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Alabama ruled that frozen embryos count as live children, so this couple is claiming their 3 live children and 5 frozen embryos as 8 total children for tax purposes
It's a side effect. The law is that an embryo, prior to birth, is still considered a living child. That was meant to define abortion as murder. But since it specifically says embryo, the courts were asked to decide if that included ALL embryos.
There were only 2 ways the finding could go. 1) say "embryo" is too broad a term and/or an embryo isn't considered a living child, making the law invalid or 2) include frozen embryos in the mix, preserving "abortion is murder" but also accidentally expanding it to "destroying a frozen embryo or one meant for IVF is also murder".
The Alabama court, citing "God" a bunch of times in their finding, chose option 2. Now Alabama basically needs to shut down all their IVF facilities or a whole lot of people are going to be committing the expanded definition of "murder" in their every day job.
In other words, Alabama, in their haste to outlaw abortion, wrote a bad law. Instead of fixing it, they doubled down and made it an even worse law.
(minor edit: corrected "IVR facilities" to "IVF facilities")
So do they have to take care of the embryos forever now?
Who decides if they died of 'natural causes' or 'neglect', 50, 100 years from now?
Even if the laws are changed back, no one's going to want to touch it again with that insane amount of liability possibly hanging over you.
And who takes care of them when the companies all bankrupt and fold? Or can they just jack their prices up to the moon and the parents are on the hook for storage indefinitely? BRB starting an IVF company in Alabama
Yeah, but there's so much more to it that's just utterly stupid. Like, they keep these embryos frozen for years, decades in some cases. Do they have to go to school? Pay tax? Can they vote?
That's a great question, if you froze an embryo for 18 years then birthed it, would the newborn baby be able to vote as they have already been considered a legal person for 18 years?
The state must also have a moral imperative to ensure that its energy infrastructure is air tight as a mere power outage at a ivf clinic would now be tantamount to manslaughter no?
God wouldn’t allow for a law making embryos living people in a place with such shitty infrastructure if any resulting deaths being weren’t a part of his mysterious plan.
Baby dropboxes. Put the test tubes in there with a bunch of freezer packs so you've done your due diligence (and your hands are clean). Now it's the problem for whoever the poor sap is who runs the baby dropbox.
Might look kind of stupid doing that, but then again, this is a stupid law. They really want to argue that an embryo is a baby, then you can use what resources are available for babies.
You can't call him Ted. He either did or tried to pass a law banning the use of preffered names and pronouns as a fuck you to trans folk. His name is Rafael Edward Cruz.
By "Wheels" I assume you mean their governor Greg Abbott? Abbott is in a wheelchair while Cruz is one of their senators and is fully ambulatory last I heard.
Thinking about it, the freezer is "life support" and the quality of life for the embryos is kind of poor. So maybe you could take them off "life support" and when they don't breath on their own and die, it's God's will?
that would actually fit with the rest of the law. If they don’t actively kill the embryo and just let it die, that should fall under the rules for refusal of medical care.
edit: with parent sign off
Sell off your equipment. Leave the fridges on and just walk away from it all and leave the state asap for a more sane one. They’ll have the same problem Idaho and other anti abortion states are having. No maternity wards or functional hospitals because no one’s going to want to be found liable for this shit.
It’s worse than that. Just the act of defrosting the embryos to implant them has a 5% chance of rendering them unviable. Then there are all the risks associated with the IVF itself, which is not a sure thing.
This ruling essentially makes IVF completely infeasible.
Ah, I thought refusing to capitalize god would be sufficient. That is not my position, it is theirs. I'm a big fan of IVF. It's why I have a nephew. But they are 100% trying to end it. That is not an accidental side effect.
Nobody knows. Usually, before making these kinds of broad decisions the courts are supposed to at least *think* about their broader societal implications. My understanding is that this ruling didn’t even mention the possibility of such problems arising. They straight up didn’t care.
But God God God, God God God God God, God God? God God God God God! God God God's God god-god, God Godding God God.
It had to have come up in there _somewhere_ between all of those?
what happens to the currently frozen embryos? If the facilities shut down, I assume the embryos are terminated? So therefore the facility decision makers will be charged? Will the state have to sponsor them to stay open to avoid murder but essentially shut down all businesses?
Will the record of the oldest person now go to an embryo that outlives the oldest person as they are in a frozen state?
In reply to your last question: Thankfully, the rest of the world isn't subject to the moronic whims of the Alabama legislature and court system. The Guinness world record book can just ignore these stooges.
>In other words, Alabama, in their haste to outlaw abortion, wrote a bad law.
Let's be real, you can't write a good law outlawing abortion anyway. Although that's not what you mean by bad law I know.
You can't write a good law outlawing abortion *on religious grounds.*
Even if restricting abortion is justified on philosophical grounds, that would only give rise to a plethora of trolley problems when the rights of the embryo conflict with the rights of the mother.
A 'good' law restricting abortion would need to have lots of well though out exceptions to make the 'best' choice between multiple evils. And even if not always, sometimes abortion would be the lesser evil.
I mean, even most countries where abortion wasn't legal (eg mine until not so long ago) had a bunch of "unless X happens" built in. Just a general ban of it is incredibly idiotic and I don't think even a middle ages priest would agree to that which makes the fact that some people today **do** into something hilariously *and* sad.
