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03/05/2009
Really love your peaches, want to shake your dumbass state senator
Dear Georgia,
Hey, if you're not too busy following NASCAR or looking at each other in surprise and murmuring, "How 'bout them Dawgs?" or finding mammal bones in candy that should by all that's holy be boneless — and I understand if you are — can you please do something about Georgia Senate Bill 169, the so-called Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act? It's important. If it passes, it could mean the end of effective IVF treatment for the men and women of your state.
Bad law. Let's run the bullets:
- It limits the number of embryos to be transferred in a cycle to two for women under 40 and three for women over 40.
- It limits the number of eggs that can be fertilized to the number to be transferred in that cycle — two or three, depending on age, with no accommodation made for the inevitable attrition that occurs. (Ahhhh, "nothing to transfer" — are there any sweeter words in the English language? Besides perhaps "pro-life slips it to us backdoor-style"?)
- No cryopreservation of embryos, a concern made moot by the previous provisions. (I guess they want to make sure Georgia's infertile people know just how screwed they are.)
- No destruction of embryos, also moot but a tasty little morsel to toss to the hungry conservative dogs who will gobble this bill right up. (I am well aware that I am cementing my reputation as a black-hearted enemy of tiny frozen people everywhere by flagging this provision as objectionable, but I firmly believe in a patient's right to have her embryos destroyed if it suits her to do so.)
- No compensation for gamete donors, a move that will dramatically decrease the number of people willing to donate.
- No companion legislation that offers insurance coverage for infertility treatment — the only possible consolation for demanding that patients accept supboptimal treatment.
The bill was introduced by State Senator Ralph Hudgens (R, and I know you're shocked). According to Hudgens, it was inspired by our good friend Nadya Suleman, who is "going to cost the state of California millions of
dollars over the years; the taxpayers are going to have to fund the 14
children she has. I don’t want that to
happen in Georgia." I beg Senator Hudgens' leave to doubt that responsible fiscal policy is his primary concern; the bill, which also declares that "a living in vitro human embryo is a biological human being," was crafted in concert with Georgia Right to Life.
If you live in Georgia, here's what you can do:
- Attend a meeting tomorrow, Thursday, March 5, at 9:00 AM in Room 450 of the State Capitol. The Georgia Senate Health & Human Services Committee will hear testimony from the public — please give yours.
- Contact Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle today to express your concerns before the meeting.
- Contact your state representatives today — RESOLVE's made it easy with an e-mail form, but a fax or a phone call would be even better.
If this bill becomes law, it will result in a disastrous decline in the standard of IVF treatment in Georgia. It will impose a financial hardship on infertile people, requiring them either to undergo multiple expensive cycles or to travel for treatment. It will undermine the financial stability of Georgia's reproductive medicine industry. (Do you want to be the one to tell that nice doctor there'll be no boat this Christmas? But I kid. I kid because I'm bitter.) And it will be a foot firmly planted in the door for other incursions against our reproductive liberties.
Georgians, please: put down those suspiciously crunchy M&Ms and take action today. There's not much time.
Love,
Julie
P.S. to Missouri: Heads up. You're next.
P.P.S. to the press: Stop calling Nadya Suleman Octomom. Jesus. Just...God. Stop.
UPDATE: The bill has been referred to a subcommittee "for more research" — asleep but not dead. Please continue to let your legislators know how you feel for when this thing oozes back out of committee, as it could all too easily do. Thanks.
Comments (133)
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"And it will be a foot firmly planted in the door for other incursions against our reproductive liberties."
Well, I for one would like to see an incursion against the "reproductive liberty" of slamming scissors into the brain of second- or third-trimester fetuses.
Can't we just let Georgia go? Push them out of the US? Set them adrift along with Miss'ippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, etc. They tried to leave once and it didn't work. Let's give them another chance.
Wow, the graphic anti-choice bit only took one comment. Usually it takes at least five or six.
GREAT post, Julie.
Preach it sister!
