Attaturk had this little tidbit from the news:
Their embryos, along with those belonging to hundreds of other couples, were kept at the Fertility Institute’s laboratory at the hospital. Two days before Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, the clinic took steps to protect the embryos by topping off all its tanks with liquid nitrogen and moving them to the third floor.
But Katrina’s eight feet of water knocked out the electricity, and the temperature climbed. A freshly topped-off tank is safe for three to four weeks in an air-conditioned room, but “I’m sure the temperature was over 100 degrees in that hospital,” Dr. Belinda “Sissy” Sartor, a fertility expert for the institute.
Fearing the embryos would be ruined, she contacted a state lawmaker, who called Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and on Sept. 11, Illinois officers on loan to Louisiana set out in National Guard trucks, towing flat-bottomed boats.
A flat surface was essential: The 35- and 40-liter nitrogen tanks, which weigh 75 and 90 pounds, had to stay upright. If one tipped over, the nitrogen would spill.
In the hospital parking lot, the boats puttered past cars still flooded almost up to their windows. The boats were taken through the flooded halls, and the embryos were floated out. They were taken across town to a hospital that had not flooded.
The embryos, which are kept in separate labeled vials inside the tanks, were undamaged, doctors said.
Well, isn’t that interesting.
I posted recently about an episode of Dirty Jobs involving house gutters in St. Bernard Parish, where I did my volunteer stint. The host asked the house gutters about the mark that appears on nearly every house in the area, a spray-painted X with certain information in each quadrant. The top quadrant is the date the house was searched, and the left quadrant contains the ID of the search unit. I don’t have the episode saved on my TiFaux anymore, but I do remember that the mark on the house indicated that the house had been searched on Sept. 12 or so by the Illinois National Guard. So before the Illinois Guard units were searching houses in badly-flood-damaged St. Bernard Parish for survivors — you know, actual, existing people — or bodies, they were rescuing frozen embryos from a private fertility clinic at the behest of the governor so that couples who can afford to throw down $12 grand for an attempted pregnancy wouldn’t have to start over again:
But if the embryos had thawed, each woman who wanted another baby would have had to undergo another expensive round of fertility drugs, egg harvesting, and in vitro fertilization. Markham estimated her first pregnancy cost $12,000; the second $2,000. Her husband’s insurance covered that, but had a lifetime cap of $15,000.
When I visited the Lower Ninth Ward, I noticed that the dates in the top quadrant were from the end of September. The dates in St. Bernard — a much more affluent community — were from the week of 9/12 – 9/17. So if the Guard units were dispatched to affluent communities sooner than to poor communities, what does it say that embryos trumped the affluent communities?
UPDATE: The episode is on now, and the date was indeed 9/12. Beth has a point in comments that the dates had something to do with accessibility of neighborhoods rather than affluence; still, the very idea that military units would be dispatched to save frozen embryos before searching homes for bodies and/or survivors (who, after all, could have used the fresh water at that point) is just horrifying.
It says class war.
Now.
Wow. Talk about knowing your priorities. Or not.
Auguste: What you mean is, they’re winning the class war right now, we’re dying for their vanity, and it’s time for us to start fighting back. Now.
it says that someone must have slipped me some really good drugs. right?
right?
that’s f’ed up. really, truly, f’ed up.
speechless.
Jeeze. Speechless. This is the culture of life.
You know that question about saving one 5 year old versus a million embryos in a freezer?
Well, looks like it was put to the test.
This has nothing to do with anything, and if you want to skip it that’s fine, but I have a few feminist questions I can’ t seem to find answers to, and I figured if anyone would know it would be you guys and gals.
First, do any other parts of the military limit how many women can join, or only the Marines (where women are allowed to make up only 6% of all Marines)?
Second, are there really no rape shield laws in the military? Is adultery against regulations in general, or only when it is between soldiers of different ranks?
Third, does Title IX apply to all schools including preschools, elementary schools, grad schools, etc, or just colleges and high schools?
Fourth, which law(s) specifically declare that people may not be discriminated against due to gender in public accomodations, goods and services?
Thanks!