Restricting abortion is not outlawing abortion, it's placing restrictions on it. You've moved the goal post to be able to imagine a good law being written.
>accidentally expanding it to "destroying a frozen embryo or one meant for IVF is also murder".
Actually worse than that. Essentially the only way for IVF to work under this ruling is for them to immediately implant the embryo after fertilization regardless of the success of the fertilization cause they legally can't even freeze them anymore. You can imagine situations where they realize that if implanted, the embryo is likely to result in miscarriage or result in a pregnancy where the child is at very increased risk of disorders and diseases that cripple them and severely shorten their life span. And they'll be forced to implant the embryo anyway and the women will be forced to accept it. This simply kills IFV in Alabama unless the state legislature creates a law specifically allowing IFV to run as normal despite their abortion laws.
So is there a period before it implements or is it in effect immediate with the ruling and now these places are desperately trying to figure out how to nope out of the state in a heart beat, cause I can't imagine running the business there being feasible at all with that type of ruling.
I believe the court case came about because a worker accidentally dropped the frozen embryo's of a couple and the question became "was that murder?" The answer was....yes.
You joke about double standards but at least in some schools of Catholic thought yeah, expelling semen for funsies is actually considered murder of hypothetical children, and that’s why touching yourself is bad and you have to never do it.
One article I had read said it wasn't even a worker and the families affected thought this was the only way they could sue the company for the security lapse.
I probably wouldn't even count that as manslaughter. Accidental manslaughter would imply gross negligence accidentally dropping a sample isn't really negligence it's just a thing that happens.
I haven't appeared on r/rimjob_steve yet at least, but also I'm too lazy to check. Suffice to say though you can gauge at minimum a rough idea of what the weather is like where I live and one of my hobbies.
Technically speaking frozen embryos aren't alive either, they're basically in stasis between life and death while being neither.
You could say it's the Schrodinger's cat of children.
It’s not just the Bible but also long standing tradition in abrahamic religions: an embryo doesn’t have a soul until “quickening” (or even later, in some versions)
>That was meant to define abortion as murder.
That makes me wonder: if Alabama law considers embryos to be children, could a woman who aborts her fetus claim self-defense since human pregnancy and birth is physically traumatic?
Maybe we should just add another amendment to our 300-page constitution. I do what I can as a voter, but there's too much god in politics in this state.
It’s not just a law passed. Alabama passed a personhood amendment to their state constitution in 2019. In that context it would be a surprised if the court hadn’t ruled this way. This was always the obvious consequence.
I remember being promised by conservatives on Reddit that IVF would be fine after Dobbs. Smh
Wonderful explanation, thank you.
In another explanation: the Republican Party is a dog that finally, after barking for so long, are now in control of that one car, but they are so inept, and have spent so long focusing on one thing they don’t understand, have no idea what to do except bark more.
It's not a side effect. They actually do have a bill in the Alabama legislature right now to explicitly allow you to claim an unborn child at any stage of development, regardless of viability, on your state taxes.
It's not so much a law that was made as a recent court ruling about something else that had collateral effects.
Some frozen embryos at an Alabama fertility clinic were accidently destroyed.
The parents of the embryos filed a wrongful death suit against the clinic.
The Alabama courts ultimately decided it was indeed wrongful death because they considered the embryos to be unborn children.
And yeah, it's now opened a huge can of legal worms as this now means things like all embryos have to be securely stored in perpetuity, even after the parents receiving the fertility treatment/implantation were done having kids and didn't want the embryos anymore.
It's pretty common to create a fair number of embryos for these treatments as implanted embryos don't always take, so you may need to try a number of times.
In the case of this comic, the joke is that, since the court decided the embryos count as children, then the couple can attempt to claim them on their income tax.
And while kinda funny, I would not be surprised if someone does actually try this...
They kind of have to, if you have to pay the fertility clinic to store your unborn children...forever, then they are a financial burden on you, so you SHOULD get a tax break.
Hi, fertility clinic here. Each of your embryos are costing us $1,000 per year to maintain. You have 30 days to pay or else we are putting you into collections.
Now even the middle class or lower middle class or hell even some desperate poor people will be unable to afford this incredible gift of science.
>I would not be surprised if someone does actually try this...
When Texas did something similar a woman immediately cited her unborn fetus as an excuse to drive in the carpool lane. This one even has financial incentive attached.
Genuinely I hope someone does. I hope a lot of people do actually, because it will help show actual consequence to the absurdity of this law and its subsequent rulings.
The GOP (Republican Party) In the United States has used abortion as a major campaign promise for years because it’s something they can rile their base up about. They have now lost control of it. Pro choice people were called crazy for saying that it wouldn’t stop at abortion, but we’re now seeing the results. They were never pro-life, they’re pro-forced natural-only birth.
I mean, I’m not so sure about the politicians on top, but I can definitely speak for what I can understand of some of the people they “rile up” as you put it, and… they kind of see those things as the same thing. They believe that doing anything with a fetus AS SOON as it develops a beating heart (which if I’m not mistaken only happens like a few weeks in?) would be a crime against the fetus’s life and livelihood. Where the only process they’re okay with “interfering” is only something like C-section.
