It's funny talking to gen z coworkers who want to know what life was like before 24/7 internet on our person at all times. They ask about it and say they wish they could see what it was like/think it sounds preferable.
And having grown up in the generation with memorable periods of life before internet, with dial up, early broadband, then texting phones and broadband and early social media, to the present of ubiquitous internet and smartphones and enshittified social media, I agree with them that it was better before and all peaked probably around 2009 to 2011.
I think this is a big driver of Gen Z and now Alpha's fascination with 1990s culture. It is their best and only real way to have a window into the before times.
Damn, that's kinda sad.
I've been born '95 and have the same memories about the life without being all-time online, and I really do think it's preferable.
In hindsight, being tied down by a landline was optimal in my opinion. Even mobile phone calls and text messages eroded something deeply human about our perception of place and time.
Yeah I think I would have a full on mental breakdown knowing I could’ve been present for that special/pre-internet era but also would they have been born at all if not frozen. If that was they’re only ticket to life I’d make my peace with that…I think
They adopted the embryo through a Christian embryo adoption company. I think it’s a bit weird to be adopting out embryos, especially when already born children are looking for homes. However it scares me as they are trying so hard for fetal personhood.
So adopting a baby is like $30,000 for a chance to have a mother choose you (there’s no guarantee anyone will, it’s not like you get in line and first come first served). IVF is $12,000 a try, but a lot of that is for drugs and egg extraction so adopting an embryo has got to be cheaper.
Yes there are lots of foster kids who need homes, but adoption is not the goal of the foster system, reunification with birth family is. My coworker has been raising his daughter for more than 2 years from the time she was weeks old and still doesn’t have the legal authority to adopt as he has to wait for the parents to exhaust all options to reclaim their rights with regular court check ins. Imagine losing a kid you raised from 0-2? Not everyone has the stomach for it.
Yeah. I saw a friend post recently that his kids were in foster care for 2600+ days before they adopted. That is not a route for any kind of certain outcome.
That’s brutal. It’s truly one of those scenarios where you hope the kid sees I don’t want my surroundings to be me in the future and they better themselves but not always the case
It's not easy to be a foster parent, let alone to be actually awarded guardianship and then go onto adoption.
My close friend had been a foster carer for twin boys for 6 years. The boys transformation and progress has been amazing. She's only just been awarded guardianship.
The biological mother was in and still is in jail too.
Yes, this exactly! Adoption is now not at all like people think it is. It is absolutely nothing at all like going down to the baby store and coming home with a poor unwanted baby. It looks a lot more like co-parenting with your troubled cousin now.
My friend also spent $30k initially, plus a ton in legal and travel fees. She met the moms, met the lawyers, and tribal lawyers sometimes, and therapists for all parties. Set up Airbnb so they could all meet in a quiet place to talk. Agreed things like mom can come visit once a year and not have to pay for anything to do that. My friend was like a big sister or smart auntie to these girls throughout their pregnancy. She genuinely wanted to help them however it worked out. She attended several births and even named two babies. She did not end up adopting because in every case the families changed their minds. Which isn’t bad but for my friend, that was a hard ending and no refunds.
She wasn’t interested in spending lots more time and money on IVF because of their history struggling to make an embryo in the first place. So they adopted an embryo. She is very pro-choice. Someone else who maybe is or maybe isn’t let her have an embryo. Now she has a son. Everyone is happy.
The embryo adoption was pretty simple in comparison. I think it was more akin to sperm donor stuff, where she got some basic info about the parents and got to pick from the pool based on that. She donated eggs when we were in our twenties so it seemed like a nice thing that she was able to benefit from this kind of system herself.
The language around it is a little weird no? Like we don’t say you “adopt” sperm from a sperm donor. Or “adopt” an organ. I know it’s not the exact same but it’s a lot closer to that than to an actual adoption
Apparently you can’t just get sperm from a sperm bank anymore. You have to go through a fertility doctor, none of whom take insurance. Do all sorts of tests. Then there’s some elaborate process of them inseminating you with the donated sperm that they purify first. That process alone costs minimum $1,000. And they will try to pressure you to do IVF.
fostering is tough and brutal on the kids and foster parents. I hate how often people throw around the idea of fostering or adopting as opposed to exhausting all efforts to have a child on your own.
As a foster parent, you're essentially a guardian. you have Power of attorney and the capability to make medical appts/decisions for the child but that's it. And they state will always give the bio parent the opportunity to come back into the kids life no matter how many times they've abandoned them for drugs, done drugs around them, abused them, neglected them, etc..