I definitely think that people should take precedence over embryos, but it’s wrong to assume that fertility treatments are only for the rich. I know several people who made incredible sacrifices in their attempts to get pregnant and the embryos they created represented a one-time shot. And that’s nothing to say of the emotional and physical cost of some fertility treatments.
As a middle-class mom of three kids born from IVF with a few embryos currently “on ice,” the ethical considerations of what to do with them (donate to science, donate to infertile couples, etc.) are very real to us; we would have been devastated to have lost our embryos, even though they would likely have been donated. As a pro-choice woman, I have been surprised by the level of my emotion for our embryos, and I can now understand why some people view them as their children-to-be.
Wow. This article sums up one of my main beefs against the “prolife” movement: all the energy is focused on the unborn, and screw those that are already here. I’m not against embryos, but the resources deployed for the utility clinic would’ve been put to far better use saving those already born, or at least already in utero.
“Excuse me, excuse me, I know this is a funeral and all for a murder, but I’ve got some questions I’m too lazy to Google for” and frankly, what the hell is a feminist question?
Jesus, why aren’t people marching in the streets?!
When I visited the Lower Ninth Ward, I noticed that the dates in the top quadrant were from the end of September. The dates in St. Bernard — a much more affluent community — were from the week of 9/12 – 9/17.
I realise this is a nit-picky point, but a part of New Orleans called Lakeview that also suffered a severe levee breach was searched the same time as the Lower Ninth Ward, so really it’s not about affluence (because Lakeview was mostly white and middle/upper class) but rather when different parts of town were accessable.
However, the fact that frozen embryos were a priority over people is not on. Thanks for pointing this out.
Hell yeah, class war.
Luckily, TEN total “first responders” were involved in saving the embryos:
Obviously the people who suffered while the embryos were being oh so carefully floated out of the lab were not likely candidates for the presidency. Hmm.
The next president, eh? I thought there was a minimum age requirement for the job. How long does he think the current president plans to stick around?
Fertility treatments are not only for the rich (by American standards of rich), but they do require a certain income level. In order to get the treatments, you have to have enough leeway in the budget that you can spend money on a medical procedure that is desired but not necessary, and still keep your home, transportation, and enough discretionary income to raise a child, or children. This may not be rich, but it’s sufficently centered around income that questions of class arise, since the embryos of the middle and upper classes, which cost a lot of money were prioritized over children of the Ninth Ward, who likely made it to elementary school for the same amount of money as it cost those embryos to be produced at all.
I can respect a degree of attachment to embryos (I get attached to and excited about prospects in my life; how much more a prospective wanted baby?), and being hurt at their loss, although I don’t quite understand being devastated.
I think in any less extreme context, there would be a lot more sympathy for people facing prospective loss of frozen embryos. But in this case, every competent rescuer was desparately needed to save actual, live people. Saving these embryos almost certaintly cost lives. If I’d had fertilized eggs in storage, I’d be horrified to discover that they were being saved at the risk of actual human lives. I’d probably donate them all to stem cell research in the hopes of saving as many lives as they’d cost.
I definitely think that people should take precedence over embryos, but it’s wrong to assume that fertility treatments are only for the rich. I know several people who made incredible sacrifices in their attempts to get pregnant and the embryos they created represented a one-time shot. And that’s nothing to say of the emotional and physical cost of some fertility treatments.
Yes but is that cost greater or less than your entire life, your job, your home, your immediate living family, all of it? Would you in short ask someone else to give those things up, or even “just” to risk those things, for your embryos?
And I’ll stop before I dangle someone over the edge of a volcano.
Kyso K, ha! Exactly.
Also, Ako said, “I’d probably donate them all to stem cell research in the hopes of saving as many lives as they’d cost.” DefCon’s post today was “New Year, New Hope For Stem Cells.”
