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**FEBRUARY 26, 2024**
On the Prospect website
FTC Blocks Kroger-Albertsons Merger on Labor Grounds
The lawsuit alleges that a combined grocery giant would make
collective bargaining more difficult. BY DAVID DAYEN & LUKE
GOLDSTEIN
[link removed]
The Auto Workers Go All In
By
devoting $40 million to its campaign to organize non-union auto plants,
the UAW is challenging not just corporate America but also labor's
status quo. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
[link removed]
Davos in the Desert, on the Coast
In Miami, leading lights from tech, finance, media, and
entertainment gathered at the Saudi investment conference, yet another
attempt to sanitize the autocratic regime. BY JONATHAN GUYER
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Fetal Attraction
The Alabama Supreme Court decision on in vitro fertilization sends
Republicans scrambling.
The Republicans have dug themselves an exquisite hole on the question of
fetal personhood. Last week's ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court held
that under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act a frozen embryo
is a person. That in turn led the court to uphold a criminal case that
found a lab technician who accidentally destroyed a frozen embryo guilty
of manslaughter.
This is the logical conclusion of right-wing dogma on when life begins.
The chief justice, Tom Parker, in a concurring opinion added a nice
theocratic touch
:
"All human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be
destroyed without effacing his glory."
But even in Alabama, the absurdity was immediately apparent. The risks
of other such prosecutions led at least three providers of in vitro
fertilization to suspend Alabama operations
.
The Alabama legislature scrambled for some kind of a fix. One Republican
politician after another seemed on both sides of the issue.
"Embryos, to me, are babies," Nikki Haley said
when asked about the decision, but then tried to hedge by adding that
"we need to be incredibly respectful and sensitive" about IVF
situations. Donald Trump, whose three Supreme Court nominees made
possible the overturning of
**Roe v. Wade** and made possible the Alabama ruling, had a better nose
for public opinion. "We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers
to have babies, not harder! That includes supporting the availability of
fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America," Trump said
on his social media website.
[link removed]
Contradictions like this are going to continue to haunt Republicans
throughout the campaign. In vitro fertilization now accounts for about 2
percent
of all births. Polls cited by a panicky National Republican Senatorial
Committee show that about 80 percent of Americans support the IVF option
,
including a majority of right-to-lifers and evangelicals.
It is not just the sheer extremism of the claim that an embryo is a
person that frightens normal voters, but the lust for criminal
prosecution. That is of a piece with Republican efforts to prosecute
women who have abortions as well as their doctors, and the efforts to
chase women and providers who travel to states where abortion is legal.
This is the logical conclusion of a doctrine that claims to cherish the
personhood of the unborn but denies the rights of personhood to adult
women. No amount of tactical backtracking by Republican candidates will
save them from the more fundamentalist allies in their own camp. The
right-to-life dogma is all of a piece, and badly at odds with what most
Americans believe about life.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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