MSNBC’s host of The ReidOut, Joy Reid, and political analyst Michelle Goldberg continued the discussion of the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent ruling that embryos are people by arguing that the Republican reaction to the ruling proves that pro-life ideology is full of “actual consequences” and “contradictions.” However, they ultimately failed in this attempt, as their efforts led them to create a version of the famous trolley problem that denied the humanity of the people on one side of the switch.
Reid ran through a list of pro-lifers and their positions that she considered to be radical, “These are recently backed bills that make the same argument as Alabama's, 125 House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, they’ve co-sponsored something called the Life at Conception Act which states the term human being includes all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being. It does not include an exception for IVF.”
She also claimed, “The chair of the NRSC, Steven, Senator Steven Daines of Montana, co-sponsored a bill in 2021 that claimed that homo sapiens, born and unborn, are entitled to full protections of the 14th Amendment. They're for it, they want to make it illegal everywhere.”
The Alabama ruling was the result of a couple seeking IVF that sued over the destruction of frozen embryos that had been dropped on the floor. It was not brought by an activist seeking to protect embryos from destruction simply because they were of the “wrong” sex or had other “unwanted” physical traits. Of course, the media has pretended that such ethical issues don’t exist.
As for Goldberg, she responded by claiming, “I don't know if they actually do. I don't know if they actually want to make IVF illegal, so much as they don't want to deal with the, kind of, actual consequences of their ideology and its contradictions.”
On the contrary, IVF represents a threat to the pro-abortion side because if a woman is seeking to become pregnant via IVF, it means deep down she knows what an embryo is.
Goldberg, however, rolled right along “Because you see them now rushing to distance themselves from something that was totally predictable and that feminists and people who care about reproductive health have been screaming about for years.”
Later on, Goldberg declared that nobody really believes what the court ruled “There are vanishingly few people who actually believe that an embryo or a blastocyst is a human.”
Truth is not determined by polls, but Reid tried to argue that it is obvious that an embryo is not a life, “Let's just be clear. You can't take a baby and freeze it. The baby would die.”
An embryo is at a different stage of development than a baby, so that doesn’t disprove anything, but Goldberg naturally agreed, “All these people, if they're in a burning building with one-- and they can save one baby or 10,000 embryos. Nobody really believes that these two are equivalent things.”
The pain of the trolley problem is that the person at the switch knows that the people on the tracks are fully human regardless of their age or physical condition, but MSNBC apparently thinks the people on one side are less than.
Here is a transcript for the February 23 show:
MSNBC The ReidOut
2/24/2024
7:26 PM ET
JOY REID: Michelle, let me just give you a few examples, here. These are recently backed bills that make the same argument as Alabama's, 125 House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, they’ve co-sponsored something called the Life at Conception Act which states the term human being includes all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being. It does not include an exception for IVF.
The chair of the NRSC, Steven, Senator Steven Daines of Montana, co-sponsored a bill in 2021 that claimed that homo sapiens, born and unborn, are entitled to full protections of the 14th Amendment. They're for it, they want to make it illegal everywhere.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG: Well, I don't know if they actually do. I don't know if they actually want to make IVF illegal, so much as they don't want to deal with the, kind of, actual consequences of their ideology and its contradictions.
REID: Right.
GOLDBERG: Because you see them now rushing to distance themselves from something that was totally predictable and that feminists and people who care about reproductive health have been screaming about for years.
REID: Right.
GOLDBERG: That this what, once you, that, kind of, personhood impacts reproductive, it impacts abortion, it also impacts fertility treatment and it impacts contraception.
REID: Right.
GOLDBERG: And, you know, kind of, everything people warned about, about a post-Roe America, that was considered hysterical beforehand, we're seeing it all come to pass.
REID: Yeah.
GOLDBERG: And so what you see them doing now in Alabama, they're talking about changing the definition of personhood, not to conception but begins at implantation, right, but it I think it just shows you how cynical it is, and nobody -- there are vanishingly few people who actually believe that an embryo or a blastocyst is a human.
REID: Let's just be clear. You can't take a baby and freeze it. The baby would die.
GOLDBERG: Well, not just that. I think that--
REID: The fact you can freeze it means it's not alive.
GOLDBERG: -- All these people, if they're in a burning building with one-- and they can save one baby or 10,000 embryos.
REID: Correct.
GOLDBERG: Nobody really believes that these two are equivalent things.