KT, I’m not surprised about U’r feelings, but only because I understand the power of intention. In creating the IVF embyos, U’r intention was that they would become children, and as such, in U’r mind, they already were children. We can see the same phenomeon with natural pregnancies. If a woman wants a child, then she will call the thing in her belly a “baby” even before it’s reached the fetal stage of development (even if she’s an M.D. and technically knows better).
beth, U’r agument is non-sequiter. The fact that Lakeview wasn’t seached, because of lack of access, until about the same time that the Lower Ninth Ward was searched, doesn’t necessarily mean that priority wasn’t given to the more affluent neighbourhoods, just that a neighbourhood had to be accessable before it was searched. (Or to put it another way, just because my car is broken, dosen’t meant that I prefer walking to driving, it means that I can’t drive beacuse my car is broken. As soon as it’s fixed…) That said the only real way to know if preference was given to more afluent areas, would be to plot the time at which a neighbourhood became physically accessable, againt the actual time it was searched, against the level of affluence.
Dude, what do you have against the word “your”? Same number of keystrokes in your and shift+u+apostrophe+r.
R. Mildred, I hoped my first sentence would make it clear that people should be saved first. That said, I wouldn’t feel guilty were those my embryos – infertile couples did not allocate those first responders.
I was just trying to point out that not all embryos belong to affluent people. I know several couples who wouldn’t have been able to afford the procedure were it not for insurance, which they knew they were lucky to have. There are programs for financial assistance and donations of unused meds for people who don’t have either insurance or their own means. Also, among our friends and in the two fertility clinics we’ve been to, white couples were by no means the only patients – far from it.
This is yet another example of incompetent disaster management and hardly class warfare. Given what’s involved to create an embryo and the emotions around them, it is not surprising that people involved would advocate for their rescue or be happy about saving them. Hopefully a non-white woman without a silver spoon will be produced through IVF and become President. I personally know a few candidates…
KT,
You made a claim that does not seem to be supported by your argument. It seems to me that you are saying that because government officials (rather than infertile couples) wrongly (?) allocated those first responders, “this is yet another example of incompetent disaster management and hardly class warfare.”
Clearly, that is not exactly what you were trying to imply. So, I am wondering, what do you mean when you say “hardly class warfare”? Are you describing the rescue of the embryos or the Katrina disaster response as a whole?
That said, I wouldn’t feel guilty were those my embryos – infertile couples did not allocate those first responders.
Here is where the problem lies. If responders are taken away from saving actual people to save your embryos, big problem. That you don’t see it that way isn’t a problem for you specifically, but it’s a huge problem if your beliefs outweigh by the need to save actual lives. Your embryos, sorry, aren’t anything compared to a human being.
if your beliefs outweigh by the need to save actual lives.
Should be: “if your beliefs outweigh the need to save actual lives.”
Let’s put this into perspective. First Responders were pulled from helping people and forced to rescue property (not that they didn’t do a piss-poor job in “rescue efforts” anyway, considering that bodies have been found in “Searched–No Bodies” houses as recently as three months ago. Don’t think the ASPCA did a better job, either.) And as much as I might feel for those who may have used their savings or their limited insurance to acquire these embryos, they are still just property.
If the National Guard would have been pulled off of rescue efforts in order to move the inventory of the local Lexis dealership before it flooded, everyone would decry that. It’s actually the same thing. My car cost more than one embryo, but I wouldn’t want or expect anyone to try to save it before saving the woman across the street.
Which, let’s face it, should have been covered by the clinic’s insurance policy in the event of flooding. So even if they were lost, it should not have fallen on the shoulders of the couples who’d stored their embryos with this facility to replace them.
So, really, I’m not sure why we should really weep for the potentially lost embryos when real, live people were drowning in their attics or drinking their own urine to survive.
I just received a message that was forwarded from some smug, self-satisfied assholes in Denver, comparing their city’s blizzard response to the situation in New Orleans. “We didn’t ask for government help, we didn’t blame the government, we didn’t get money, we didn’t loot, we didn’t get trailers, etc.” It sickens me. My response included this information about the fertility clinic.
Dude, they had the National Guard dropping hay to stranded cattle.
You know, when 9/11 happened, I was on Table Talk, and there were a number of people there from Seattle who said we had no right to complain about Bush not even doing a flyover of the city for nearly a week because Clinton didn’t come running after their earthquake.
…seriously?
Which earthquake? I lived there my whole life until just before 9/11, and we had several earthquakes — but not a single big one. Assholes.