And, colicmommy, if the choice is a mom's life or the life of her second or third trimester fetus, I choose the mom!
Thank you for posting this, Julie. Well put, as always.
You know I agree, right? On every point. (Including the one about not calling her Octomom. In fact, I think they should stop calling her anything, on account of not there would be no need to call her anything if they were not talking about her at all.) Right? Right.
The question I have is do you think the evildoers are counting on the whole implant/transfer thing to ram this through? As in do you think they expect to not meet significant opposition because Suzi and Stan Fertile now would view this as eminently reasonable, since they can't imagine why anyone would need more than two embryos (cause clearly they all survive and grow-- DUH!) at a time, seeing as a doctor would, you know, implant them? Right in the uterus and everything. I am imagining that average non-infertiles do not know about the implantation rate statistics, for natural cycles or ART ones. I am imagining that the home pregnancy tests, with their binary representation of the result would cement in people's heads the whole idea of conception meaning implantation, meaning continued pregnancy, meaning live birth.
And I know this is not relevant so much to the action that needs taking right the fuck NOW. But I am thinking about the language again, and about whether we need to go on the offensive with the rebranding/reframing strategy. Cause this? BLOWS.
"It limits the number of embryos to be transferred in a cycle to two for women under 40 and three for women over 40".
We have this already in the UK, and I am happy with it, as, unlikely though it would be for me personally, I wouldn't want to deal with either the prospect of HOM or a reduction. And the doctors don't have to either, on the whole. We had our own Octomum, but she went against medical advice.
Fiona, the key difference, at least as I understand it, is that in the UK women are entitled to IVF coverage. If the government wants to call the shots, well, okay, as long as they're paying for treatment. Here that factor's not in play.
Call me naive, but if you can't transfer them, freeze them or destroy them - what do you do with them? And wouldn't a law like that just make you take your second mortgage out of state for treatment?
Susie, apparently you can't make 'em, either — the bill calls for the creation of no more embryos than you'll transfer.
How 'bout that 100% fertilization rate we all get every time, huh?
I thought Octomom was her secret Superhero identity!
This incorporates a lot of current German law. Except, you do get 50% coverage for 3 IVFs up until you're 39. When you hit 40, the cost is all on you. But Georgia law is more liberal in many ways - no egg donation allowed in Germany, no PGD, no surrogacy. And no embryo selection as well ... the number fertilized is the number you transfer, and to your question if they don't look good, they get transferred regardless. My biggest question on it being illegal to freeze any embryos in Germany was ... what the heck happens when a woman has OHSS and it's deemed unsafe to transfer the embryos? Stilll looking for that answer and I had moderate OHSS after retrieval here and they still transferred .... it seemed unsafe. Embryos are frozen at the pronuclear stage, before they start dividing and the push against embryo selection goes back to the Nazi past (from what I understand). There are a quite a few Germans that head out of country here. The policies here are considered some of the most restrictive in Europe. But just about ALL European countries have guidelines, which seem to be absent in the US. Or are there? The OHSS angle worries me the most b/c women will almost certainly push for transfer if it means losing all the embryos if not able to freeze them for FET, which puts an 8 cell embryo above the health of a woman. Personally, I think SOME regulation is needed, but this bill takes it too far.
As an Atlanta taxpayer and likely future IVFer, I've already contacted everyone on the list to express my horror at even the IDEA of this bill.
i found about this just a few minutes ago, which annoys me because i was in atlanta this morning for monitoring and could have gone by the capitol to express my opinion. my senator happens to be on the health and human services committee, so i called his office to make my opinion known. i was told in no uncertain terms that he already understands how this would affect infertile women and that my opinion wasn't needed. really? because the last time i checked it was his job to talk to his constituents.
I have contacted my state reps, but I resent the implication that I talk about Dawgs. I graduated from Georgia Tech. Go Jackets!
Wrecks represent! (So did my brother.)
