University of Alabama Pauses IVF Services After Court Embryo Ruling (thehill.com) 309
Following a recent ruling from the state supreme court, the University of Alabama at Birmingham health system said it is pausing all in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments for fear of criminal prosecution or punitive damages. On Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are "children," entitled to full personhood rights, and anyone who destroys them could be liable in a wrongful death case. The Hill reports: "We are saddened that this will impact our patients' attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments," the health system said. [...] It is standard practice in IVF to fertilize several eggs and then transfer one into a woman's uterus. Any remaining normally developing embryos can be, at the patient's request and consent, frozen for later use. But legal experts say it's unclear if the standard practice is illegal in Alabama and could make IVF virtually inaccessible in the state.
According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, the best-developing embryo will be transferred into a patient for an attempt at a pregnancy while the rest are frozen for later use, in case the first one does not develop into a live birth, or the patient later desires another child. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 238,126 patients underwent IVF treatment in 2021, resulting in the births of 97,128 babies, the last year for which statistics were available. There are 453 IVF clinics nationwide.
According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, the best-developing embryo will be transferred into a patient for an attempt at a pregnancy while the rest are frozen for later use, in case the first one does not develop into a live birth, or the patient later desires another child. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 238,126 patients underwent IVF treatment in 2021, resulting in the births of 97,128 babies, the last year for which statistics were available. There are 453 IVF clinics nationwide.
Uni towns politically underrepresented (Score:4, Funny)
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Nope. For voting, the timer starts at birth, not fertilization.
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Republicans will just raise the voting age to 25 https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com] and gerrymander the hell out of districts.
The American political system (Score:2, Troll)
Seriously go look into just how wealthy George Washington was relative to the times. Even Bill Gates wouldn't be able to match his wealth in terms of a percentage of the civilization. There's an old story about him turning down being the king of America and while it's b
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> bunch of ahistorical nonsense
[citation needed]
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Are you referring to my .sig link to his racist anti immigration ranting?
laws working as intended (Score:2)
The universe hates humanity (Score:4, Interesting)
Just when you think you might have heard it all...
So aside from the obvious issues of the idiot who wrote the opinion doing just about everything but quote scripture in the decision, this is about the dumbest thing I've ever heard come out of a court system. So if a woman is freshly pregnant and doesn't know it yet and consumes a beer, is she engaging in child abuse and administering alcohol to an underage person? What about if she the next morning goes and engages in some other risky, but totally legal behavior and something happens to the eight-celled embryo in her womb (that she doesn't even know about yet) -- does that mean she's guilty of child endangerment? What happens if she is a little bit farther along but miscarries because {reasons}? What if she engages in drug use (legal or illegal) that a "reasonable" person should have known would be harmful to the embryo, like many OTC and prescription medications which are contraindicated in pregnancy?
How does this apply in the state to some woman who gives birth to a child that is afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome, withdraws from nicotine (yes that's a thing), withdraws from cocaine, heroin, or even marijuana? What about the woman who is over some arbitrary age (let's say 40) who gets herself impregnated due to her "negligent" actions and the child is born with some maternal age-related disease like Down Syndrome? What if the mother or father starts a pregnancy knowing full well that they have some communicable disease or a genetic disorder? Are these people guilty of premeditated child abuse/murder/whatever?
Re:The universe hates humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
>So if a woman is freshly pregnant and doesn't know it yet and consumes a beer, is she engaging in child abuse and administering alcohol to an underage person?
The way these laws are intended to work... yes, if a powerful enough member of the community decides they want to punish the woman and no, if a powerful enough member of the community is protecting the woman.
Either way, it turns women into property requiring an influential male owner if they don't want to be subject to incarceration for failing to submit to the system.
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it turns women into property requiring an influential male owner if they don't want to be subject to incarceration for failing to submit to the system.
Gilead is not just a fictional place anymore.
Re:The universe hates humanity (Score:5, Insightful)
There are still worse places in the world, but Republicans are trying to fix that.
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Like all fundamentalist fanatics, really. The Republicans are not that special.
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If you believe life begins at conception then it is logically consistent.
You obviously don't believe life begins at conception and neither do I. But some people do. Can you come up with a convincing argument for a different time?
