Double meh (Updated)

Must blog about ... something.

Gah! Is it 8 yet so I can go to sleep? No ... it's only half past noon. Crap.

Man, Fiver better be twins, 'cause this pregnancy is already kicking my arse.

And I'm listless. I don't have the energy/inclination to do aught, but doing nothing bores me. I've cut my blog reading down to my P Posse (and still need to put you ladies up with your name in all it's glory on my other blog) and started checking my mommy bulletin boards. My BabyMed boards can be dull. My Coffeeshop board is filled with lovely but busy women who don't have time to post much, and everyone on my Large Family board is fighting. The comic book boards are tiresome and my Cafepress boards take two seconds to read.

Meh.

OK, howsabout a rant?

Right, this falls under the category of "Someone Please Explain this Idiocy To Me"

There are folks who are against stem cell research. I do not understand this mindset.

A person has embryos left over from ART that are going to be disposed of ANYWAY but they can't use them for research. WTBlueF?

They're going to be disposed of anyway you effing morons!

This, to me, is like people who refuse to donate their organs. I'm dead, you're going to shoot my cold, quickly decomposing corpse full of chemicals to 'preserve' it (a SICK and OBSCENE practice), and then put all that mess in the ground to finish rotting but OH HELL NO you can't take my organs! That would be desecrating what is just dead flesh and has NOTHING to do with the person I was!!!

How horrible and selfish can you be? Someone's life could be SAVED by your dead relative's kidney or heart. She doesn't need it any more! Someone's BABY could live because you had the compassion to donate.

Or you could close your eyes and close your heart and pull the covers over your stubborn head and let other people waiting for donated organs suffer and die because, hell, you don't know them, you can't see those sick children and besides, my loved one should rot in the ground with ALL HIS ORGANS, damnit!

I've never undergone ART despite years of infertility. I could never afford it. But if I had and I had embryos sitting around I'd be glad that those embies could be used for research. I'd be proud that I may have helped save someone's life.

But what about the babies? people cry. What about those poor defenseless babies?!

Welllll, first of all, a 5 day old frozen embryo is not a baby. It's barely a potential baby.

"We must draw the ethical line at research that destroys human life," said House Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Well guess what, asshat? Eighteen cells is not a human life.

Do you know all of the possible things that can go wrong with an FET*? Ya don't? Ask someone who's done one. Ask someone who's gone through IVF with a fresh embie, for that matter. ASK HER if those embies are a guaranteed human baby for her. They're NOT.

I don't know what the success rate is for a frozen embryo transfer (anyone who can help me out here, please do). The best I could find was 20-30%. There's only a 25% chance of conceiving each cycle for the regular ole' two-people-shagging method.

It is a FACT that every woman has an unknown number of early spontaneous miscarriages without even knowing it. Embryos are made, don't divide properly, fail to implant properly, etc and are lost - usually before any of us realizes she was pregnant.

How is this any different? How is the millions of embryos lost 'naturally' any different from the couple of hundred frozen ones set to be destroyed? Neither was made with the intention of losing. Why not use the frozen ones to further science?

To suggest that these collections of cells are anything other than a collection of cells is stupidity.

(EDITED to add that the delightful Julie, over at A Little Pregnant, just happened to blog about this very subject (Frozen Embryo Transfers). This lady has been there, folks. Go read. Read the comments, too.)