#Alabama IVF ruling

[council-of-beetroot]

Even as a child I knew that I was born IVF and I was one of many clumps of cells on a petri dish. These where then narrowed down to three embryos one great and two good. They chose two of the three and here I am as is my twin sister.

My mom has pictures of these cell clumps. Do I consider every single one of them my siblings? No, just the one that became my sister.

If by Alabama logic, and they are people, then they would technically be my siblings. then my mom should get a lot more in tax returns just saying.

If you have batter for a cake you don't have a cake you have a potential for cake. IVF works the same way.

[asteraceae-blue]

I don't normally post about this sort of thing on here, but I think it's a timely reminder as we enter election season...

These people are anti-science.

They are also against non-"traditional," non-heterosexual families.

This is not some idiotic, "what the heck are they thinking, do they not get the difference?!" ruling. They are actively anti-science and they are against advancements that allow for people to pursue other options when it comes to fertility - specifically and probably very targeted in regards to same sex couples.

This ruling is MASSIVE in its impact for anyone seeking IVF treatment, but most especially those in the LGBTQ+ community.

They want "traditional" families, and if those families cannot conceive, they want them to adopt the babies that women are forced to birth when they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy.

[faramirsonofgondor]

Y’all I genuinely cannot get over the audacity of some men because tell me why I was watching a video about the Alabama IVF ruling and underneath a comment where a women expressed her fears that the ruling could criminalize all sexually active uterus holders, some man has the audacity to say that the problem is that it screws over men because people with uteruses will “refuse” to be sexually active. Like….you have to be a whole other category of selfish to make someone’s genuine concern of being arrested over something they cannot control about you not getting to have sex.

[filosofablogger]

What Would We Do Without ... 'TOONS!!!

Okay, brace yourself … I’ve got more ‘toons coming out of my ears!  Y’know, it occurs to me that if it weren’t for the Republican Party, I would likely only have one cartoon post every six months or so … as it is, I consistently have two every week! Eisenhower quote, Republican quotes, political cartoon

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Alabama, where they serve women's rights sunny-side up :: Clay Jones :: @claytoonz

* * * *

The Alabama Supreme Court decision regarding frozen embryos continues to cause chaos, confusion, and fear.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled this week that a frozen embryo held in storage outside the human body is a “human child” for purposes of a wrongful death statute. Although the opinion deals with a civil lawsuit (not a criminal prosecution), the reasoning could be applied to murder prosecutions by the Alabama Supreme Court. The possibility of civil liability for wrongful death or criminal liability for murder arising out of in vitro fertilization procedures caused the largest IVF facility in Alabama to cease the fertility procedures. See CNN, Days after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are children, one facility pauses IVF treatment.

There are reasons to believe that the rationale in Burdick-Aysenne v. Center for Reproductive Medicine will not be applied to the criminal context, as explained by Ian Millhiser in Vox, The Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF opinion saying embryos are children, explained. Millhiser’s explication of the legal reasoning in Burdick is superb; if you want to dig deep into the legal history and context, Millhiser’s article is the place to start.

Millhiser explains that “Alabama’s criminal homicide law applies only to “an unborn child in utero.” Frozen embryos stored in cryogenic freezers are not “in utero.” Therefore, any reasonable observer would conclude that the handling of frozen embryos stored in cryogenic containers are not “human children in utero.”

The problem is that at least one member of the Alabama Supreme Court invoked religious dogma in setting forth his rationale for joining the majority opinion. Chief Justice Parker wrote a concurring opinion that included the following:

Man's creation in God's image is the basis of the general prohibition on the intentional taking of human life. See Genesis 9:6. [T]the doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment: "You shall not murder." Exodus 20:13 Aquinas taught that "it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent" because "we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him." Calvin explained the reason for the Sixth Commandment this way: "Man is both the image of God and our flesh. Wherefore, if we would not violate the image of God, we must hold the person of man sacred." In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. [Alabama law] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life -- that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.

But the fact that at least one member of the Alabama Supreme Court (the Chief Justice) believes that religious dogma and faith can and should supersede civil law, no reasonable person in Alabama should take comfort in the notion that the criminal laws apply only to “an unborn child in utero.”  

Caution is especially warranted given that Chief Justice Parker recently appeared on the podcast of a QAnon conspiracy theorist and endorsed the so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life.” See Media Matters, Alabama Supreme Court chief justice spreads Christian nationalist rhetoric on QAnon conspiracy theorist's show.

In short, resorting to legal reasoning and precedent may provide little comfort when the Alabama Chief Justice looks not at the state law and constitution but to the Bible and the commentary of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin when deciding a civil action for damages caused by the destruction of cryogenically frozen embryos.