I've got to tell you that, even though I'm pro-life, I hate that the government is trying to limit the options of IVF, etc. Personally, my brand of pro-life extends to those who want to have a child and are having troubles, too. What about the right they have to become parents and create a life? Jeez. I'm both glad I don't live in GA and also frustrated that there is nothing I can do to help stop such an awful law. And I second the motions to stop calling Nadya Octomom and, well, just stop talking bout her at all. She needs help, and I don't mean in the form of a nanny.
There's one now in California too, something about having fertility clinics overseen by the medical board.
So many people here are in favor of it because of the recent octuplet births, but I keep telling them it's a slippery slope. When you give an inch to the oversight of reproduction, you give a mile of reproductive rights, and then what?
I never thought I'd see reproductive regulation in my lifetime outside of China.
Thank you. I'll be linking to this on my own blog.
(But just for the record, I'm no 'dawgs fan and I don't share in my 4-year old daughter's passion for NASCAR. I simply watch it with her.)
on the UK position there is no entitlement to funding even though funding is recommended for 3 cycles not many actually get it as ivf is low on the list of priorities for many health authorities. Plus there are often loads of restrictions on bmi etc before they will find. Personally even when I was self funding I had no problem with the 2/3 embryo limit depending on age. We also have an expenses only rule for donation. Whilst some now go abroad this is more because of no donor anonymity rules here. Those points apart the proposals are beyond terrible.
Thanks, Betty. Didn't realize the funding wasn't in place to support the mandate. Gah.
And, Anjali, please weigh in immediately with your position on M&Ms. I am staunchly in the filet camp, but as a reasonable person I do acknowledge that there must be merits to the bone-in option.
Okay, can't go to the meeting, but called and emailed the relevant people, more than once. I knew this was in the air but not so soon so thanks for the heads up. So uninformed.
This law is far too Draconian to pass; it's a kneejerk Octomom (sorry) reaction. I agree it should be fought tooth and nail, but it will never get the support it needs. Hold your comments about the hick right-wing Southerners who wrote the legislation – there are enough transplants living in Dixie now, and once it's more widely understood just how anti-ART, anti-infertile this bill is, it will die the death it deserves.
I just read Tertia Albertyn's book, "So Close," so I just had a crash course in how nine cycles of IVF can go, with the wildly inconsistent and unpredictable results that may arise. No eggs! Unfertilizable eggs! Withering embryos! Terrific embryos that don't implant! Etc., etc.
May I just say that State Sen. Ralph Hudgens is a monkeyfucker and I don't like him? He might have the teensiest shred of a rationale if America were in the midst of an outbreak of octomoms and nonamoms and decamoms, but holy crap, it ain't happening. This isn't a societal problem calling out for solutions. It's just a pro-lifer leaping at a chance to persuade people to fuck over women and take more control over their uteruses and ovaries. No sir, I don't like it.
This makes me so angry. Especially the notion that this is being proposed in order to protect Georgia's taxpayers from the possibility of having to fund a bunch of children born to parents with limited means. Interesting. Apparently, the theory is that only those of us with reproductive challenges give birth to children we can't afford? I note that there are no sanctions on people who conceive naturally. No test they have to pass. No income threshold that must be satisfied. No timeline between conceptions that must be fulfilled before they're allowed to try again. No maximum number of children permitted per household (regardless of income level). Funny, that. The concerns about these things seem to begin and end with those who need to go through IVF treatments in order to conceive. And they are just so concerned about it that they'll apply blanket rules without consideration to individual circumstance. Brilliant!
There are so many things wrong with this proposed legisltation that it's quite pathetic, really. Limiting the number of embryos that can be transferred is normal, but the limit should be determined by the parents and their qualified RE, and not by politicians. And the limit proposed here is pretty darned tight anyway. Limiting the number allowed for attempted fertilization? As with everything else you mentioned here, that is ludicrous! Egg retrieval is a rather unpleasant process. If a woman has gone through it, I think she has the right to decide how many of those retrieved eggs her RE should work with. And obviously, she should have a say in what happens to any that are not transferred. These are decisions that should be made by family units, not politicians.
