Niels-Bohr model for the atom is wrong. It's a useful way to think of electron quanta and helps understanding but taking that structure as a literal way for how the atom works only creates errors. But the important thing is that for the vast majority of people it's seriously not a big deal.

Now I used to have the same feeling towards human reproduction, specifically conception and implantation. The popular media depiction of 'one sperm fertilizes one egg, conception happens instantaneously, implantation somehow almost always happens soon thereafter' could be a helpful oversimplification but it's led towards really pig-ignorant views on the process and needs to be torn down. Because unlike the model of the atom it's causing people to advocate some really dumb policy decisions.

So, for any biologists in the house, could you walk us through the entire process in exacting detail from how the (human) sperm is created into a testicle to a successful (human) birth?

[tzor]

Wow, Tzor. When ever I think you can't possibly become more stupid and evil, you go and prove me wrong.

One of the common fertility problems amongst women is attachment,...

You know, if you read things in CONTEXT, you might pause before you dogpile on the Tzor. Frank has been harping about this dozen thing for a couple of pages. Wasted embryos are OK because real people do that natually all the time. (NB Real people also die of cancer all the time; doesn't mean it justifies infecting people with cancer.) Frank has been harping that the only reason for fertility programs is attachment. It's not, and it's not even the biggest reason.

[DSMatticus]

(NB Real people also die of cancer all the time; doesn't mean it justifies infecting people with cancer.)

This argument sucks. People choose to get artificially fertilized, and people choose to have sex (natural fertilization). If choosing artificial fertilization is wrong because it kills fertilized eggs, choosing natural fertilization is wrong because it kills fertilized eggs. End of discussion. 'Natural' and 'artificial' are not words with ethical weight, so they are meaningless, and all that actually gets considered is "are these people killing fertilized eggs as a direct result of their choices?" and the answer in both cases is yes. So if one is wrong because of that, so is the other. Anything else is just you trying to bullshit your way out of the ramifications of your position. As usual.

[Lago PARANOIA]

No no, DSMatticus, what we SHOULD actually do is make all fertilization done by implantation. That minimizes the chances of people losing eggs. Of course we'll do it one at a time and feed women a cocktail of fertility drugs, but it's worth it for the pweshus babiez, right?

Anyone who reproduces the savage natural way is a fucking baby killer.

[Datawolf]

No no, DSMatticus, what we SHOULD actually do is make all fertilization done by implantation. That minimizes the chances of people losing eggs. Of course we'll do it one at a time and feed women a cocktail of fertility drugs, but it's worth it for the pweshus babiez, right?

Anyone who reproduces the savage natural way is a fucking baby killer.

Murder has never been so fun.

[Username17]

So, for any biologists in the house, could you walk us through the entire process in exacting detail from how the (human) sperm is created into a testicle to a successful (human) birth?

I think we can go into a little less detail than that, but when I get a persistent internet connection again, I could do the whole thing if you want.

Tzor's claim of the maximum number of implanted eggs being two is simply factually wrong. We had a word for quintuplets long before IVF was invented. The "normal" number of eggs to be released is one at a time, and one egg "normally" results in one fetus. The singular fetus implants and is not flushed out a little more than one time in four. Thereafter, nearly 85 percent of fetuses don't get spontaneously aborted. But the number of released eggs isn't fixed at one. When one egg is released, it also releases a chemical signal that suppresses (but does not necessarily prevent) other eggs from releasing. The most common double release is to have one egg release from each ovary, because there is a lag time for the chemical signals to get across the body. But there is no hard and fast limit. Fraternal triplets totally exist.

Monozygotic twins happen when a blastocyst forms and then collapses and then reforms in two places. It can keep doing that until differentiation starts, and splitting like that delays differentiation. So theoretically there's not even a hard limit on the number of identical fetuses in a litter.

There is a practical limit, where larger numbers of fetuses in a womb increase the chance of miscarriages and defects. Even twins pop out an average of three weeks early and have a lot of problems. Octomom does not represent new territory in terms of numbers of fetuses implanted in a womb, she represents new territory in terms of fetuses brought to term. There have been women who just naturally had ten or twelve fetuses in their wombs: data goes back to twelve fetuses in one woman in 1736 - it did not end well. Those are mostly classified under "disgusting medical oddities".

If someone complains about octomom and about abortion, their position is inconsistent. The medical revolution of octomom was the ability to prevent all eight fetuses from being aborted spontaneously and then keeping all eight children alive after they were born. Remember, octomom isn't even the first set of octuplets in America, she just has the first set of octuplets where all eight children survived longer than a week. The previous record was set by the Chukwu family in 1998, where seven of eight of the children survived. And the Chukwu family did it all with a penis in a vagina, not with IVF. The Chukwu family is of Nigerian ancestry, and those people have the highest rate of multiple births in the world.

-Username17

[tzor]

This argument sucks. People choose to get artificially fertilized, and people choose to have sex (natural fertilization). If choosing artificial fertilization is wrong because it kills fertilized eggs, choosing natural fertilization is wrong because it kills fertilized eggs. End of discussion.

End of the wrong discussion. People do not have sex to deliberately fertilize eggs so they won't implant. (Some people have sex trying to avoid fertilizing eggs and if those eggs were unintnetionally fertilized would be just as pleased if it didn't implant, but that's a side issue here.) The notion to deliberately attempt to implant a plethora of eggs just to hope that one implants (and if too many are implanted their removal through abortion) tends to seem like medicine through overkill which, on the face, just plains seems wrong, if not outright barbaric.

[Neeeek]

The notion to deliberately attempt to implant a plethora of eggs just to hope that one implants (and if too many are implanted their removal through abortion) tends to seem like medicine through overkill which, on the face, just plains seems wrong, if not outright barbaric.

Overkill? It sounds more like "Well, it's cheaper, safer, more likely to work, and will work more quickly if we do it this way, so let's do it this way."

[tzor]

How about this argument then? "I want a very bright son to take over the family. I'll marry a dozen wives, half of them will have girls but the remaining six boys I'll raise and the brightest gets to live, the rest I'll just kill off because I don't need them."

[RobbyPants]

Pretty late term abortion, wouldn't you say?

New trick: lets compare abortion to other things and argue about those things!

[Neeeek]

How about this argument then? "I want a very bright son to take over the family. I'll marry a dozen wives, half of them will have girls but the remaining six boys I'll raise and the brightest gets to live, the rest I'll just kill off because I don't need them."

It's a lot closer to "I'm going to have a bunch of kids in hopes that one of them actually survives to see adulthood." Which was the default plan for most people for most of history.

[tzor]

It's a lot closer to "I'm going to have a bunch of kids in hopes that one of them actually survives to see adulthood." Which was the default plan for most people for most of history.

Yes but in that case there was no elimination for multiple successes. The first surviving son got the estate, the second was sent to the military to get someone else's estate, the third was sent into a religious order to get the church's estate. and so on.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yes but in that case there was no elimination for multiple successes. The first surviving son got the estate, the second was sent to the military to get someone else's estate, the third was sent into a religious order to get the church's estate. and so on.

Tzor, the quote is "first son gets the land, second son gets the church, other sons get the shaft." (all daughters also get the shaft) This is why succession-based assassination and war were very common even under the fairly limited historical window where the situation you're trying to describe occurred.

[Doom]

That's why I'm a supporter of the ogrish method of child raising: "Keep the best, eat the rest."

[Grek]

My sig now has the maximum character limit. Congrats, guys!