The pro choice crowd is also wrong at the other extreme.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wa... [bbc.com]
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Life begins when someone pays income taxes.
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Incidentally, if (surprisingly) that Republican senator does not mastubate but has a "wet dream" (which is quite inevitable when not masturbating), that needs to be at least a few 100'000 counts of involuntary manslaughter, sentences to be served sequentially.
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Aaaand you've fallen into the trap. We can talk about life and when it begins all day, and at the end of the day it's irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is **personhood**.
The Bible states that personhood begins at birth. Most legal systems do as well. I think that was done mostly as it is very convienient. The christian taliban want to move that point backwards, as far as conception.
There are lots of good (and bad) arguments for changing when an entity gains personhood, but talking about when
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The katoliban and evengelifuckups want to make use of contraceptives equivalent to murder. Conception? Amateurs! If you do not supply plenty of new victims to the cult, you _must_ be evil and deserve the worst punishment available!
Fully agree that this "start of life" "argument" is just a lie by misdirection.
Re:The universe hates humanity (Score:5, Interesting)
Human reproduction is a very lossy progress. About 80% of fertilized eggs get rejected by the female body anyways. Abortion is not a major factor. Realize it, make a sensible judgment call (generally "will likely survive") and move on. The defects in the human reproduction process are a problem that cannot be fixed, so do not attempt to.
Oh, and make sure everybody has access to contraceptives and good information about how things work. Teaching abstinence is schools is _malicious_, nothing else.
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This is what seems so illogical to me at times. If someone is fervently anti-abortion then logically it makes sense to be pro-contraceptive. Make contraceptive easily available and the number of abortions will go down, QED. But that's the engineer in me not understanding how the world really works... How it really works is that some people want a religious society, one founded upon a specific sect, and in that sect premaritcal sex is one of the worst evils there is. Contraceptives makes pre-marital sex
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You let your women drink!? Pretty sure that makes you the guilty party.
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Simple: Lock them all up! Religion is not about fairness or justice. And it always needs some "bad examples" that then get "punished" to keep the others in line by fear.
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Religion is about control. Always was, always will be. That's the game they're in. Why do you think the one thing they regulate the most is anything sexual? If you control someone's dick, you control that person.
Scare quotes (Score:2)
What's with the scare quotes around "children"? The court ruled that they are children, not "children". It seems that these "reporters" are editorializing in the news.
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That's not quite it.
The court ruled that they were "persons" which is a fictional concept.
They definitely are children, as the offspring of two people.
They definitely aren't infamts - those have to be born first.
They aren't citizens yet either - the Fourteenth Amendment is clear that a "person" first has to be born or naturalized to be a citizen.
Legal aliens and preborns still have their other Fourteenth Amendment rights.
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The very first line of the ruling says:
It goes on to say that
So it didn't
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For shame: "preborn children" imposes on GOD's majesty and prerogative, by presuming that HE intends for them to be born. Out of respect for the divine and the little tykes themselves, please refer to them as "extrauterine children," as the Alabama Supreme Court does.
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That's circular logic, because children are defined as the offspring of two people and offspring are defined as the children of two people.
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Everyone who isn't a religious fanatic knows these aren't children any more than an egg is a chicken.
If these wack jobs had even bothered to read their little book they'd know that life begins at the first breath. Their little book even says so [biblegateway.com]:
Then the Lord God formed a man[a] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
In other words, that lump of cells isn't a person until it takes its first breath. Or doesn't the Bible mean anything to these people because no matter which version you look at, they all say the same thing [biblehub.com].
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Because the embryos were made of clay.
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You need to re-think your terms. Arguing when life begins is a waste of time - it's not well defined, and pretty much **by definition** any embryo is alive.
Start talking about **personhood** instead. By the way, the Bible explicitly states that personhood begins at birth.
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Yep, a whole bunch of lying by misdirection going on here. Human life is not protected, unless a person is attached to it and depends on it. Incidentally, sperm, eggs, skin-cells, blood, etc. all "alive" for a while after being separated from a human body.
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The bible gives abortion instructions.
And the priest shall cause her to swear, and shall say unto the woman: 'If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness, being under thy husband, be thou free from this water of bitterness that causeth the curse; but if thou hast gone aside, being under thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee besides thy husband--then the priest shall cause the woman to swear with the oath of cursing, and the priest shall say u
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Actually, voluntary surgery is a thing and it can remove healthy things, say an extra toe or finger, for example. Or a kidney to be donated, for example to a close relative. (You cannot sell that kidney, but that is a different question.) All quite legal.
