Are they not, though? Isn’t this part of what the stem cell controversy was all about? The idea that scientists would encourage the unnecessary generation of frozen embryos to prey upon for their devilry?
It’s been mentioned in other threads. Some do…
https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/22/embryo-adoption-industry-not-pro-life/
The Federalist piece uses the same terminology of ‘cryopreseved children’.
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Well, until recently. There are plenty of Conservative politicians, federal and provincial, who are eager to reopen that can of worms.
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Right. And I can see where anti-choice groups are grasping at these edge cases in order to maintain ideological purity when it comes to the question of does life begin at conception. It’s leading to some bizarre situations.
However these cases appear to be about couples who split up and which party can assert custody of the frozen embryo. What I’m curious about is their stance on IVF clinics in the first place. In order to successfully conceive via IVF, a couple must “bank” lots of fertilized eggs in the likely event that it takes multiple rounds before successful implantation. Why isn’t the entire IVF process not criticized like abortion clinics? What about the 600,000 currently frozen embryos in storage? Should not every one of them be forcefully implanted and brought to term? Should we hold frozen embryo adoption programs?
Again, I would love to personally ask some of these folks these questions just to see them tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize one over the other.
It seems that someone who really believed embryos were people would object to them being frozen in the first place and take equal umbrage at married couples who don’t implant all their embryos. In a 2008 study of more than 1,000 fertility patients with frozen embryos, 20 percent of patients who didn’t want to have any more children said they expected to keep their embryos frozen forever. It’s worth asking whether being frozen in perpetuity is any better than being destroyed.
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The first piece I linked to was about the disputes.
The second was more generally about the whole issue of creating and freezing embryos and what the ethical response to that should be for ‘pro-lifers’. Is ‘rescuing’ such children by adopting them the right course?
It goes into those points you raise and indicates that there is plenty of argument on those lines among pro-lifers.
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Sorry, I missed your second link and yep, just as I thought. These extreme pro-lifers are tying themselves in knots trying to remain ideologically consistent by conflating IVF and abortion into a single issue.
Odd though that even the ultra lifers don’t advocate shutting down and banning IVF entirely like they do abortion. It’s almost like they view only one of these as a medical procedure that a women chooses for herself.
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But some do.
Here you go 
U.K. Pro-Life Leader Calls for Ban on All IVF Procedures - LifeSite
is one example.
And this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/prolife/comments/an9knb/is_rprolife_also_against_ivf/
has some discussion of the issue and the different views pro-life people have on it. Lots of views there that IVF in general is wrong and shouldn’t be done; some say that it’s ok as long as you only make as many embyros as you are prepared to implant.
ETA:
And more:
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Someone said at a rally the other day that they wanted to make abortion “unthinkable” in Canada in our lifetime. The general thinking is that the issue is too poisonous to touch. But I think it’s bringing in the kind of laws that “everyone agrees with” that opens the door. First you pass a law outlawing extremely late term abortions except whether the health of the mother is on the line. That aligns with enough people’s feelings about the issue even though almost no one would like the actual outcomes of it. Then it’s incremental steps towards hallway widening bills and whatnot.
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This one-issue twerp.
He’s getting some pushback.
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The moment I see a pro-life femalewoman (and her inevitably male partner) volunteer to spend the next 5 years pregnant with implanted fetuses, and the following 20 years raising the kids, in order to ‘rescue’ those lives, I might take my fingers out of my ears and stop saying ‘la la la’ whenever they heave into view. I think I’m safe.
But probably these pro-lifers would prefer to see red-robed vassal handmaids forcibly implanted, as part of their Gilead fantasies.
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Yeah, you’re right (if I interpret your reply correctly - and if not, well, just let this pass, please) but I was clumsily unable, in the heat of the moment, to find a more elegant way of expressing it, males as yet being unable (AFAIK) to carry thawed out, implanted fetuses to term.
The math on this stuff shifts rapidly as the policy proposals get more extreme. Abortion is not popular, and people are pretty evenly split over unrestricted access. But outright banning abortion is unpopular, and the more expansive the ban, the less popular. Criminalising abortion is even less popular, and the more it falls on the women themselves the less popular it is. Bans that make no allotment for rape or incest are probably the least popular. But you bring up specific circumstances like that and they seem to poll near the basement too. And you aren’t far off where that basement lives.
Basically the vaguer and less immediate banning abortion is, the more support it has. And there’s reason to believe that the extremity of the right’s current approach could alienate a big ole chunk of their voters. Emphasis on could. There’s been a bunch of wonky number crunching articles that have popped up recently, like this one.
Saletan seems very good at deluding himself, but he’s done a decent job pulling numbers here.
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Just say pro-life women, because that’s what they are. Just because they are in the business of dehumanizing others doesn’t mean we have to.
And yeah… I get your anger. Believe me, I do.
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Referring to women as “females” strikes many as dehumanizing since it is a way of leaving out the fact that the people are humans from the sentence. English is a fast-and-loose language but when it comes to turning adjectives describing marginalized groups of humans into nouns it’s pretty dicey. Calling homosexual people “gays” as if it were a noun makes you sound like you might be homophobic. Referring to people like their race was a noun (“blacks”, “whites”) sounds a little racist.
Of course we are find with nounifying adjectives that indicate nationality (American, Canadian) which is maybe why everyone seems to be okay with “lesbian” (i.e., from Lesbos) as a noun because our brains are weird networks of relationships between ideas.
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Edited it.
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Thank you! I appreciate it.
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Yeah, I get that some? many? people perceive that, and why they do. Myself, I’ve never thought use of that term was dehumanising per se - context tells if one is talking about a female human or a female of some other species and it would never occur to me/be my intent to dehumanise anyone (unless I really and deliberately meant to - and then they’d know it! 
) But my mindset cannot be known so, well: fair point.
My politically formative years were spent in close proximity to the women’s movement(s) - especially in university student groups in the late 1970s, so I did learn a lot about assumptions! But mea culpa - I guess I need - as ever - to be a bit more vigilant with language.
It would never occur to me to think I was being dehumanised by being referred to as male, either, but before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, I do also get that use of ‘female’ really is different from a woman’s perspective given (a) historical experience and (b) natural tendency of English to use the male pronoun to mean both male and female.
(Though the worst language amendment back then did make me laugh - and it was mostly in jest but pointed out the ubiquity of male language: Apparently you could not say ‘person’ because it contained ‘son’. One said ‘peroffspring’! )
/threadderailrelanguage.
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I understand where you are coming from. I learned about this the same way you did, someone told me it was offensive so I stopped. Hurray for listening!
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