Just a quick reminder that I’ll be Zoom chatting today at 12:30. The link is here … join me then. As always, leave your questions below or shoot me an email.
In the meantime, you can read my latest for MSNBC on my personal experience with IVF and why potentially outlawing the practice is the opposite of a “pro-life” position.
In the case of IVF, we’re talking about parents who desperately want children — and who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to make it happen. Alabama has already made it impossible for women in their state to end an unwanted pregnancy; now, they are threatening to stop women who want to have children from doing so.
One can argue that if a person believes that life begins at conception, the ideologically coherent position is to oppose the destruction of frozen embryos, which are the result of conception.
But this is precisely the location where the anti-abortion train, tied to an ideologically rigid worldview, goes off the tracks. Without IVF, those embryos can’t become people. It’s literally the reason IVF exists: to help people who can’t conceive naturally. In making the argument that an embryo is a person, the Alabama Supreme Court is blocking the only path for that embryo to become a person — and thousands of families to raise children.
Read the whole thing here.
What’s Going On
Two separate takes on how Russia has fared two years into the Ukraine war. Rajan Menon argues Putin has already lost. Edward Wong and Michael Crowley at the New York Times say that Putin has avoided the worst consequences of international sanctions. I lean more toward Menon’s view, but Wong and Crowley make a compelling argument.
Alex Conant makes a compelling argument that Republicans might be overplaying their hand by focusing on Joe Biden’s age.
Very interesting article from the Associated Press on the limits of the Democrat’s “saving democracy” message.
Musical Interlude
Maybe the AP should spend 3000 words on Project 2025 instead of interviewing libertarians.
I suggest the wheels came off the anti-abortion crusade long before they got to IVF.