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Fuck your made up fairy tails. Grow up.
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The real question here is how these people made it onto the supreme court of a state.
Masturbation (Score:3)
For that matter, any masturbatory emissions, where the sperm is clearly not seeking an egg, could be termed reckless abandonment.
Elle Woods, Legally Blonde
Fighting for last place (Score:5, Insightful)
Alabama has thrown one final knockout blow in the fight against Mississippi for the shittiest state. If NASA has any smarts they would be moving Marshall Space Flight Center to a more reasonable state. No young people with two brain cells are going to want to relocate there.
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No young people with two brain cells are going to want to relocate there.
On the bright side those two brain cells are a person.
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No young people with two brain cells
You mean an embryo?
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I dunno, Mississippi has the lowest homeless rate per capita in the country, with Alabama close behind. Maybe they're on to something.
Simple solution (Score:2)
It is standard practice in IVF to fertilize several eggs and then transfer one into a woman's uterus.
Fertilize one at a time.
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The rate of failure would be much higher.
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Not sure if this is sarcasm. I can think of two very simple reasons one at a time is not a good idea. First, no guarantee that one egg will become a viable embryo. Second, cost.
And since this is a religious debate and not a science debate, why is IVF even accepted by Christians? If I were a religious person, I would argue IVF is against God's plan.
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Informative)
If I were a religious person, I would argue IVF is against God's plan.
You don't think this ruling is saying exactly that?
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Why is it against God's plan? Maybe God made IVF so Christians can breed faster?
I don't pretend to speak for God, though.
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And since this is a religious debate and not a science debate, why is IVF even accepted by Christians? If I were a religious person, I would argue IVF is against God's plan.
That is, in fact, the position of the Catholic Church.
The Religious right in Alabama tends to be Southern Baptist... who also think IVF is against God's plan: https://goodfaithmedia.org/sou... [goodfaithmedia.org]
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First, no guarantee that one egg will become a viable embryo.
They have to check each one selected for implantation. If its not viable, they move on to the next one and try again.
Second, cost.
That's the big show-stopper.
why is IVF even accepted by Christians?
Because there's no one who goes running to a fertility clinic faster when they can't conceive naturally. Something about "be fruitful and multiply". The higher cost will hit that group harder.
Perhaps the infertility is God's way of saying, "We really don't want any more of your kind."
Next up: Black embryos only count as 3/5... (Score:2)
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And that is different from those lording over in DC...how?
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No I am accusing you of having no fucking clue about American history. Because you don't.
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What? Blacks were 3/5ths of a person? Can you share the historical reason why the anti-slave North insisted on that number?
It was a compromise. The south wanted the slave population to count 100% toward representation in the House (which would have given them control of the nation). The northern states wanted the slave population to not count toward representation in the House. 60% was the compromise.
Nobody, of course, suggested that they should be able to vote, but the idea that everybody gets to vote hadn't been invented yet.
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Thank you.
Alabama (Score:2)
A friend of mine is the smartest person in all of Alabama. He has average IQ.
GTFO (Score:3)
I'm tellin' ya, GTFO...
When I was a kid in the 70s (Score:5, Insightful)
There was this general feeling that religions would slowly lose ground to science, because it was so damn obvious that they belonged squarely into the dark ages and we had entered the age of reason. We still had to deal with it because of inertia, but essentially things were gonna become better for those with sane mental processes.
And here we are, a quarter century into the 21st: Roe v. Wade has been overturned and frozen fertilized eggs are full human beings.
I can't believe this. This is genuinely fucking jaw-dropping for me. Not only has insanity not disappeared as we were promised, it's thriving. How did this future came about?
I'm ashamed to be a human being. The United States is a living advertisement for human extinction.
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The leftward leap was too extreme and too sudden, it generated a backlash. The center doesn't fight, and the right-wing is more organized, has more useful idiots, and powerful.Both sides are polarizing to the extremes. The inevitable outcome is conflict and war. For example, the current biggest fueler of the far right resurgence — Elon Musk — personally retweets every incident of violence by black on white and very rarely white on white (only if it has a gay/tran perp) and definitely never white
Re:When I was a kid in the 70s (Score:5, Informative)
The leftward leap was too extreme and too sudden, it generated a backlash.