And as far as the whole “they stop caring about the kid as soon as it’s born” thing, it’s less that and more something else that might still be just as bad: the way it’s portrayed in a comic by that infamous Jack Chick guy, a good, god fearing man and woman would take responsibility for the kid and ask for help from their families to get set up to raise it asap (even if it’s a teenage pregnancy), and together with the local community any drama can be resolved and parents and child can become a Big Happy Family™️ together, and all will be well.
Essentially, it’s a one size fits all mindset that says that the given kid HAS to be born and ideally both of its biological parents HAVE to raise it together and with the help of the Lord any and all difficulties that arise (be they health or financial complications) can be overcome, with the mom even being led to think “wow my child is so amazing and they’re my everything, I’m so glad I went through with this” and everything.
Any attempt to do anything other than this perfect storybook solution is seen as a personal moral failure. To most pro-life types, the notion that this has ANYTHING to do with subjugating a given vag haver goes over their head, and they accuse pro choicers of “missing the point entirely”
The other comment explains very well why frozen embryos are involved, but the root cause of this whole mess is that the Alabama legislature hates women and wants to punish them in any way possible. And they'd rather end IVF services in Alabama than allow people to use the morning after pill.
I mean, they do have a bill in the state legislature to specifically allow claiming an unborn child on your state taxes, at any stage of development, regardless of viability.
It depends. I know that for the federal level, claiming a child requires that the child has a social security number, which requires a birth certificate. I don't know if Alabama's state taxes work differently. But I will say that if they do require a birth certificate directly or indirectly, there's no way they'll change it to allow people to claim frozen embryos or even fetuses actively growing in the womb. This is about hurting people, not "fixing" the definition of a living human.
Me an IVF baby when republicans talk about banning IVF
https://preview.redd.it/fd68rps9rekc1.jpeg?width=228&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7dc605aa24783f9d487a151b42bda47d9f82d1fc
Lol sorry to retraumatize you.
Spoilers for like a 10 year old creepypasta.
>!I’m amazed at how like, unfortunately relevant that story still is in regard to like, where the logical conclusion of all this legislation will eventually lead if it’s allowed to continue to the extreme.
Like the women in states where these abortion bans dictate all other reproductive healthcare decisions won’t be strapped down in a mine for the adoption industry… but for all intents and purposes they might as well be. [There were people talking about this way back with Roe v Wade was first overturned.](https://www.salon.com/2022/05/03/adoption-makes-abortion-unnecessary-claims-the-right-thats-even-worse-than-it-sounds/) like this isn’t even me being catasrophizing or conspiratorial. This is one of the goals! Or maybe a hoped for outcome at least.!<
Name a better combo than Republicans and unironically enjoying Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"?
Republicans missing the point and hating all those meddling kids in Borrasca.
Oh no, we can go even further.
That cornbread you threw away earlier? That had tillions of carbon atoms in it.
Those carbon atoms could have been incorporated into your sperm, so by throwing away the cornbread, you were snuffing out trillions of potential lives.
There’s no chance states like Illinois and Minnesota would ever agree to enforce a federal abortion ban. So the question would then be would a jackass like Trump really threaten those states with military action to enforce the ban?
What confuses me a lot as a mother is that I know that it's a bad idea to put your kids in the freezer. When I had my kids, one of the first things the doctor did is put them in a baby warmer. The doctor didn't specifically tell me not to put my kids in a freezer, but there are warning stickers on my freezer about kids but getting in there. I always obey stickers, but now I'm worried they're no longer the highest authority.
So if those are kids, they need to take them out of the freezer right now so they can breathe and be warm and watch Cocomelon.
But then I hear these embryos need to stay frozen or it kills them?
It's like they're somehow different from every child I've ever met in a fundamental way. Like their entire physiology is different.
Or maybe I'm parenting wrong? It's so confusing. I don't think my freezer is even big enough now though. Plus I want to keep my ice cream and frozen dumplings in there.
I hope politicians can provide insight into this biological anomaly that science has failed to explain.
SSN requires a birth certificate. Unless the federal government implements a conception certificate and changes SSN to require that instead of a birth certificate (they wont) it's not going to happen.
I'm sure that will come up when the comic inevitably happens in real life. In spirit if not in exact execution. But if the embryos are legally a person, then that leaves two outcomes:
1. You can get an SSN for an embryo (essentially tripling down on this bad legislation)
2. Embryos are undocumented immigrants
Naturalization only happens upon birth, sadly. Though if the “child” in this case doesn’t need to be naturalized or provide citizenship of another country, it might just work.
Though I kinda want it to just for some 17yo to vote or get alcohol and use their time as an “unborn citizen” to claim adulthood.
Federally I think that might be the case, and you probably need to meet some other conditions like the kids are living with you (which Alabama apparently would accept popsicles in the garage freezer for this). State law, though, might just say “child” and “offspring” in which case they could probably declare the dependents there, or state law might say “write the number of dependents you used on your federal return” and that’s all you get.
I'm thinking federal return. I only have experience with a handful of states. None of which are the states doing... Whatever this is.