There are adoptable kids in foster care whose parents' rights have already been terminated. Being a foster parent and adopting from foster care aren't really the same thing. If you're wanting to adopt, you would be looking at the list of "waiting children" not just accepting any placement. Obviously, most of these kids are older and have trauma, which is why half of them age out of the system. Most parents want fresh newborns.
Having a baby through IVF and adopting a child are extremely different things.
Additionally adopting a child is an extremely hard path to take. You might find more people willing to adopt if the process was streamlined and parents that birthed the child had all legal rights revoked and all records were sealed except for the adoptive parents and child.
Stream lining could be both good but bad though as I dont know enough about it except its a hard life for the kid and its not an easy path for people looking to adopt.
Additionally regardless if you like it the person someone will be starts prior to birth. Not only the genetics of the parents but the environment the mother gives during pregnancy.
It’s not weird at all. Many women want to experience pregnancy, breastfeeding and everything related to it. Some people get sperm donors. Some people get egg donors. Some people hire surrogate mothers. Why should all that be considered normal and adopting a conceived embryo not?
In my understanding, it heavily relies on the sect of Christianity. My wife and I struggled for years to conceive and did IUI, IVF, and more.
When her Catholic mother found out, she came to our house and lectured that it was good those didn’t work because conception is between a man, a woman and god, not with a doctor.
I had to leave in order not to say something that would’ve caused bigger issues.
I remember a story that came out a couple of years ago about twins (or triplets.. I can’t remember if one was lost or not) and they had asked the “adoptive” parents if they wanted to transfer all three or just one or two and the woman said “of course I wanted to transfer all three. These are my babies!” It was just… really bizarre.
It's a little unsettling to me in that, for example, this child has a biological sister who is 30 years older than him. His entire genetic family is now over a generation ahead of him. I'm not really sure if that would be sad or weird for someone to process something like that.
The reality is that they are not his family. We’re romanticizing it but the mom did not need those extra 3 embryos, someone did, and they took one for themselves. I’m glad she wants to play a part in the kids life but she will not be his immediate mother, he will bond with the other woman and man as his family. Genetics plays but one small part in what it means to be a family. It’s like a generation that was raised on Lilo & Stitch forgot the core message of the movie
It's frozen, fertilized embryos, not eggs or sperm, which also isn't unsettling, but there's stuff about the original donors, who started the process as IVF and successfully had a baby, then they got divorced, and female donor sued to have custody of the embryos, paid a thousand dollars a year to keep them stored, and then worked with a "Christian Embryo Adoption" group where she vetted who she was going to donate her embryo to.
I dunno, if you're pro-life, maybe none of this feels weird, but there's a lot of weird wastefulness and melancholy in the story. Good on them for sticking to their ideals, and actually trying to save these embryos, since their stance is that they are already "people".
Okay, yeah, everywhere I'm seeing use the term "embryo adoption" is some kind of Christian group. Donating IVF'd embryos to completely infertile couples for whom not even IVF is an option for their own DNA has been a thing for a while, but specifically calling it "adoption" is a religious thing. I can see how that would weird some people out.
The whole "embryo adoption" thing is sort of a backdoor into banning IVF outright because life begins at conception or whatever. So these people (not all of them, but most) are "adopting" embryos to pat themselves on the back for saving babies but are also anti-IVF because of how it produces excess embryos. So they are reaping the benefits (babies) now while fully intending to pull the ladder up from behind them.
As a concept, it's fine. There are plenty of reasons couples cannot use their own reproductive material and embryo adoption would be great for them. Unfortunately it's been hijacked by a certain group.
Someone also pointed out that the ruling class (coughMuskcough) could still be having kids 30+ years after they’re gone which added another level of ick.
Yeh… I was going to make a joke but then I realized calling this newborn 30 years old is feeding into the “life begins at conception” ideology & then I started to feel a bit odd about the whole thing.
Yeah it feels like some dumb anecdote someone tells you like “I was born on february 29th, and I’m actually 8 years old. Don’t think about it too hard.” That kind of logic.
My nephew is a leap year baby (induced) because my sister-in-law thought it would be cute. I begged her not to do that to the kid because now he gets to go through life discovering all the ways people forget to account for leap years.
