00:00:48.840if you bought it, read it, got it from your local library.
00:00:53.260There's going to be an audio book not read by me.
00:00:55.600So like really, he has everything to recommend it already.
00:00:59.280The book is called The Cancel Culture Panic, How an American Obsession Went Global.
00:01:04.820If you like the way that we talk about and dissect cultural pathologies here on In Bed with the Right, I think you'll really like the book.
00:01:14.200It's a different perspective on cancel culture than I had seen before because Adrian is a real cosmopolitan internationalist citizen of the world.
00:01:25.600And has a really kind of like global approach to this particularly American pathology.
00:01:36.680And it's funny and it's playful and it's insightful.
00:01:41.720And I feel like I wanted to underline almost the whole thing.
00:01:46.680So you should find The Cancel Culture Panic by Adrienne Daub wherever your books are sold.
00:01:53.400thank you so much for for saying such nice things i'm like now now i don't know how we're
00:01:58.360going to segue back into ivf uh oh yeah well now we need to talk about the chilly expensive
00:02:04.640uh hormonal process of creating babies uh using artificial reproductive technology and
00:02:14.540And it's new site of political controversy because a lot of people in the U.S. want to ban IVF.
00:02:23.640So what do you know about this controversy, Adrian?
00:02:26.120So it's a kind of an interesting one, right?
00:02:27.820It is it breaks down along pretty predictable lines.
00:02:32.500Democrats are making it into a big issue in this election, partly because I guess I gather that Project 2025 has some stuff to say about this.
00:02:41.960On the other hand, Republicans clearly recognize it as kind of a losing issue and are running
00:02:46.460away from it even faster than they are from the perception that they want a complete national
00:03:29.260And they're once again sort of running away
00:03:31.220from the results of their own theocratic impulses.
00:03:36.580But yeah, the basic outline appears to be that as abortion comes under pressure nationally, partly through these fetal personhood amendments or legislation, the question of whether or not in vitro fertilization runs afoul of any of these laws becomes a really tricky one, and it is one that affects a whole lot of Americans.
00:04:03.120Yeah. So as you pointed out, this does predate the Alabama controversy that arose earlier this year in February. It predates even the Dobbs decision that sort of pushed this issue into a place of having actual legal stakes. Right.
00:04:22.540But the far right and particularly the anti-abortion movement opposes in vitro fertilization and they impose it as part of this broad spectrum of social changes and in particular changes to like gender and the family that have happened since the mid century.
00:04:40.340Right. They understand with some justification that IVF is both a product of and an enabler of the post-second wave change in gender roles and in the status of women.
00:04:54.240And they also understand it to some degree as an assault on babies. Right.
00:05:01.220There is a so there's sort of like two competing interests in the right wing attacks on IVF.
00:05:06.960Right. There's like one is the notion that IVF allows the creation of families that Republicans don't like and a change to the way that families are created and the timeline on which families are created that Republicans don't like.
00:05:24.400And then there's this other like often overlapping, but I think distinct theory they have that embryos, which are created and in many cases also destroyed in the IVF process, are or should be treated as full human beings endowed with all the rights that are given to citizens in the Constitution.
00:05:46.540Right. And if you understand a frozen embryo and a Petri dish as having all the same rights as human beings, then these practices become ethically and legally tricky.
00:06:02.220And that is something that's been thrown into relief since Dobbs, as a lot of state laws that had been passed either as what are called trigger laws or as sort of messaging bills during the Roe era that recognized fetal or embryonic personhood are now actually enforceable in the post-Dobbs era.