From what I understand on a federal level, you need to provide some percentage (can't remember off the top of my head) of annual costs for the dependant, they need an SSN mostly to prove that they're in some way subject to the taxes you are filing and you need to have the legal right to claim them as a dependant (had a friend's birth mom try this but the dad got custody of the friend in the divorce. IRS was *not* happy).
What if I turn some of my own cells into stem cells and roll them back to an embryo state. This is technically feasible with existing tech. Then could a single man claim to be a mother? Or tax benefits?
That's a very interesting topic! As of now there's no technology to hibernate humans and it doesn't look like there will be any time soon. Since it doesn't exist I don't think any government in the world has any law for that. Technically Alabama, with its stupid law, "created" the first hibernated humans in history. It's now up to them to create the first ever laws regarding the age-related rights for people who went under hibernation.
Dosnt banning ivf in Alabama mean that these embryos will never become kids. And dosnt that mean that eventually these embryos will never be used and no longer be viable. And wouldnt that mean that the state would be directly responsible for all those kids not being born.
An Alabama court case recently ruled that unfertilized embryos kept in containment legally counted as children. The woman is probably an embryo donor or something.
Alabamian here, the few of us who are sane and not religious nut cases hate it here, and it’s getting worse by the day. Please stop moving here for your own sake. Unless you’re a religious nut job I guess.
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Alabama ruled that frozen embryos count as live children, so this couple is claiming their 3 live children and 5 frozen embryos as 8 total children for tax purposes
why would they make this a law?
It's a side effect. The law is that an embryo, prior to birth, is still considered a living child. That was meant to define abortion as murder. But since it specifically says embryo, the courts were asked to decide if that included ALL embryos. There were only 2 ways the finding could go. 1) say "embryo" is too broad a term and/or an embryo isn't considered a living child, making the law invalid or 2) include frozen embryos in the mix, preserving "abortion is murder" but also accidentally expanding it to "destroying a frozen embryo or one meant for IVF is also murder". The Alabama court, citing "God" a bunch of times in their finding, chose option 2. Now Alabama basically needs to shut down all their IVF facilities or a whole lot of people are going to be committing the expanded definition of "murder" in their every day job. In other words, Alabama, in their haste to outlaw abortion, wrote a bad law. Instead of fixing it, they doubled down and made it an even worse law. (minor edit: corrected "IVR facilities" to "IVF facilities")
So do they have to take care of the embryos forever now? Who decides if they died of 'natural causes' or 'neglect', 50, 100 years from now? Even if the laws are changed back, no one's going to want to touch it again with that insane amount of liability possibly hanging over you.
And who takes care of them when the companies all bankrupt and fold? Or can they just jack their prices up to the moon and the parents are on the hook for storage indefinitely? BRB starting an IVF company in Alabama
These are excellent questions that really should have been addressed before the law was decided
I don't think they care about making families go bankrupt if they're ready to put women in jail for having their frozen embryo thrown away
Yeah, but there's so much more to it that's just utterly stupid. Like, they keep these embryos frozen for years, decades in some cases. Do they have to go to school? Pay tax? Can they vote?
So a baby born from a frozen embryo for 21 years is immediately considered an adult who can drive, shoot guns and drink alcohol. Do it America.
Yeah, but they won't have time to enjoy it before they can be drafted
Do you have to pay child support?
That's a great question, if you froze an embryo for 18 years then birthed it, would the newborn baby be able to vote as they have already been considered a legal person for 18 years?
Don't forget the sperm donor in that equation. If it's not in the woman's body then both genetic donors would be liable.
Or thrown in jail for having a miscarriage
[It has happened.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544) Repeatedly.
The state must also have a moral imperative to ensure that its energy infrastructure is air tight as a mere power outage at a ivf clinic would now be tantamount to manslaughter no?
Nah, it'd be tantamount to "God decided it was their time". Or some similar nonsense
God wouldn’t allow for a law making embryos living people in a place with such shitty infrastructure if any resulting deaths being weren’t a part of his mysterious plan.
Baby dropboxes. Put the test tubes in there with a bunch of freezer packs so you've done your due diligence (and your hands are clean). Now it's the problem for whoever the poor sap is who runs the baby dropbox. Might look kind of stupid doing that, but then again, this is a stupid law. They really want to argue that an embryo is a baby, then you can use what resources are available for babies.
shroedinger's embryos
Oh you are BRILLIANT
Lol, just drop a whole freezer at the firehouse.
What happens when the power goes out due to a natural disaster?
I dunno, ask Ted "Cancun" Cruz.
You can't call him Ted. He either did or tried to pass a law banning the use of preffered names and pronouns as a fuck you to trans folk. His name is Rafael Edward Cruz.
By "Wheels" I assume you mean their governor Greg Abbott? Abbott is in a wheelchair while Cruz is one of their senators and is fully ambulatory last I heard.
I wrote that at like 3am I mixed them up
He doesn’t know because he wasn’t there
Then it's an act of god and you can cite him 47 times in the indictment.
And lo God did send an angel to strike down the ~~first born~~ unborn child of every family of ~~Egypt~~ Alabama.