Alabama’s Supreme Court has inflicted cruelty and anxiety on thousands of couples trying to conceive and tens of thousands of medical professionals assisting them. Joyce Vance lives in Alabama. She posted the following on Wednesday:

Just contemplating my life in a state where frozen embryos have more rights than I do . . . .

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[chronicsheepdrawing]

KOSA Bill. In three days, the bill will either pass or be disgarded. Please reblog and sign petitions. to help stop the bill by going to the stop kosa tag so we can not let the bill pass!

The definition of not safe for work content that would be censored under KOSA is vague and would of course target the LGBT community.

[padawanton]

Conservatives: *claim to be pro-life*

Also conservatives: *pass laws that prevent people who can't conceive easily from seeking treatment that can help them do so*

[liberaljane]

when reproductive justice activists told us that overturning roe was just the beginning, this is what they meant. The ruling from Alabama is an outrageous violation of bodily autonomy.

Illustration of an older pregnant Black woman wearing a starry robe. Text reads, ‘protect access to IVF’ with smaller text that reads, ‘ivf helps queer and trans people, single women, older people, disabled people and couples struggling with in infertility.’

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

[Alternate Text:

Alabama supreme court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’

Court allows two wrongful death suits against fertility clinic to proceed while decision could impact people seeking IVF.]

absolutely horrifying news coming out of alabama.

the whole article is a terrifying but worthwhile read, but i wanna highlight two passages from it which are just absolutely fucking horrifying.

[Alternate Text:

Alabama supreme court justice Jay Mitchell wrote that embryos are indeed protected under the state’s existing law: “The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children – that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed,” he wrote. “Under existing black-letter law, the answer to that question is no: the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”]

[Alternate Text:

The Alabama supreme court’s ruling repeatedly references God and the sanctity of life, citing the Bible and biblical scholars including Petrus van Mastricht, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Chief Justice Thomas Parker wrote: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself … this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life – that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”]

[phoenixyfriend]

The BBC and New York Times both had some interesting coverage on the Alabama IVF ruling. NYT spends more time on it, but I think the BBC's shorter section has an interesting approach by interviewing a bunch of pro-life people who are almost bewildered by the fact that yes, the tigers are also eating their faces.

EDIT: The BBC Global News Podcast generally has three or four topics per cast, and the IVF discussion is second in this one. I believe the timestamp varies by region due to some advertising algorithm, but for me it's at about six and a half minutes in, starts with "For decades, the debate over reproductive rights--"

[mariacallous]

Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court issued an opinion, complete with a wildly theocratic concurrence from Chief Justice Thomas Parker, that functionally outlawed in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state.

In the wake of the ruling, Republicans have tried to unwind this mess, with the Alabama legislature considering passing a law to ensure IVF access and Donald Trump coming out to say he strongly supports access to IVF. 

All of this is a bit of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as the damage is done. The entire spectacle was inevitable once the GOP gave the party over to anti-choice zealots decades ago.

In brief, the reason the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion implicates and outlaws IVF is that the state has a Wrongful Death of a Minor statute, and the court decided this applies to “all unborn children, without limitation.” But there’s no language in the statute that says this. Rather, it’s just that over the last 15 years, the Alabama Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings saying that the undefined term “minor child” in the statute can be stretched to “unborn children” regardless of what state of development the embryo is at. Once the court created such an expansive definition, the decision that frozen embryos are people was inescapable. 

To be fair, though, the Alabama Supreme Court is entirely made up of conservative Republicans, they were a bit hamstrung in their decision. Alabama’s state constitution states that “it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate." But that doesn’t necessarily mean the court was required to, as it did here, extend that “unborn child” definition to what it calls “extrauterine children” — embryos frozen by people pursuing IVF. 

That IVF is even controversial is an indictment of the GOP

An IVF cycle is designed to produce multiple eggs that can be retrieved in one procedure. The more eggs produced, the greater the likelihood of a viable embryo that can be implanted, hopefully resulting in a pregnancy. Because of this, multiple embryos often remain, and people freeze those for several reasons. People may use them if the first attempt at implantation doesn’t work, thus avoiding multiple egg retrieval cycles. They may save them for later if they decide to have more children. They may donate them to other people struggling with fertility issues. 

For people not saddled with the misguided anti-choice belief that a tiny clump of cells is the same as a person, this is a non-controversial process. It enhances the chance of pregnancy and allows people to plan for future children without undergoing multiple invasive egg retrieval cycles. But if one subscribes to the notion of fetal personhood — that a fetus is quite literally a person, with all the attendant privileges that confers — then those frozen embryos are the same as babies. 

This is, of course, a religious, not scientific belief. Chief Justice Parker, in his concurring opinion, made clear that his vote, at least, stems directly from his religious beliefs rather than being grounded in the law. Citing Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, the Ten Commandments, and the King James Bible, Parker concludes that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Notably, none of those things are legal precedent. Indeed, in a country founded on the separation of church and state, they shouldn’t inform a court holding. However, since religious conservatives dominate the US Supreme Court, that separation has largely collapsed. This has emboldened conservative litigants and conservative state and federal judges to take ever more anti-choice stances. 