Imagine today if a republican made the open carry of firearms illegal. Governor Ronald Reagan signed that California law in 1967. Imagine today if a republican called for amnesty for people in the country illegally? Ronald Reagan made that speech in 1984.
What's this crazy left leap you speak of?
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s/teams/sports
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Roe v Wade was a bad decision, not because abortion is good or bad but because having courts made new law from whole cloth is a bad idea.
New laws belong in the Congress not USSC. It was an over reach and they knew it.
The only reason neither side ever put a real bill up in Congress to either fully ban or allow abortions nationwide is so they could both have a wedge issue to beat each other up every election.
"Vote for us! My body my choice!"
"Vote for us'1 We'll end baby murder!"
IMO, we don't have nearly en
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>
The only reason neither side ever put a real bill up in Congress to either fully ban or allow abortions nationwide is so they could both have a wedge issue to beat each other up every election.
Every attempt is stalled or filibustered by republicans. It's literally the only policy they have.
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> Roe v Wade was a bad decision, not because abortion is good or bad but because having courts made new law from whole cloth is a bad idea.
This assumes that you believe that a women's right to control her body any way she sees fit is alienable. For a lot of women that is a non starter.
Remember the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty a
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I'm not angry. I never was. I merely point out that even people such as Ginsberg are on record saying they didn't think it was the best way to go. She wasn't comfortable with it and is on record saying so even though she officially did support it.
Both sides have been using it for decades. To say otherwise requires extreme blind obedience to "us vs them" politics.
Not being a member of either party I have no problem standing outside the ridiculous and artificial blue vs red nonsense to see it for what it
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You can't justify one brand of madness with another.
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Right, because Roe v. Wade was overturned the USA is clearly on the path to self destruction
No, it means it's not on the path to greatness the way we all thought it was 50 years ago. The United States is regressing. Madness and callousness is alive and well in this country.
Remember: if you believe the United States is a democracy, then overturning Roe v Wade was ultimately a decision of the people. If you're proud to be a member of a species that can create a country that can elect leaders that cause that to happen, I'm not.
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It's a democratic republic so the will of the people isn't directly counted, but due to the way it's setup with the electoral college there are cases when a majority of people want something but we end up with something else
Anyone bothered by the fact ... (Score:2)
That some random patient was able to walk into the embryo freezer area and drop a bunch of someone else's frozen embryos on the floor?
Aspirin bottles at hospitals are better locked up.
In all this goddam nonsense ... (Score:2)
... I get the impression that no Republican women need reproductive rights and no Republicans are in the LGBTQ+ community.
It's Democrats all the way down.
Nothing to do now, except... (Score:2)
Nothing to do now except load up all the embryos and leave town--in the carpool lane of course.
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Re: God can't wait to murder them (Score:3, Insightful)
No. The people who imprisoned the embryos in the freezer without adequate fail-safes in case of a foreseeable power outage are.
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According to religious doctrines, God made humans mortal. So every single human death is on his hands.
Depending on the tradition, God also tortures most of them in fire forever, and blames them for it.
If God does exist, I sure hope he (or she) is not the monsters our stories claim.
Re: God can't wait to murder them (Score:2)
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You're talking about Islam, aren't you? Because in Christianity, it's both: fear (in the sense of reverence/deep respect because of God's holiness) AND love (in the sense of acknowledging God's goodness and justness).
You are attempting to draw a distinction where there is none. The various religions that metastasized out of the superstitious goat herders and illiterate warlords of the Bronze Age Middle East all describe the same capricious slaver deity of boundless cruelty and limitless sadism. It doesn't matter whether your preferred holy text is the Torah, the Bible, or the Koran, there is no difference. The god described in these texts petulant, wicket, and jealous. The followers of these religions are little more th
Re:God can't wait to murder them (Score:5, Informative)
is God a mass murderer?
He killed every first born in Egypt, human or otherwise, to teach the pharoah a lesson rather than just kill the pharoah (and had Jews mark their homes because he couldn't tell who was who). He flooded the Earth and killed all living things except for Noah and his family who then had incest to repopulate the planet. He caused a three year famine to punish the Israelites for King Saul's actions (rather than simply stopping Saul from killing in the first place) which led to tens of thousands of deaths.