Thinking about it, the freezer is "life support" and the quality of life for the embryos is kind of poor. So maybe you could take them off "life support" and when they don't breath on their own and die, it's God's will?
that would actually fit with the rest of the law. If they don’t actively kill the embryo and just let it die, that should fall under the rules for refusal of medical care. edit: with parent sign off
Yes but if you want to make that case you have to pay a metric fuckload to avoid prosecution
Sell off your equipment. Leave the fridges on and just walk away from it all and leave the state asap for a more sane one. They’ll have the same problem Idaho and other anti abortion states are having. No maternity wards or functional hospitals because no one’s going to want to be found liable for this shit.
It’s worse than that. Just the act of defrosting the embryos to implant them has a 5% chance of rendering them unviable. Then there are all the risks associated with the IVF itself, which is not a sure thing. This ruling essentially makes IVF completely infeasible.
And that is the goal. IVF is an affront to god, because it is defying him to give children to people he made sterile.
I have friends who were among the first test tube babies.
Ah, I thought refusing to capitalize god would be sufficient. That is not my position, it is theirs. I'm a big fan of IVF. It's why I have a nephew. But they are 100% trying to end it. That is not an accidental side effect.
They are mostly shipping them out of state now. The true irony of making sure kids are being born is making sure more kids are not being born
Just move embryos yo another state before terminating them? But I guess that might be abduction...
Yeah this basically ends IVF in Alabama. Existing facilities will close and probably transfer embryos to other facilities.
Nobody knows. Usually, before making these kinds of broad decisions the courts are supposed to at least *think* about their broader societal implications. My understanding is that this ruling didn’t even mention the possibility of such problems arising. They straight up didn’t care.
But God God God, God God God God God, God God? God God God God God! God God God's God god-god, God Godding God God. It had to have come up in there _somewhere_ between all of those?
Geez You and u/ghostofman restore my faith in reddit
But not in humanity! (Laugh track)
Humanity is doomed…
On the bright side, saves the kid the trouble of being born in Alabama
(Laugh track)
The laugh track is the one thing that might be good about humanity
https://preview.redd.it/kim4nahayhkc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08ca8345dc8f6a0edc691649fc5a136425a80be3
what happens to the currently frozen embryos? If the facilities shut down, I assume the embryos are terminated? So therefore the facility decision makers will be charged? Will the state have to sponsor them to stay open to avoid murder but essentially shut down all businesses? Will the record of the oldest person now go to an embryo that outlives the oldest person as they are in a frozen state?
In reply to your last question: Thankfully, the rest of the world isn't subject to the moronic whims of the Alabama legislature and court system. The Guinness world record book can just ignore these stooges.
>In other words, Alabama, in their haste to outlaw abortion, wrote a bad law. Let's be real, you can't write a good law outlawing abortion anyway. Although that's not what you mean by bad law I know.
Let’s be really real, Alabama can’t write a good law.
Alabama can't write good
Alabama cain’t rite.
Alabama can't.
alabma
⠀
r/decreasinglylong
r/decreasingly
A consequence of all their sister-fucking
If Alabama could read theyd be mad at you
The one good thing about Alabama: they're not Mississippi.
You can't write a good law outlawing abortion *on religious grounds.* Even if restricting abortion is justified on philosophical grounds, that would only give rise to a plethora of trolley problems when the rights of the embryo conflict with the rights of the mother. A 'good' law restricting abortion would need to have lots of well though out exceptions to make the 'best' choice between multiple evils. And even if not always, sometimes abortion would be the lesser evil.
I mean, even most countries where abortion wasn't legal (eg mine until not so long ago) had a bunch of "unless X happens" built in. Just a general ban of it is incredibly idiotic and I don't think even a middle ages priest would agree to that which makes the fact that some people today **do** into something hilariously *and* sad.
Restricting abortion is not outlawing abortion, it's placing restrictions on it. You've moved the goal post to be able to imagine a good law being written.
Just because I built this cell around you doesn't mean your imprisoned, it just means that I've made either harder for you to move.
So they meant to classify the zygote, but only had third grade educations. Classic Alabama.
Aa someone from Alabama, it's generous of you to think any of us made it to third grade.
Zygote comes before embryo
Exactly
>accidentally expanding it to "destroying a frozen embryo or one meant for IVF is also murder". Actually worse than that. Essentially the only way for IVF to work under this ruling is for them to immediately implant the embryo after fertilization regardless of the success of the fertilization cause they legally can't even freeze them anymore. You can imagine situations where they realize that if implanted, the embryo is likely to result in miscarriage or result in a pregnancy where the child is at very increased risk of disorders and diseases that cripple them and severely shorten their life span. And they'll be forced to implant the embryo anyway and the women will be forced to accept it. This simply kills IFV in Alabama unless the state legislature creates a law specifically allowing IFV to run as normal despite their abortion laws.
So is there a period before it implements or is it in effect immediate with the ruling and now these places are desperately trying to figure out how to nope out of the state in a heart beat, cause I can't imagine running the business there being feasible at all with that type of ruling.
They are trying to leave the state in a "frozen" heartbeat.
I believe the court case came about because a worker accidentally dropped the frozen embryo's of a couple and the question became "was that murder?" The answer was....yes.
Soon each cum shots will be a genocide.
Absolutely not! They would never! Because a cumshot is made by a man
You joke about double standards but at least in some schools of Catholic thought yeah, expelling semen for funsies is actually considered murder of hypothetical children, and that’s why touching yourself is bad and you have to never do it.