Reproductive health activists have been sounding the alarm about the anti-choice attacks on IVF for years, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. At least two prominent anti-choice groups, Americans United for Life and Students for Life, have railed against IVF. The chief legal officer for Americans United for Life, Steve Aden, called IVF “eugenics” and said that IVF created “embryonic human beings” that were destroyed in the process. Students for Life called IVF “damaging and destructive.”

These same anti-choice groups also hate birth control, and the Dobbs decision paved the way for them to mount a theocratic attack on it too. Christopher Rufo, who ginned up a panic over benign diversity initiatives and helped force out the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has already telegraphed that this is his next attack.

Over on Elon Musk’s increasingly Nazi-fied social media site, X, Rufo is spewing rhetoric about how “the family structure disintegrated precisely as access to birth control proliferated” and that recreational sex is bad and leads to single-mother households. 

Rufo isn’t alone. The Heritage Foundation, which is also busy with a blueprint for a second Trump presidency that would destroy the administrative state and whose leader is still pushing the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election, has also called for the end of birth control. Also over on X, Heritage’s official account posted last year that “a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and … returning the consequentiality to sex.”

And there you have it. Religious conservatives are calling for a return to a world where sex isn’t recreational or for pleasure but is instead fraught with consequences — namely, pregnancies that can’t be terminated even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger. To do this, however, they would need to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated restrictions on birth control. 

More importantly, Griswold affirmed the constitutional right to privacy. It’s that right that not only underpinned the right to an abortion in Roe but also underpins other cases related to the rights of Americans to pursue sexual and marital relationships without government interference. In Lawrence v. Texas, decided in 2003, the Supreme Court relied upon Griswold to throw out laws that criminalized sexual contact between members of the same sex. Twelve years later, that same reasoning was used in Obergefell v. Hodges to affirm a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. 

Justice Clarence Thomas hates the right to privacy and has made no secret he wants it gone. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, he called on the Court to “reconsider” all these cases and overrule them as “demonstrably erroneous.” Justice Samuel Alito has been a bit more evasive about this, writing in Dobbs that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” However, Alito’s Dobbs opinion is littered with references to “fetal life” and how abortion destroys an “unborn human being.” As recently as last week, Alito wrote a statement decrying Obergefell because he doesn’t think it’s fair that people who are bigots about same-sex marriage ever get called bigots. 

It isn’t just Thomas and Alito. During her confirmation hearing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether she thought Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell were rightly decided. In 2012, she signed an open letter stating that the Affordable Care Act’s required coverage for birth control was an assault on religious liberty. Similarly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his confirmation hearing, also wouldn’t say whether Griswold was correctly decided. Justice Neil Gorsuch did the same. 

That makes five likely votes — with Chief Justice John Roberts a possible sixth — for a rollback of privacy rights in America. With that pillar of law gone, states would be free to outlaw same-sex marriage, get rid of birth control, and impose any other theocratic conditions they’d like. 

The dog that caught the car

Right now, Republicans are scrambling to undo the damage they’ve wrought, realizing that an anti-IVF stance is alienating to most. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that 42 percent of adults had used fertility treatments or knew someone who had. From 1996 to 2018, over 1 million babies were born as a result of fertility treatments. Mike Pence has spoken publicly about how he and his wife used IVF and that the procedure should be protected. 

In Alabama, Republican legislators are planning to introduce a law that would say the embryo isn’t a person until implanted in a uterus. But legislation doesn’t trump the state constitution, which means the Alabama courts could throw out any law they deem contrary to their fetal personhood interpretation of the constitution. Several Alabama fertility clinics have stopped IVF services, citing the legal risk. The state’s GOP attorney general, Steve Marshall, said he wouldn’t use the decision to prosecute IVF providers or people seeking IVF treatment, but that’s a slender reed to rely upon. What provider or patient wants to rely upon the vague assurances of the attorney general rather than a law that protects access?

And it isn’t just IVF. Elected officials in states that have banned abortion have openly mocked those people who have come forward with horror stories of being refused abortions even as they developed sepsis or faced the possibility of permanent future infertility. Doctors have no clear guidance on when they can terminate a pregnancy to save the life of the pregnant person, leaving them vulnerable to prosecution. People who currently have frozen embryos have no idea what to do with them, and nor do clinics. If the hardest-line anti-choice people get their way, access to birth control will become as spotty and politicized as access to abortion is now. 