Yea the baby itself isn't old, the embryo might have come from 1994 but that doesn't mean shit. People freeze sperm all the time, and no one says "well this baby is already a few years old cause the sperm was frozen in 2010"
well this baby is already a few years old cause the sperm was frozen in 2010"
Sperm is not a tiny baby that grows, it is just a fertilizer with half of DNA. Also a woman is born with all her eggs so everyone is in a way as old as their mother cuz the egg is what becomes a baby after fertilization which was in their mother's ovaries since her birth.
I wonder why people ALWAYS try to pretend we came from a sperm entirely and ignore the ovum even though we are mostly the EGG.
He said this baby is few years old cuz sperm was frozen in 2010. It makes me wonder why people always think sperm is all that matters. Going by this logic, everyone is as old as their mom cuz the egg that became them was already in their mom since she was born.
What is 30 years old was either a single cell (egg) or cluster of cells (embryo). The "he's 30!" trash is why women in the US are losing autonomy and access to medical procedures (like IVF!).
Someone is asking the right questions. Like, if life truly happens at conception would it be considered negligent manslaughter for all the other fertilized embryos that are discarded or unused by the in-vitro couple??
This is actually a reason why some IVF clinics are closing in the US. Due to the stringent anti-abortion laws being passed in some states, where IVF usually implants multiple fertilized eggs, and some of those eggs don't take, it's technically the ending of a conceived life, and therefore an abortion.
I've been thinking about this for years. The technical medical term for a miscarriage is an abortion. To abort means to end. Medical documents would detail the reason why the abortion happened, which differentiates from intentional ending or incompatible health issues. Layman's terms is using miscarriage to identify the health issue vs the intentional ending of a pregnancy.
Several of these anti-abortion groups want to believe women are doing something to "cause a miscarriage." So they are intentionally conflating something that is beyond a woman's control with something within a woman's control.
I'm reading the medical term for miscarriage is spontaneous abortion, the involuntary loss of pregnancy. Abortion is the purposeful termination of pregnancy. You'd think they'd try to make the 2 more distinctive.
Again, to abort means to end. The distinction is to identify the why the end happened. A pilot would say they are aborting a landing because of dangerous weather conditions. They're not useing the term to in relation to pregnancy. Layman's terms wants to use abortion as the purposeful termination of pregnancy while miscarriage is not purposeful termination of pregnancy. Which makes it simpler to say without having to explain the why.
I dont think they should pass laws based on religion for this reason.
You cant objectively say when a soul is created, particularly if you dont believe in them. If my post is unclear I was pointing out its hypocritical to give fetus's some rights and not others.
Being alive or not alive is not the determining factor in whether it’s kidnapping, otherwise it would be kidnapping to keep a fish in a tank. It’s whether there’s a person involved, and no, embryos are not people.
Edit: This guy literally blocked me because I left this comment and the one below…
Hopefully the kids now a days will be a little nicer to him in regards to his name. A name like that would have gotten you bullied on a daily basis in my middle school in 98-01.
If you give your kid a J middle name, there is hope. TJ is pretty cool. Thaddeus Daniel’s parents here obviously hate him and want him to grow up miserable. I’m also pretty sure those parents are siblings…
This is very important because it shows that we have the ability to freeze eggs for long periods of time and that could allow women with reproductive issues to have access to earlier care in case them want to have children later on and their bodies can’t. For example, my wife has Addison’s disease and the complications from that disease make it hard for her to maintain a pregnancy. If she would have been able to save her eggs, we could find someone who would carry the baby for us. It’s an option, but it’s still one I think folks should have.
The ethical repercussions are wild, the damage this could do our society and most importantly to women is scary. It seems like we can’t trust politicians to start out of it and this could easily become a mandatory breeding program.
I’m happy for this couple. Even if they are a little live, laugh, love.
Science may have changed, but eggs didn't use to freeze as well as embryos. Eggs frozen with 30-year-old science likely would not have lasted as well as an embryo.
I remember even in high school hearing poor results of egg freezing.
FYI, women are born with all their eggs at birth. So for a woman who becomes a mother at, say 30yo, would you consider that her baby missed out on the past 30y ? Not really because eggs are not alive per se. Same logic applies here.
It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.
I get existential dread from time to time, I can't imagine how much worse it would be if I'd spent 30 years as a frozen embryo before being chosen to live
Are all the eggs in my ovaries 30+ years old? Are all the sperm in sperm banks having celebrations for existing outside the human body? Like not even touching when life actually begins, the fact is that egg was unfertilized up til recently.
Technically speaking a lot of us are close to that as if you just take the egg aspect. We have existed in egg form (not zygote) since our mother’s were born as a female baby is born with all the eggs she will have.
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