Elizabeth McCracken (@elizmccracken): It's not right that this kind of nonsense makes me mad, but it does.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1115204443/georgia-fetus-pregnant-dependent-taxes
t makes me mad because people going through infertility, pregnancy loss, doomed pregnancies, & stillbirth don't get actual sympathy, or leave, or conversation.
But sure codify the personhood of an embryo for tax purposes, as though that's the sort of support pregnant people & their partners need.
It was weeks ago that I read this "op-ed," which has bothered me ever since.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/04/opinion/ectopic-pregnancy-roe-abortion.html
The pain of infertility & miscarriage is immense & untalked about in our country.
It's not the same as losing a child. I don't mean it's less; it's ugly human nature to compare grief. Comparisons are nonsensical.
But I read the piece on ectopic pregnancies, &, for me, it makes it so clear that an embryo is not a child. An ectopic pregnancy cannot be "delivered" because there is no way to do so.
The writer's miscarriages were "too early to retrieve a body" because there wasn't a body.
The monks give tiny coffins because they are making believe. There is not a body to bury. Anyone can make believe to assuage their grief. I recommend it. It's helpful. But laws should not be made upon those shores.
& talking to people about lost pregnancies, doomed pregnancies, loss in all its forms: that would be astonishing. But a tax deduction?
According embryos & fetuses rights that override other people's rights? To declare them, in fact, a kind of superhuman which the law protects in a way it protects no other?
That is a kind of grotesque make believe, the government as Bette Davis as Baby Jane.