00:06:23.200that means that there are some legal cases working their way through the courts that seek to actually
00:06:30.420treat embryos as persons yeah and that creates a lot of questions for families for women for
00:06:38.180doctors and for judges which we're going to get into but you know i think i think it might be
00:06:44.580useful for our listeners and candidly just for me to walk through just like what ivf is what the
00:06:51.420procedure is what the science is because a lot like a lot of like candidly like sexual health
00:06:56.300like a lot of reproductive technologies it's actual like mechanisms and function
00:07:02.500are kind of opaque to me and adrian i think you know more about this than i do
00:07:06.720well i know some things because you know full disclosure that's how my daughter was conceived
00:07:13.240um but i have to say that you know i i was it was my first time through that process and uh
00:07:20.640you learn a whole bunch of acronyms but like how it all works uh is still a bit of a bit of a
00:07:25.400mystery like they they all kind of sort of shrug and like oh we don't know it's like 50 50 at this
00:07:29.680point and like whoa wasn't this all science and then like yeah it's kind of just uh you know it's
00:07:35.040sort of where really impressive science comes up against human bodies being fundamentally unknowable
00:07:39.480uh or or really hard to figure out um but yeah so the product so in vitro fertilization uh which
00:07:46.300just different from intrauterine insemination, for instance, there are other forms of reproductive
00:07:53.500health, basically. It has, I think, three steps. There's an egg retrieval. Sometimes you have more
00:08:02.880than one. That is to say, a person who produces eggs will usually inject themselves with all kinds
00:08:08.740of hormones and then there'll be a retrieval of one or more eggs until there's enough to really
00:08:17.380start the in vitro fertilization process which is the second step which is when basically yeah
00:08:24.300it's what it sounds like you fertilize the egg in a test tube or in a petri dish or something
00:08:33.140And then in the third step, there's an embryo transfer of usually one or two embryos into the uterus of the person carrying the child.
00:08:43.380It can be the same person that the egg was retrieved from, or it can be a different person.
00:08:48.040There are possible intermediary steps, especially people who struggle with fertility.
00:08:52.800They can be testing at different steps.
00:08:54.520But that's my overall sense of this procedure.
00:08:57.660um i think it's quite common uh in the u.s uh but it's still i mean even though someone has
00:09:06.680gone through it it is it is a bit mysterious yeah it's science that is not that new but is a product
00:09:17.380of the second half of the 20th century right so ivf is now like incredibly common it is
00:09:25.640very expensive and insurance companies don't always cover it, which is something we're also
00:09:30.960going to be talking about later in this episode. But it is really popular. So these days, about
00:09:38.4202% of babies born in the US are conceived through IVF. That's according to CNN. About 8 million
00:09:45.060babies have been born through IVF in total. And it's been around for a while. So the first child
00:09:52.840to be born from IVF was a British baby girl named Louise Brown. She was born in 1978.
00:10:00.380She's now 46. Her younger sister became the first IVF baby to in turn give birth. That was only in
00:10:10.0001999. So there had been some not very well grounded, but popular speculation that IVF
00:10:17.900babies might be infertile and that was proved untrue in 1999 uh was this because of mules or
00:10:25.040something like what was the reasoning there but you know these are healthy people who are now not
00:10:33.360especially young right yeah um my brother was conceived using ivf uh he is a fully 37 year old
00:10:41.020man right so when we're talking about ivf babies they're not all babies anymore yeah right yeah um
00:10:47.280embryo freezing was perfected a little later. It's now a very typical part of IVF, right?
00:10:55.040Something that happens a lot is that women who might be ending their reproductive years or
00:11:01.940worried that they might not be able to be in a position to have children by the end of their
00:11:06.960reproductive years, they often freeze their eggs. This is something that sometimes like
00:11:11.980if you have a fancy job, your boss might pay for you to freeze your eggs so that they can retain
00:11:18.360your talent rather than losing you either to childbirth or to another company that will pay
00:11:25.040to freeze your eggs. So like I have friends who went into big law who got offered this.
00:11:29.580At Silicon Valley, I think it's pretty, it's become a pretty prevalent perk.
00:11:33.040And that was a little bit of a later development in the technology. It came about in the mid 1980s.
00:11:39.720The first babies to be born from IVF that had used frozen embryos were a pair of Australian
00:11:45.920twins who were born in December 1983, and they'll be 41 later this year, right?
00:11:52.200So this is like not super new, but it's new sort of in the cultural consciousness, right?
00:11:59.600Like our idea of how families are made, our very popular ideas of how families are made
00:12:04.640have not quite caught up with the reality that this is how a lot of families are made.
00:12:09.140Yeah. And I mean, a couple of things that that might be worth pointing out. So there's a culture war around around, you know, what to do with the embryos themselves. But as you say, there's also it's a culture of war about about what the shape of the family is.