This proposed legislation is a huge step backwards for women's rights. And I certainly hope it does not pass.
This Bill sucks. Hard. But not all southerners are as bad as people seem to think. :-(
There are other ways to have 14 children than through IVF. This is a stupid law that will be uneffective.
Did you know that Ga also just shot down a bill designed to increase needed state revenue by repealing the states's blue laws prohibiting Sunday alcohol sales?
I grew up in Georgia and do you know what exists right across the Georgia/Florida border on almost every major road? A great big liquor store whose major revenue stream is Sunday alcohol sales to Georgia residence. As a now resident of Florida I very much appreciate their $$ being spent in my state.
Sounds like IVF Clinics will start buying real estate right next door.
Wrecks all around.
This is SO typical of the one or two obnoxious senators in every state. I honestly don't think this is a southern thing, believe it or not. It would be just as likely in Kansas, Idaho, or Michigan. Its just that those people don't get the press that the southern loud mouths do.
That said, being a former resident of GA, I would definitely be banging on some heads for this one. But I think this falls under the whole "Hey, Bad press is still Press!"
Moronific.
We will see some legislation out of this, thankyouverymuchNadia - she is obviously mentally ill, ya'll. So I am trying to cut her some slack. Her Dr? Not. So. Much.
Momma trish hit it right on the head - when will Hudgens be submitting legislation to perform forced sterilization on women who give birth to more than one child while on welfare? Doesn't the state of Georgia have to pay for those children? Why not let all the criminals out of jail too? Why should the state of Georgia have to pay to support criminals? Let 'em out and have them get a job!
I'm not from Georgia and I'm also not concerned about this bill. I did, however, find it interesting that you insulted the entire population of Georgia by implying that they are stupid and all rednecks and then ask them to support your opinion of this.
Yeah, Gina, that's exactly what I did when I mentioned a sport that's wildly popular across the Southeast; an exciting upset by the University of Georgia basketball team; and the Fox story Google News pegs as #2 in local Georgia news.
Totally aside from the content of this post (which I fully support), I love your ability to write catchy post titles. ; )
oh. god. it just gets worse and worse. i wish i lived in georgia and could go slap someone.
I'm all for limiting the amount of embryos transferred, but it should be up to the professionals to oversee their colleagues, not the government. I think if a doctor is going to lose his or her license to practice they may think twice about transferring so many embryos into a proven mother under the age of 35. I could be wrong, but at least the doctor would only have one chance to make that mistake. It's not the government's job to oversee lawyers, either, and they seem to do a fairly good job of disbarring their own when they commit malpractice.
This attempted legislation is just really, really bad anti-choice crap. Maybe they think if we get rid of all the birth control, eliminate abortions, and force people to have as many babies as they possibly can, that the United States will be like Romania. Yeah! Orphanages everywhere. No infertile couple will ever have to worry about killing embryos ever again. People from France and Canada...heck, from all over will be coming HERE to adopt babies because we'll have so many. (half of them will be born addicted to crack or crystal meth, but whatever). Doesn't that sound GREAT!?!
But then we would have more kids being supported by the state...hmmm.....I guess Hudgens was too busy watching NASCAR to think that far ahead.
Can't we just sterilize Georgia?
The hypocrisy of this bill is honestly what annoys me the most. Just call it what it is, instead of pretending you're all aghast about the financial implications to the state of fourteen kids. Are they going to start forcing moms on welfare to get their tubes tied? Are OB's going to have to force sterilization after a maximum of three kids on any moms who fall under a certain income bracket? No, no they're not.
I live in ALABAMA, am a REPUBLICAN (on the more moderate side - less government involvement, for Stem Cell Research (especially on those wee-little-frozen never-be's that could be used to SAVE LIVES, pro-life, but for abortions in the case of medical reasons and/or 14-year-olds... etc etc) and I DISAGREE WITH THIS BILL.