I don’t mind answering a question honestly asked, so I’ll gladly remove the burden of others’ ignorance from those who feel afflicted by it. I leave the question of whether this is the appropriate thread to the moderators.
anna, your answers:
1. The official cap on women’s enlistment (2%) ended in 1967. As far as I can tell, the cap you reference would be an unofficial one, or perhaps you confuse the percentage of Marines who are women with an actual limit.
2. The military does have a rape shield law, Military Rule of Evidence 412, but it seems to be weaker than in civilian courts. Adultery is not specifically described in the UCMJ, but is not limited to fraternization. The only requirements are that the participants not be married to each other, and that some “damage” be done to the military, e.g. unit cohesiveness or morale.
3. Title IX applies to all schools that receive federal funding, with a couple of exceptions related to the admissions process (allowing for single-sex schools at the grade school and undergrad levels).
4. Anti-discrimination laws exist at the federal, state, and even municipal level. You’d have to check specifically where you live and work for the names of those laws.
Disclosure: I’ve done IVF. We have a single frozen embryo on ice.
When I read this article, I was pissed off for a number of reasons. Lousiana doesn’t have mandated insurance company for IVF, so YES, if you’re doing IVF in Louisiana, you’re a lot more financially fortunate than some/many. The idea of saving the embryos of rich folks rather than helping poor people who are actually alive is disgusting. Just disgusting.
And Zuzu, embryos aren’t insured by the clinic. When you start IVF, you have to sign about a dozen forms, one of which states that if the clinic loses (destroys/allows the destruction of) your embryos because of an act of God, hey, tough shit. They’re not liable.
Anyhoo, under the law, embryos are property, and property should never be placed above people.
Sadly, I’m not surprised by your statement.
When the government allocates resources it knows are scarce to saving embryos, when the government could have allocated them to saving people, that is not mere incompetence. There is an unspoken premise about what takes precedence. The appropriate government response to such a request would be “We’re sorry, but we’ve got people whose lives take precedence over embryos.” The fact that the government saw fit to allocate scarce resources to this request speaks volumes about our values.
Let me bring it down to an individual level for you. If a first responder were at the scene of a clinic fire and opted to save 10 embryos over one doctor, no one would think twice about condemning that first responder. They would probably be fired, possibly charged with something, and definitely slapped with a wrongful death suit.
All we’re talking about here is a difference of scale. I hate to see Stalin proved right: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
Thank you, Erin M! I did not mean to be a troll, but I could not find the info-alas, my google skills are weak. I hope I didn’t bother other people too much. I will keep to thread topics from now on.
It’s a bit presumptuous to think that all of the embryos were those belonging to white women, even in New Orleans. Yes, the poor in NOLA are disproportionately African American, but there are also a good number of middle class African American folks living there.
IVF is not a tool of the rich, but a tool of those who are willing to sacrifice to have have children (or of those who are lucky enough to have insurance coverage for ART). I agree that the embryos should not have been placed before humans for evacuation, but women who have struggled with years of IF and mourn the loss of embryos are not to be scoffed at.
When did being feminist become equal to belittling other women/feminists who value their embryos as perspective/possible/future/current (whatever your belief) children?
this might be too personal of a question, but to those who underwent IVF- why did you choose IVF over adoption?
Certainly not in this post. Where are you seeing that?
I’m not sure where you’re seeing that, either. KT wrote very honestly about her attachment to her embryos, and as far as I can tell most people on the thread recognized that it’s perfectly normal to feel an attachment to what you consider a future child.
The issue here isn’t women’s perspectives on their future/possible children. I think we’d all be perfectly happy to see those embryos rescued, provided that rescuers had saved all the born people first. That’s the issue, not whether or not individual women should value their embryos.
I can understand not feeling specifically guilty over the rescue of the embryos if you’re not the one who decided to have rescuers taken away from people to favor unborn cells. I probably would feel guilty myself, but I recognize that’s not terribly rational, and there’s no actual issue of blame.
It would strike me as unnatural to feel unmitigated joy at the rescue of one’s embryos knowing that they were saved at the cost of actual human beings. I’d imagine some emotional upset would be normal.