00:12:25.160it is also of course like very noticeable it's a very expensive procedure um you know speaking
00:12:30.920from experience here and it is um one that i think in the conservative imagination is very
00:12:36.620frequently and inaccurately connected to lgbt families right this is the idea that like that
00:12:41.780people who can't normally conceive and then they're like thinking of two dudes basically
00:12:45.600um and and that's not the case you know like that people experience infertility at staggering rates
00:12:52.540but I believe in the popular imagination0.61
00:13:18.860amounts of money even if they're not themselves wealthy0.56
00:13:20.880But the idea that this is kind of a niche thing and it's just meant to make, to fulfill the, you know, baby cravings of like the very wealthy and the very queer, I think is definitely part of why the Republicans sort of went for this, even though it appears to be such a losing proposition.
00:13:39.000They didn't understand that the people who were getting IVF were their neighbors, right?
00:13:43.280And were maybe their fellow churchgoers, you know, who maybe didn't talk about it that
00:13:46.880much, but like who absolutely like needed this technology.
00:13:52.280And I would, you know, tease this culture war issue out a little more and just make it
00:13:57.100really explicit that IVF is very broadly used in truth, right?
00:14:03.260A lot of different kinds of families have children using IVF, but in the Republican imagination, Adrian, you're right that it skews very gay, right? It's imagined as something that gay couples do because they can't have children in the quote unquote natural way.
00:14:21.380It also skews in their imagination to career women, to women who have prioritized professional ambitions and participation in public life, be it through education or be it through, you know, fancy jobs or be it through some other kind of decadent delay in settling down where they're, you know, doing coke off of men's abs.0.64
00:14:48.080I don't know how Republicans think, but you know what I mean? Like this is something that is seen to be the product of women's insufficient moral commitment to family making and their decadent, suspicious, misguided to evil prioritization of other non baby making things.0.70
00:15:10.340And that is a way that IVF gets linked to abortion that is beyond the mere fact that IVF often involves the destruction of embryos. It is also something that is seen to be the province of women who aren't doing enough to commit themselves to the family, especially very young.0.95
00:15:31.520right yeah and so we should say that um i mean there is something here that's like just
00:15:38.860the kind of parascience or the kind of scientificity that you often get with
00:15:45.380anti-abortion politics where like very clearly a bunch of these republicans banning various0.99
00:15:51.080procedures didn't even know what like an ectopic pregnancy was right like they just have no fucking0.74
00:15:55.660clue and this extends to this too we're gonna i mean i'm sure you're gonna tell me a little bit0.79
00:15:59.680about the question about sort of embryos
00:27:44.740That is also something that happens in, quote unquote, natural conceptions. Something like
00:27:50.480half of all fertilized eggs that are ever fertilized in the uterus, you know, the old
00:27:56.120fashioned way, don't implant. They just drop. They don't do anything. Yeah, this is something
00:28:01.880that fertility doctors will tell you that a lot of what people think are missed periods are
00:28:05.740very early miscarriages. IVF kind of highlights the contingency in what we take to be natural,
00:28:11.940right? And I think that's another sort of more subconscious reason why religious conservatives
00:28:16.820find such find it such a vexing issue that it it kind of it's a little bit like that todd aiken
00:28:24.220legitimate rape comment right like there is a lot of sort of magical thinking around around0.99
00:28:28.600fertilization um in aiken's case because he's a piece of shit but in other cases because it's a0.99
00:28:34.660super anxiety producing moment and it's like it's such a people who really want this to happen0.98
00:28:38.900and and can't figure out why currently it's not it's like one of the it's it's a horrible thing
00:28:43.820And, you know, so I think that there's, it's natural that like we tell ourselves sort of just so stories about it. And so it's not totally baffling to me that Catholic conservatives would find this, would want to tell themselves these stories. But I think what it highlights is just that human reproduction is really fraught and difficult and unpredictable.
00:29:04.800Todd Akin, for those of our listeners who are not ancient, I believe he was a candidate for Congress?
00:29:23.260Missouri, 2012, to replace Claire McCaskill.
00:29:27.900A Republican anti-abortion politician who was asked about his opposition to rape and incest exemptions on television in an interview, and he said, well, if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down, right?
00:29:45.500It's almost magical thinking that a pregnancy could not result from unwelcome or unwilled or non-consensual sex, right?
00:29:54.860And I think you're onto something, Adrian, with this almost like mystical understanding of fertilization in the anti-choice imagination.
