This month’s Alabama court ruling that IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) embryos are “children” covered by wrongful death lawsuits has Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the fallout. According to the party’s own polling, 85% of Americans support increasing access to fertility-related procedures and services. The high level of support remains consistent among the GOP’s most dedicated voters: 78% of abortion opponents and 83% of evangelicals support IVF specifically.
  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
    42·
    8 months ago

    People generally hold that one has a right to have children (consider that things like government enforced sterilization of low income or minority groups are generally considered to be egregious breaches of the rights of the people affected.) IVF is used to assist people who wish to have children but who for medical reasons have been unable to do so, thus prohibiting it denies the people who need it in order to have kids the right to have them, thus it must be a right by proxy. Yes, things like housing and food should be rights too, but those are irrelevant to this discussion, given that it is possible for more than one thing to be an issue at a time.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
        10·
        8 months ago

        All rights require assistance to a lesser or greater extent to have any practical consequence. For example, if I were to make it illegal to share any information about where polling places are and then move them somewhere one would be unlikely to find by chance, it is technically still possible to vote if you manage to find the place to do it, but if I were to then argue that what I was doing wasn’t violating your right to vote because you aren’t entitled to assistance in exercising that right, you’d rightly call bullshit on that argument.

        Further, “rights” do not exclusively refer to things spelled out as part of the constitution like the right to vote. There isn’t any explicit right to walk in the constitution that I can think of, but were I to make canes and crutches illegal, it’d absolutely be fair to say that i was taking away disabled people’s right to walk.