So yeah, mass murderer fits.
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The original God was not omnipotent or omnipresent. Cain was able to hide from him, as was Jonah.
He also wasn't the only god. It says so right in the 1st commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
It doesn't say, "No other gods." Just that He expected to be first in line for worship, sacrifices, or whatever.
He was the god of the Hebrews. But the expectation was that other tribes also had gods, and those gods were just as real.
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Indeed. This whole model of reality is fundamentally broken, as are those that believe in it. Funnily, you find modern priests today that use a massively less literal interpretation of things because they can just see that anything literal or concrete does not work and cannot work in this space. But when you come right down to it, a religion is just a group with power that feeds a specific type of made-up "story" to its followers (a.k.a. "useful idiots"), nothing more.
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Blessed be the fruit.
May the Lord open.
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is God a mass murderer?
He killed every first born in Egypt, human or otherwise,
Please.. .you don't even need to go that far back. Given the natural failure rate, Invisible Sky-beard has "killed" *countless* embryos.
According to the delusions of these religious wackjobs, this makes their sadistic deity the most prolific mass murderer of all time. OF ALL TIME
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I really wish people would stop bringing up this fairy-tail nonsense as a straw man.
god didn't do shit. it doesn't fucking exist.
it's a figment of your shitty imagination. a failure of your meat sack of a body that can't handle the nothingness to which it will go back to when it dies so it needs to delude itself with a made up belief system. Mental illness.
Re:God can't wait to murder them (Score:5, Funny)
is God a mass murderer?
He killed every first born in Egypt,..... He flooded the Earth and killed all living things except for Noah and his family..... He caused a three year famine ....which led to tens of thousands of deaths.
Everyone has a bad day every now and again.
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Kinda? You'd think so but actually read exodus. It's a lot weirder.
Pharo was happy to give Moses his demands, until good fucked with his brain to make him refuse (it took repeated fuckery), and then once he refused punished him.
What's the moral there? God's a dick, deal with it. He then followed up by trolling Moses until he was angry then banished him from the promised land for that. Moral is definitely that God is a dick.
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Exodus 12:3 [biblehub.com]: When the LORD goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.
The interpretation of that seems rather straightforward to me. Also, there were no Egyptians casting about for Jews that night. They were too busy dying or mourning deaths.
Your interpretation sounds like something that arose as a legend from years of perse
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He is already a mass murderer.
Sodom and Gomorrah?
World wide flood?
Plagues of Egypt?
The fucker is a god damned psychopath.
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Not to mention that he is the reason for any of these things happening. He sent the angels to Gomorrah to trigger the events that gave him an excuse to kill everyone, he deliberately and wantonly flooded the world and he hardened pharaoh's heart just so he could show off how awesome he is, and he decided to do that by torture and murder.
Quite frankly, even according to his own ad brochure, that guy is a narcissistic psycho.
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IVF makes the failures a lot more visible, since people are watching closely and attempts are expensive; but human reproduction simply can't be done(on average; obviously there's someone who has managed to implant and carry to term all
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Well, technically everything a woman does can impact the eggs she carries. Smoking? Drinking? Even working as it introduces stress.
It's not just the 9 months she's carrying, but the years since she was born.
In order to protect the viability of her eggs, she'll need to be cloistered until she is unable to bear children. Then she'll be released into the general population or become a matron to watch over all the protected women.
[John]
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Why wait? Just leave now. Or is that prohibited, too?
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If the father gets a custody order then she can't leave the state.
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Just leave now. Or is that prohibited, too?
Not yet...
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... hmm. Yes, that seems to track. It seems this rabbit hole goes pretty deep.
I recalled that a significant percentage of fertilized embryos, through no fault of the mother, fail to implant in normal sexually active women. A quick Google Search seems to indicate it's approximately 10-40%.
It seems sexually active woman is prosecutable in Alabama. That's about the worst possible outcome I can imagine.
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Actually, in total the fertilized eggs aborted naturally are at around 80%.
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No. They were simply ruling on what the existing law says.
They called on the Alabama state legislature to clarify the law, but the law says what it says.