00:30:02.860I think part of it is not just that it troubles our conception of the natural and adds contingency and uncertainty to something that the right-wing imagination likes to imagine as foreordained and extremely black and white, but it also draws in.
00:30:24.860attention to the contingency of our own lives. Before any of us became persons, let alone the
00:30:32.180persons we are, at some point, what became us was just a clump of cells. At some point,
00:30:42.700a sperm met an egg and set off a chain of events that led to you. If that event is very contingent,
00:30:52.640If it's very risky, if it's the kind of thing that fails all the time, that points to a world in which you don't exist, right? In which you were never born, in which it failed to implant in the uterus, or it failed to develop and grow, or it failed to be sufficiently viable to implant.
00:31:10.840There's so many ways that it draws attention to how unlikely your own life is, right?
00:31:22.960And if you are a domination masculinity right wing guy who builds your identity around thinking of yourself as inevitable, or if you are a Christian femininity mother goddess kind of lady who builds your identity around an idea of a natural role of creating and nurturing life, right?
00:31:50.040that's a very tricky concept that the whole thing could have gone haywire that actually uh it is
00:31:55.560perfect it is as natural for this not to have happened as it is for it to have happened right
00:32:01.580that's that's a disturbing idea yeah yeah uh so you know along this theme the idea of giving
00:32:08.500personhood rights to embryos and fetuses has long been a reach goal of the anti-abortion movement
00:32:16.520right um it has been an idea that they've had and they've had a few different uh ways that they
00:32:23.220could get into it one very popular and the sort of like hardcore principled stance that they take
00:32:28.880is they're like what we want to do is give embryos from the moment of conception full personhood
00:32:34.600rights under the 14th amendment right the 14th amendment it's one of the three reconstruction
00:32:38.680amendments yeah uh the 14th amendment provides equal protection and due process uh to all persons
00:32:46.460right or all citizens and the idea of giving equal protection rights to fetuses would first
00:32:53.800of all it would ban abortion nationwide right but it would also mean that if you have to regard an
00:33:00.500embryo as a human being with full personhood rights it doesn't really make sense that you
00:33:05.680would then be able to say freeze them or that you would be able to um dispose of them without due
00:33:13.620process of law right this means that the embryos can go to court and demand due process rights and
00:33:21.160people do indeed sue on behalf of embryos right who does who does that then like can i do i mean
00:33:32.120how does an embryo give power of attorney i just i'm trying to figure it out the other way that
00:33:40.320the anti-abortion movement has tried to do this is in ways that by this i mean established for
00:33:46.860you know personhood is in ways that don't seem so over the top right at stanford a few months
00:33:53.700ago last year we had this amazing panel on pregnancy criminalization with michelle goodwin
00:33:58.120orin carman and kiara bridges and a lot of what we talked about at that discussion was the
00:34:06.580enforcement of chemical endangerment laws against pregnant women. Chemical endangerment laws are
00:34:12.940laws that were passed mostly in the 2000s that were meant to increase criminal penalties for
00:34:21.640drug users who exposed children to like chemical pollutants or chemically dangerous environments.
00:34:32.180It was meant to be used against people who were running meth labs out of their apartments,
00:34:35.820basically uh and this began to be enforced particularly in alabama against pregnant
00:34:42.080people who use drugs right with the chemical environment not being your uh environmentally
00:34:48.800dangerous polluted apartment but in fact your very body because you smoked cannabis and that made
00:34:54.960your body in which a quote-unquote child is living a chemically dangerous environment right
00:35:05.280Or like a lot of women are involuntarily tested for drugs at the moment that they give birth, especially if they are on Medicaid.
00:35:15.380And often they will test positive for trace opiates.
00:35:20.480Then you hear these horror stories about people who ate a sesame bagel the morning that they went into labor.
