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?

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’.

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.

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.

Saving an embryo isn’t just about saving an embryo. It’s about saving the potential offspring of two living people.

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.

When did being feminist become equal to belittling other women/feminists who value their embryos as perspective/possible/future/current (whatever your belief) children?

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?

That said, I wouldn’t feel guilty were those my embryos – infertile couples did not allocate those first responders.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

When did being feminist become equal to belittling other women/feminists who value their embryos as perspective/possible/future/current (whatever your belief) children?

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.

When did being feminist become equal to belittling other women/feminists who value their embryos as perspective/possible/future/current (whatever your belief) children?

Certainly not in this post. Where are you seeing that?