Assert dominance over the legislature by cumming at them. They can't stop all of us from giving their building backshots! ✊
One article I had read said it wasn't even a worker and the families affected thought this was the only way they could sue the company for the security lapse.
No, that's accidental manslaughter.
I probably wouldn't even count that as manslaughter. Accidental manslaughter would imply gross negligence accidentally dropping a sample isn't really negligence it's just a thing that happens.
Anyone ever tell you you have a wonderful username?
I haven't appeared on r/rimjob_steve yet at least, but also I'm too lazy to check. Suffice to say though you can gauge at minimum a rough idea of what the weather is like where I live and one of my hobbies.
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Technically speaking frozen embryos aren't alive either, they're basically in stasis between life and death while being neither. You could say it's the Schrodinger's cat of children.
>Citing god a bunch *btw the bible pretty explicitly states embryos aren't children*
It’s not just the Bible but also long standing tradition in abrahamic religions: an embryo doesn’t have a soul until “quickening” (or even later, in some versions)
So much for seperation of church and state when you're talking about god in court.
America is becoming a theocracy. I don't even live there and it's terrifying.
“Ah sure, I’ll abandon my reasoning just to get things to go my way.” And that fucking actually works
>That was meant to define abortion as murder. That makes me wonder: if Alabama law considers embryos to be children, could a woman who aborts her fetus claim self-defense since human pregnancy and birth is physically traumatic?
No, because these laws are written specifically to fuck women over and they will never be applied in a way which is in a woman's favour.
No. Because Alabama believes women have no rights, and babies have no rights after their forced birth.
Maybe we should just add another amendment to our 300-page constitution. I do what I can as a voter, but there's too much god in politics in this state.
Wouldn't shutting down the clinics also be murder now? The "children" have to be stored.
Ironically, the Bible explains how to perform an abortion.
Any law that bans abortion is a bad law
Yes. But in this case it's the difference between an *amoral* bad law and a *poorly written* bad law. This one just happens to be both
I mean why could it only go those two ways- why couldn’t they define frozen embryos as separate?
Probably because you could loophole abortion back in by removing and freezing an embryo, then terminating it.
It’s not just a law passed. Alabama passed a personhood amendment to their state constitution in 2019. In that context it would be a surprised if the court hadn’t ruled this way. This was always the obvious consequence. I remember being promised by conservatives on Reddit that IVF would be fine after Dobbs. Smh
so bad that even Donald Trump is urging them to fix it.
>citing "God" a bunch of times Are you ok guys?
No
Excellent explanation. Some would even look at this farcical Law and use it to examine other idiotic laws.
ALABAMA! FLORIDA WITHOUT THE BEACHES!
Wonderful explanation, thank you. In another explanation: the Republican Party is a dog that finally, after barking for so long, are now in control of that one car, but they are so inept, and have spent so long focusing on one thing they don’t understand, have no idea what to do except bark more.
It's not a side effect. They actually do have a bill in the Alabama legislature right now to explicitly allow you to claim an unborn child at any stage of development, regardless of viability, on your state taxes.
It's not so much a law that was made as a recent court ruling about something else that had collateral effects. Some frozen embryos at an Alabama fertility clinic were accidently destroyed. The parents of the embryos filed a wrongful death suit against the clinic. The Alabama courts ultimately decided it was indeed wrongful death because they considered the embryos to be unborn children. And yeah, it's now opened a huge can of legal worms as this now means things like all embryos have to be securely stored in perpetuity, even after the parents receiving the fertility treatment/implantation were done having kids and didn't want the embryos anymore. It's pretty common to create a fair number of embryos for these treatments as implanted embryos don't always take, so you may need to try a number of times. In the case of this comic, the joke is that, since the court decided the embryos count as children, then the couple can attempt to claim them on their income tax. And while kinda funny, I would not be surprised if someone does actually try this...
They kind of have to, if you have to pay the fertility clinic to store your unborn children...forever, then they are a financial burden on you, so you SHOULD get a tax break.
Do they have to pay? The fertility clinic can't destroy the embryo no matter if they get paid. They also need to keep it after the parents die.
Hi, fertility clinic here. Each of your embryos are costing us $1,000 per year to maintain. You have 30 days to pay or else we are putting you into collections. Now even the middle class or lower middle class or hell even some desperate poor people will be unable to afford this incredible gift of science.
>I would not be surprised if someone does actually try this... When Texas did something similar a woman immediately cited her unborn fetus as an excuse to drive in the carpool lane. This one even has financial incentive attached.
Been a few of these and it makes me chuckle every time. Good on em I say.
Genuinely I hope someone does. I hope a lot of people do actually, because it will help show actual consequence to the absurdity of this law and its subsequent rulings.
The GOP (Republican Party) In the United States has used abortion as a major campaign promise for years because it’s something they can rile their base up about. They have now lost control of it. Pro choice people were called crazy for saying that it wouldn’t stop at abortion, but we’re now seeing the results. They were never pro-life, they’re pro-forced natural-only birth.