00:35:25.500or i'm sorry a poppy seed bagel the morning that they went into labor uh and then test positive
00:35:30.140for heroin because um the poppy is what's being tested um and can lose rights to their kids right
00:35:38.280uh so that's one way there's also other ways where you know fetuses will be able to be represented
00:35:47.500in court by their parents, right, for rights to an inheritance, say. That implies that the fetus
00:35:56.520has rights that can be enforced by a court, which might not be used or passed in the initial instance
00:36:05.220to establish an abortion ban or an IVF ban, but effectively give enforceable rights and
00:36:12.460recognition of personhood to fetuses. A lot of this happens in criminal law. So a lot of states
00:36:17.060have criminal laws on the books that say that if say violence uh or an accident impacts a pregnant
00:36:25.780woman the person who is responsible for that violence or for that accident will be charged
00:36:31.060uh additionally for their injuries to the fetus right um sometimes child support laws are written
00:36:40.040so they can begin retroactively before a child is born so like during pregnancy uh somebody
00:36:47.040can demand child support from the person who impregnated them, or can retroactively demand
00:36:52.600child support to begin back when they began to be pregnant. And these are all cast as ways
00:36:58.180to protect women's rights, right? When they're being passed, they're saying, well, like a pregnant0.62
00:37:02.760woman is really vulnerable. And if she gets murdered, or if somebody hits her with her car,
00:37:09.200we want that person to be punished in a way that reflects the gravity of her vulnerability, right?
00:37:15.920But it would be trivially easy to write a law that accomplished that without granting personhood rights or the status of a person to an injured fetus, right? You could say that her fetus was her property. You could conceive it as a pain and suffering claim and say that the investment and hope she had for that pregnancy is what's been taken away.
00:37:40.240You could make this about the rights of the pregnant person.0.51
00:37:43.500Instead, they give they write these laws in such a way that gives rights to the fetuses.0.93
00:37:50.860And that those laws being on the books allows anti-choice lawyers to go into court and say, listen, judge, you don't have to make law to enforce fatal personhood because fetal personhood is already a legal fait accompli.
00:49:58.840And people are thinking about the families that they know and are saying, oh, my God, this could endanger people like me, people like my friends, right?
00:50:09.800The other thing about it is that, as I also talked about at the top of the show, a lot of people who are conceived through IVF are now adults.
00:50:18.720uh it's not quite the same with abortion right because the the the anti-choice movement
00:50:31.040likes to try and implicate people in abortion by saying like well what were you if you were
00:50:37.900aborted right but actually nobody who was aborted is around can never answer that question right
00:50:44.060Right. They don't have they don't vote. They don't have opinions about it. They don't have any feelings about it. They're not here. That's not true of people who are conceived with IVF.
00:50:53.460Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are here. And a lot of them are old enough to vote. Right. It's a it's a different kind of constituency.
00:51:02.760They're old enough to freeze their eggs. Yeah.
00:51:04.800so is there any theology behind this at all like is the is it just that they want to have their
00:51:12.680cake and eat it or is there a theology that sort of makes implantation somehow the the moment of
00:51:22.180insolument or something like that or is it just are they really just did they need to figure out
00:51:26.000a way to inch back from a position so unpopular it is really only matched by the vice presidential
00:51:36.440candidate for the Republicans in sheer horrendousness? Or is there something in
00:51:43.840evangelical or Catholic doctrine that would somehow allow for this?0.99
00:51:48.180adrian you're going to be shocked to hear that it's bullshit because actually in other contexts0.91
00:51:56.500the anti-choice movement will claim that it is not implantation but in fact fertilization that0.95
00:52:02.480marks the moment that personhood began for instance like they claim that several kinds
00:52:07.220of birth control prohibit implantation but allow for fertilization right so this is their stated
00:52:13.980opposition to birth control pills iud's and what was the other one oh plan b emergency contraception
00:52:22.420uh it's not really quite true that those work that way primarily they prevent ovulation that's
00:52:28.840the big one uh sometimes they thicken cervical mucus which stops uh the sperm from reaching the
00:52:36.860egg to fertilize it. But the claim is that these also can theoretically prevent implantation of a
00:52:46.860fertilized egg and that because that is murder, the mere possibility that they can work that way
00:52:52.140requires banning them, right? That is not something that happens in a test tube. That's
00:52:58.320something that happens in a person who they want to control. Right. So it's basically Schrodinger's
00:53:03.020embryonic personhood they needed to be a person it is if they if it's super politically inconvenient
00:53:08.600for it to be uh who knows exactly right and listen because these ivf bans are so unpopular
00:53:16.440trump is really really trying to get away from them right and this has created a genuine cat
00:53:23.900fight within the republican party that makes me so happy to see adrian i love to see it so trump
00:53:29.840and some other people in the mainstream Republican Party,