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The American Fertility Association Blog
Super Tuesday - Are You Voting For Your Family?
February 4, 2008 - Monday
Posted by Stuart
Today, when voters from 24 states go to the polls to select the candidates who will represent the major parties in the next election, I’m thinking about how direct our democracy is. I’m thinking about how I voted by absentee ballot for the people who represent my family’s best interests. Not just the family I have at this moment, but the one I’ll have in three weeks when my son is due to be delivered, and the one I reserve the right to have in the future.
As one-half of a gay couple with our first child ready to be born through the amazing assistance of an egg donor and surrogate, I’m keenly aware of the huge strides we’ve made in legalizing many types of family formation. At the same time, I’m acutely conscious of how all that progress could be taken away with the stroke of a pen or the judgment of a court.
That’s why I know deep in my bones that my vote makes a difference. Yours does too.
I suppose it all came home last week I was at lunch with a friend who told me she was voting for one of the candidates who I think is probably the worst on many of the issues that the AFA stands for. I was a little upset at my friend, the mother of two children via surrogacy, for not factoring in reproductive and family building rights into her candidate selection criteria.
Now while I’m gay, and she’s straight, I realized then and there, this isn’t about the politics of sexual orientation. This is about the threats to the basic human right to have family. This is about the threat to assisted reproductive medicine that could wipe out our choice to freeze embryos and to dispose of unused ones according to our individual moral codes. This is about fending off constant challenges to selective reduction, egg donation, genetic diagnosis, surrogacy and gamete donation. And we’ve got to be alert and educated because sometimes the assaults are obvious and sometimes, as in the Colorado push to confer the legal rights of personhood on a fertilized egg, stealthy. We take many of these rights for granted but each of these has come under attack in the last few years.
When I read the papers, listen carefully to the platforms of various candidates, I do know we’ve got to be grounded enough to vote for those who will stand up for the essential right to create family in the ways that are suitable to us. Not according to the ideological dictates of a given administration. But according to our individual hearts.
Knowing just how fragile our family buiding rights are, I believe that this next election is crucial. The results will have a profound impact on our future and that of succeeding generations. I’m voting with all of that in mind. All I can say is I hope you will too.
Stuart Miller
Co-Chair
American Fertility Association
Categories
Adoption •
Egg Donation •
Family Building •
Surrogacy
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