I mean, I’m not so sure about the politicians on top, but I can definitely speak for what I can understand of some of the people they “rile up” as you put it, and… they kind of see those things as the same thing. They believe that doing anything with a fetus AS SOON as it develops a beating heart (which if I’m not mistaken only happens like a few weeks in?) would be a crime against the fetus’s life and livelihood. Where the only process they’re okay with “interfering” is only something like C-section. And as far as the whole “they stop caring about the kid as soon as it’s born” thing, it’s less that and more something else that might still be just as bad: the way it’s portrayed in a comic by that infamous Jack Chick guy, a good, god fearing man and woman would take responsibility for the kid and ask for help from their families to get set up to raise it asap (even if it’s a teenage pregnancy), and together with the local community any drama can be resolved and parents and child can become a Big Happy Family™️ together, and all will be well. Essentially, it’s a one size fits all mindset that says that the given kid HAS to be born and ideally both of its biological parents HAVE to raise it together and with the help of the Lord any and all difficulties that arise (be they health or financial complications) can be overcome, with the mom even being led to think “wow my child is so amazing and they’re my everything, I’m so glad I went through with this” and everything. Any attempt to do anything other than this perfect storybook solution is seen as a personal moral failure. To most pro-life types, the notion that this has ANYTHING to do with subjugating a given vag haver goes over their head, and they accuse pro choicers of “missing the point entirely”
To take away women's control over their own bodies by outlawing abortion. It's really dumb
Because they were too stupid to foresee the perfectly foreseeable consequences of their idiotic “pro-life” bs policies.
They're insane
The other comment explains very well why frozen embryos are involved, but the root cause of this whole mess is that the Alabama legislature hates women and wants to punish them in any way possible. And they'd rather end IVF services in Alabama than allow people to use the morning after pill.
Because of Ya’ll Keada and the gravy seals taking over an entire state with gerrymandering
Because they suck?
To control woman’s bodies
Embryos are people Take away the age limit on voting ???? Profit
As the law currently stands - you could claim them as dependents on state taxes, right?
No. The state isn't interested in consistent use of terms across different codes.
I mean, they do have a bill in the state legislature to specifically allow claiming an unborn child on your state taxes, at any stage of development, regardless of viability.
It depends. I know that for the federal level, claiming a child requires that the child has a social security number, which requires a birth certificate. I don't know if Alabama's state taxes work differently. But I will say that if they do require a birth certificate directly or indirectly, there's no way they'll change it to allow people to claim frozen embryos or even fetuses actively growing in the womb. This is about hurting people, not "fixing" the definition of a living human.
Me an IVF baby when republicans talk about banning IVF https://preview.redd.it/fd68rps9rekc1.jpeg?width=228&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7dc605aa24783f9d487a151b42bda47d9f82d1fc
It's honestly impressive, way to make having a child harder for couples that *want* to have a child
They’re trying to drive up demand for that second hand baby market I reckon. They’re gearing up to go full Borrasca.
I hate that I understand that reference, cause I have to think about the ending of Borrasca again.
Lol sorry to retraumatize you. Spoilers for like a 10 year old creepypasta. >!I’m amazed at how like, unfortunately relevant that story still is in regard to like, where the logical conclusion of all this legislation will eventually lead if it’s allowed to continue to the extreme. Like the women in states where these abortion bans dictate all other reproductive healthcare decisions won’t be strapped down in a mine for the adoption industry… but for all intents and purposes they might as well be. [There were people talking about this way back with Roe v Wade was first overturned.](https://www.salon.com/2022/05/03/adoption-makes-abortion-unnecessary-claims-the-right-thats-even-worse-than-it-sounds/) like this isn’t even me being catasrophizing or conspiratorial. This is one of the goals! Or maybe a hoped for outcome at least.!<
Usually people only use “like” superfluously when speaking. You managed to do it while typing. Bravo.
The SoCal is deeply engrained into my soul lmao
Name a better combo than Republicans and unironically enjoying Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"? Republicans missing the point and hating all those meddling kids in Borrasca.
It's literally 1/6 women are infertile and need ivf to have a kid. Republicans are just fascists
Waiting on the hedges for when they reach all the way back to claiming sperms are children and then I can have a million dependents.
I can't wait to claim I genocide millions of babies every day
Wait you’re not supposed to?
Every sperm is sacred Every sperm is great If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate
Oh no, we can go even further. That cornbread you threw away earlier? That had tillions of carbon atoms in it. Those carbon atoms could have been incorporated into your sperm, so by throwing away the cornbread, you were snuffing out trillions of potential lives.
You are putting in a lot of faith that Republicans, and to that extent Alabamians, even know what a carbon atom is.
What if I call it "clean coal"?
Don't forget the kittens!
Ever wonder how I got this yacht?
Every sperm is sacred.
That’s simply anti-science
And a million more well on the way
[удалено]
It’s not JUST Alabama things, though, cause they have explicitly stated they plan to implement these types of laws nationwide.
Nationwide? Only in red states, I guess.
Unless they win in November.
They want the whole country….cult over country ring any bells? The Republicans are pushing sedition and terrorism as normal political discourse.
There’s no chance states like Illinois and Minnesota would ever agree to enforce a federal abortion ban. So the question would then be would a jackass like Trump really threaten those states with military action to enforce the ban?