I think the couples who knew they were lucky to have insurance that covered in-vitro fertilization would recognize that even if they weren’t rich, they were financially better off than a signifigant portion of society. And even with the programs to extent fertility treatments to the poor, frozen embryos are disproportionately likely to come from middle and upper class couples. So even if they weren’t sorting through the names of the embryo’s owners, trying to match them to income levels, saving extra reproductive cells of the predominately middle and upper class before saving actual people in predominately low-income neighborhoods indicates class predjudice at the least, and can be considered class warfare.
I trust you’re not implying that infertile people who don’t manage to pay for IVF aren’t all unwilling to sacrifice. It’s not exclusive to the rich, but people of middle-income or higher are the main customers. And there are a lot of people in the US who are too poor to afford IVF, or would have to make sacrifices that would leave them possibly homeless and unemployed, which is a bad position to be in when raising children.
It’s not an insult to people who use IVF to say that money is definitely a factor. It’s simply the truth that unless one is lucky enough to get it entirely paid for through charity (and how often does that happen?) one has to have a certain income level and financial security to even have IVF as an option. And that the embryo rescue was not just poor planning, but indicitave that the embryos of people likely to have money are of more value to our government than the lives of people likely to lack it.
I see it everytime someone emphasizes that embryos are property and compares them to a car. Saving an embryo isn’t just about saving an embryo. It’s about saving the potential offspring of two living people. Everytime someone compares an embryo to an owned object, they belittle the pain felt by the people who hoped that embryo would become a child. Why don’t we try to have a class-based and culture-of-life-based discussion which recognizes that it’s paternalistic of us to ascribe pain levels for loss of an embryo vs. loss of a living family member?
Which is all well and good and dandy, but there were actual people who weren’t receiving assistance because 10 first responders were sent to save embryos.
Regardless of the personal feelings of the people who would have lost embryos (or anyone else who has embryos on ice), that is all kinds of fucked-up and wrong. And I think that it’s important not to let one’s feelings about one’s own frozen embryos get in the way of a rational assessment of the priorities of the governor in this particular situation.
If this were a case where there were sufficient resources to assist living people AND rescue embryos, this would simply be a cute little human interest story (which is how it was presented). But read against the background of this enormous failure of government at several levels to allocate resources fairly or adequately, this is a glimpse into the true priorities of the decisionmakers. And that should scare the hell out of us.
This whole line of discussion seems awfully familiar….
Privileging the embryos over actual people who were dying seems, in my mind, to be tied up with the same sort of pro-life mentality that prizes an embryo over a woman’s bodily integrity.
I have frozen embroys. I would not compare them to a mere care because given my age, it is very unlikely that I will ever produce any embryos that healthy again, and I would like to think that cars are a bit more fungible than that. However, I would NEVER chose the embryo over a real person. I could have the embryos implanted and it may not take. I could miscarry. I could die in a car accident on Tuesday. The person who is here is not a contingency, and society’s higher moral duty is to the born. Because we have done such a piss poor job of dealing with the born, the fetishization of the unborn is in my book a way of saying to the disadvantaged, you REALLY don’t matter.
I don’t know about “ascribing pain levels”, but most of us consider the loss of a person objectively worse than the loss of an embryo. Because you either decide that people are worth more than frozen embryos that may or may not be implanted one day in the future, or you give the rescuers a big shiny medal for saving so very many embryos in a time period when they could only have saved a few of the people who were trapped in flood water, starving, sick, and drowning. That’s your ‘culture of life’.
So now you’re ascribing appropriate pain levels, and criticizing women who say that they would (or perhaps do) view their frozen embryos as a valued and expensive economic investment in the chance of a child, analagous to losing a major possession? Does that mean you’re being paternalistic to women who don’t think that embryos are people too?
And I don’t understand the “culture of life” rules on frozen embryos, anyways. Are you allowed to dispose of some of them? Are you required to implant them all, and see what happens? If they’re so valuable, is it even allowed to make more than you need to improve the chances of implantation? And do you have to offer up the remainder as “snowflake babies”?
Because if embryos are of less value than people, using multiple embryos to create one person is fine, and there isn’t any moral obligation to preserve the “life” of the frozen cells. But once the “culture of life” gets in, it gets downright messy.