Something else to worry about with this bill, from someone who lives in Georgia and has two kids via IUI with donated sperm: What will be the impact on lesbian and/or single women? No payment for anonymous egg and sperm donors means fewer anonymous donors, who give up parental rights automatically as part of that process. Using gametes donated by known-donors mean they have parental rights unless you go through the courts ($$ for lawyers) to surrender them. More importantly, note this important section: "The creation of an in vitro human embryo shall be solely for the purpose of initiating a human pregnancy by means of transfer to the uterus of a human female for the treatment of human infertility." Who gets to decide what constitutes "human infertility"? Is the mere absence of having a partner with whom you want or are able to create an embryo enough? Could lesbians, surrogates for gay men, or single women of all sexual orientations be turned away from insemination or IVF if they are not deemed technically, medically infertile?
Goooood catch, Laura. I skimmed over that passage and missed that nuance — I was too busy boggling at the implied fear that human embryos might be used for, what? I don't know, transfer to a super science robot hyper uterus?
My heart bleeds for you poor mommies that are just trying their damnest to be mommies. Why must they make it so very hard for you?
Why do they act like not being able to concieve is NOT a medical condition?? There is a part of your body not working. How does that not scream medical intervention!?
And really, I used to live in GA and there are people out there with more than 14 kids and there was no IVF to speak of.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that limiting the options of lesbians and single women to become mothers is not really a bad thing in the eyes of Sen Hudgens. It's like a little bonus.
But maybe it will make people take a closer look at adopting the babies and children that are already here and need a home. And that would be a good thing.
In thinking about it more, lesbians and single women using donor insemination might be okay -- the language of the bill does refer to "creation of an in vitro human embryo." Presumably many of us would start with donor insemination, not moving on to the more expensive and invasive IVF unless we were unable to achieve pregnancy, thus qualifying us under the "infertility" definition.
Men (gay or straight) who pursue fatherhood using donor eggs and gestational surrogates would still be up the creek, though, since none of the parties (father, egg donor, surrogate) would necessarily be medically infertile.
Although should this bill pass, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they attempted the apply the rules for IVF to insemination as well. Especially given how few people seem to know the differences between these, unless they have direct experience.
You've inspired me to come up with the "Whadaya know, Georgia?" reproductive quiz -- should be mandatory for any state legislator thinking of drafting, commenting, or voting on anything remotely related to a woman's uterus.
I'm so tired of The Men feigning concern over my bits. I really am.
Elena--while I think your intentions were good with your comment, there are actually very, very few babies who are up for adoption in this country. There are, of course, many, many more older kids and/or special needs kids who need permanent homes. However, most people, rightly or wrongly, are hesitant to adopt these children. Most of the population are not equipped to deal with the severe emotional, psychological, cognitive, and physical issues that these children have, and the result is a good number of terminated adoptions that leave the kids worse off than they probably were in the first place.
I don't know what the answer is, but "forcing" people who want to be parents into possibly adopting kids they are not equipped to handle ain't it.
And as a P.S.--why does the infertile population have to bear the responsibility for adopting these kids? If fertile couples would forgo having a second biological child and adopt a special needs child through the state, that would work just as well. Should we introduce legislation limiting "natural" reproduction to one child per family until there are no more adoptable kids left?
But Ann, isn't it possible that even with birthing your own child there could be disabilities that you have to deal with? Parenting doesn't come with guarantees, so isn't part of becoming a parent understanding that you might just have to become equipped to deal with just about anything?
I know three three families and eight kids that have been through the adoption process and it has just been such a blessing not only to the families and the kids, but the communities that these families live in as well. One of these kids is one of my son's best buddy!
I just think it wouldn't be the end of the world if adoption came more to the forefront as an option for couples.
Im not sure where people get off thinking that the number of embryos another woman has transfered is any of their business, much less make a law about it. CREEPY....
this is also creepy
"When her "teeth wouldn't go through it," Potts said she washed the chocolate off of the approximately inch-long object in the office sink and saw it CERTAINLY WASNT A PEANUT "
Elena, I assure you that infertile people are acutely aware that adoption is among the available options.