The ban on IVF reveals us the skinny fringe of the theocratic wedge
By MIKE MAGEE
To avoid wasting the Republican Celebration, we should all vote Democratic this 12 months.
With out exaggeration, Undertaking 2025 feels just like Germany within the early Nineteen Thirties. Their web site introduction reads:
“It’s not sufficient for conservatives to win elections. If we’re to save lots of the nation from the grip of the novel left, we want each a governing agenda and the suitable folks able to implement that agenda on day one of many subsequent Conservative authorities.”
Clearly, 73-year-old Alabama Decide Tom Parker is a type of “proper folks.” He didn’t flinch in his February 16, 2024, choice in “LePage v. Heart for Reproductive Drugs.” Citing an 1872 Alabama regulation that permits people to sue for the “wrongful dying of a minor,” he confidently declared that 8-cell embryos cryopreserved at fertility clinics had been human beings. He then added insult to harm. He tied the choice to the declaration that people answerable for the wrongful lack of the cells are accountable for damages beneath the state’s 2019 regulation (enabled by the Dobbs choice) banning abortion. A messy backlash in opposition to and for IVF rapidly adopted.
Parker was not happy along with his function as a lawyer and a health care provider, so he added theologian to his {qualifications}. In his choice he acknowledged: “In abstract, the theologically primarily based view of the sanctity of life espoused by the folks of Alabama contains the next: (1) God created every particular person in His picture; (2) every particular person subsequently has a price far past human capability to calculate; and (3) human life can’t be unjustly destroyed with out incurring the wrath of a holy God, who sees the destruction of His picture as an affront to Himself.”
Decided radical leaders, pushed by spiritual fervor, way back rejected the Founding Fathers' dedication to the separation of church and state.
Think about the phrases of James Madison in a speech to the Home of Representatives in 1789:“The civil rights of nobody shall be abridged on account of non secular perception or worship, nor shall any nationwide faith be established, nor shall the total and equal rights of conscience be violated in any approach or beneath any pretext in any respect.”
As we flip the nook on the highway to the November election, you will need to acknowledge that the menace we face is greater than simply Trump. To not acknowledge the leaders of Undertaking 2025 and past at this level in our historical past can be like believing that WWII was nearly Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, when in reality the problem was a lot higher.
Merely put, the human species within the Axis societies had gone off the rails and entered a dying spiral. Breaking the spell required unprecedented energy and finally using atomic bombs, adopted by multi-decade investments by means of the Marshall Plan to revive civilized human societies.
For that reason, “limping to the end line” is not an possibility for our nation. Undertaking 2025, the Supreme Court docket’s current Chevron choice, and the multi-pronged assault on girls’s reproductive freedom all recommend {that a} landslide defeat of Republicans on the poll field will likely be obligatory to put the muse for the restoration of a wholesome, bipartisan democracy.
Something much less will solely embolden an already captive Supreme Court docket and MAGA insurgents. A two-party system of democracy has ensured a dependable and peaceable switch of energy for over two centuries till 2020. A kind of events has been taken over, placing our cherished democracy in jeopardy. The quickest approach to reset a viable two-party system is to decisively defeat Trump and all of his MAGA allies in the USA this November.
Mike Magee MD is a medical historian and a daily contributor to THCB. He’s the writer of CODE BLUE: Inside America's Medical Industrial Advanced (Grove/2020).