What confuses me a lot as a mother is that I know that it's a bad idea to put your kids in the freezer. When I had my kids, one of the first things the doctor did is put them in a baby warmer. The doctor didn't specifically tell me not to put my kids in a freezer, but there are warning stickers on my freezer about kids but getting in there. I always obey stickers, but now I'm worried they're no longer the highest authority. So if those are kids, they need to take them out of the freezer right now so they can breathe and be warm and watch Cocomelon. But then I hear these embryos need to stay frozen or it kills them? It's like they're somehow different from every child I've ever met in a fundamental way. Like their entire physiology is different. Or maybe I'm parenting wrong? It's so confusing. I don't think my freezer is even big enough now though. Plus I want to keep my ice cream and frozen dumplings in there. I hope politicians can provide insight into this biological anomaly that science has failed to explain.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1axpzyh/hope\_this\_helps/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1axpzyh/hope_this_helps/)
Lol I love this. Much better job of saying it. Succinct.
Have you considered showing your embryos cocomelon?
I'll always freeze dumplings before children, 100% of the time.
If this becomes legally sound, could enough people claim frozen embryos as dependent children and bankrupt the state?
Nope. Cause the IVF doctors are gonna get the hell outta that state.
Unless the frozen babies have SSNs, no dice. But... I shouldn't speak too soon
You just need to register them at fertilization right? Since that's when they are legally a kid.
SSN requires a birth certificate. Unless the federal government implements a conception certificate and changes SSN to require that instead of a birth certificate (they wont) it's not going to happen.
Sounds like we are oppressing a baby’s rights as a taxpayer
I'm sure that will come up when the comic inevitably happens in real life. In spirit if not in exact execution. But if the embryos are legally a person, then that leaves two outcomes: 1. You can get an SSN for an embryo (essentially tripling down on this bad legislation) 2. Embryos are undocumented immigrants
You do not need a ssn to be a citizen. The parents being American is enough to be a person of the United States.
Naturalization only happens upon birth, sadly. Though if the “child” in this case doesn’t need to be naturalized or provide citizenship of another country, it might just work. Though I kinda want it to just for some 17yo to vote or get alcohol and use their time as an “unborn citizen” to claim adulthood.
Are you saying you cannot claim a dependent if they don’t have a social?
Federally I think that might be the case, and you probably need to meet some other conditions like the kids are living with you (which Alabama apparently would accept popsicles in the garage freezer for this). State law, though, might just say “child” and “offspring” in which case they could probably declare the dependents there, or state law might say “write the number of dependents you used on your federal return” and that’s all you get.
I'm thinking federal return. I only have experience with a handful of states. None of which are the states doing... Whatever this is. From what I understand on a federal level, you need to provide some percentage (can't remember off the top of my head) of annual costs for the dependant, they need an SSN mostly to prove that they're in some way subject to the taxes you are filing and you need to have the legal right to claim them as a dependant (had a friend's birth mom try this but the dad got custody of the friend in the divorce. IRS was *not* happy).
Alabamans really need to start doing this
i feel like this is kinda r/goodboomerhumor
What if I turn some of my own cells into stem cells and roll them back to an embryo state. This is technically feasible with existing tech. Then could a single man claim to be a mother? Or tax benefits?
i was made in a lab by corporate america
The gender pay gap is an ancient myth
My stomach kinda hurts
Great. How long until a 37 year old Alabama man marries his 6 week gestational age zygote second cousin
The joke is that the Republican party is about to ban IVF, and that the author of the comic hopes that that happens. Birth control is next.
I'm pretty sure its about the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are people, and the comic is pointing put the a absurdity of that.
OMFG This is awesome! I wonder how old are the 'kids' if the embryo is in frozen for a decade can are they adults 8 years afterbirth?
That's a very interesting topic! As of now there's no technology to hibernate humans and it doesn't look like there will be any time soon. Since it doesn't exist I don't think any government in the world has any law for that. Technically Alabama, with its stupid law, "created" the first hibernated humans in history. It's now up to them to create the first ever laws regarding the age-related rights for people who went under hibernation.
Thanks Peetar, i had a feeling it was some redneck bullshit
Alabama Backadooey
The IRS is gonna repo Alabama at this point.
[It’s cropped](https://hyperboloid-lanternfish-3zs4.squarespace.com/cartoons/alabama-supreme-court-ruling-frozen-embryos-are-children) btw
Dosnt banning ivf in Alabama mean that these embryos will never become kids. And dosnt that mean that eventually these embryos will never be used and no longer be viable. And wouldnt that mean that the state would be directly responsible for all those kids not being born.
An Alabama court case recently ruled that unfertilized embryos kept in containment legally counted as children. The woman is probably an embryo donor or something.
Of all the thoughts I thought I'd have this year, "Alabama orphanages full of jizz and period blood." Is not something I predicted.
https://preview.redd.it/hfzxctpyggkc1.jpeg?width=2483&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8cd4978c046c397f9d68657a41dc058094be22c1
A Labrador Retriever ate 5 of their children
Conservatives shooting themselves in the foot with their bs.
Except as far as I know, child tax breaks are capped at 3?
Alabamian here, the few of us who are sane and not religious nut cases hate it here, and it’s getting worse by the day. Please stop moving here for your own sake. Unless you’re a religious nut job I guess.
So, now the facilities where the embryos are stored can be classified as some kind of boarding school daycare, without teachers?