This type of amorphous fear is a feature, not a bug, of the post-Dobbs landscape. When the entire spectrum of reproductive health is murky, and the threat of prosecution looms large, doctors won’t perform abortions or IVF treatments. Patients won’t seek abortions even as their health deteriorates to a level that could result in death. People who can get pregnant will have their lives narrowed to nearly nothing as they try to sidestep the landmines of an ever-shifting jurisprudence over their bodies. 

And that’s exactly the way conservatives want it, no matter their current feeble attempts to get out from under an IVF disaster of their own making. The GOP made common cause with the worst people in the country on this issue, and now we’re all stuck with the consequences. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Incomplete vs. overshoot

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in Seattle (Feb 26) with Neal Stephenson, then Portland, Phoenix and more!

You know the "horseshoe theory," right? "The far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

It's a theory that only makes sense if you don't know much about the right and the left and what each side wants out of politics.

Take women's suffrage. The early suffragists ("suffragettes" in the UK) were mostly interested in votes for affluent, white women – not women as a body. Today's left criticizes the suffrage movement on the basis that they didn't go far enough:

https://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134849480/the-root-how-racism-tainted-womens-suffrage

Contrast that with Christian Dominionists – the cranks who think that embryos are people (though presumably not for the purpose of calculating a state's electoral college vote? Though it would be cool if presidential elections turned on which side of a state line a fertility clinic's chest-freezer rested on):

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-alabama-ivf-ruling-was-influenced-christian-nationalism-on-the-media?tab=summary

These people are part of a far-right coalition that wants to abolish votes for women. As billionaire far-right bagman Peter Thiel wrote that he thought it was a mistake to let women vote at all:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Superficially, there's some horseshoe theory action going on here. The left thinks the suffragists were wrong. The right thinks they were wrong, too. Therefore, the left and the right agree!

Well, they agree that the suffragists were wrong, but for opposite reasons – and far, far more importantly, they totally disagree about what they want. The right wants a world where no women can vote. The left wants a world where all women can vote. The idea that the right and the left agree on women's suffrage is, as the physicists say, "not even wrong."

It's the kind of wrong that can only be captured by citing scripture, specifically, A Fish Called Wanda, 6E, 79: "The central message of Buddhism is not 'Every man for himself.' And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up."

Or take the New Deal. While the New Deal set its sites on liberating workers from precarity, abuse and corruption, the Dealers – like the suffragists – had huge gaps in their program, omitting people of color, indigenous people, women, queer people, etc. There are lots of leftists who criticize the New Deal on this basis: it didn't go far enough:

https://livingnewdeal.org/new-deal-and-race/

But for the past 40 years, America has seen a sustained, vicious assault on New Deal programs, from Social Security to Medicare to food stamps to labor rights to national parks, funded by billionaires who want to bring back the Gilded Age and turn us all into forelock-tugging plebs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

If you only view politics as a game of elementary school cliques, you might say that the left and the right are meeting again. The left says Roosevelt got it wrong with the New Deal (because he left out so many people). The right says FDR was wrong for doing the New Deal in the first place. Therefore, the left and the right agree, right?

Obviously wrong. Obviously. Again, the important thing is why the left and the right think the New Deal deserves criticism. The important thing is what the left and the right want. The left wants universal liberation. The right wants us all in economic chains. They do not agree.

It's not always just politics, either. Take the old, good internet. That was an internet defined by technological self-determination, a wild and wooly internet where there were few gatekeepers, where disfavored groups could find each other and make common cause, where users who were threatened by the greed of the shareholders behind big services could install blockers, mods, alternative clients and other "adversarial interoperability" tools that seized the means of computation.

Today's enshitternet – "five giant websites, filled with screenshots of the other four" (h/t Tom Eastman) – is orders of magnitude more populous than that old, good internet. The enshitternet has billions of users, and they are legally – and technologically – prevented from taking any self-help measures when the owners of services change them to shift value from users to themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The anti-enshittification movement rightly criticizes the old, good internet because it wasn't inclusive enough. It was a system almost exclusively hospitable to affluent, privileged people – the people who least needed the liberatory power of technology.

Likewise pro-enshittification monopolists – billionaires and their useful idiots – deplore the old, good internet because it gave its users too much power. For them, ad-blocking, alternative clients, mods, reverse-engineering and so on were all bugs, not features. For them, the enshitternet is great because businesses can literally criminalize taking action to protect yourself from their predatory impulses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Superficially, it seems like the pro- and anti-enshittification forces agree – they both agree that the old, good internet was a mistake. But the difference that matters here is that the pro-enshittification side wants everyone mired in the enshitternet forever, living with what Jay Freeman calls "Felony contempt of business-model." By contrast, the disenshittification side wants a new, good internet that gives every user – not just a handful of techies – the power to decide how the digital systems they work use, and to be able to alter or reconfigure them to suit their own needs.

The horsehoe theory only makes sense if you don't take into account the beliefs and goals of each side. Politics aren't just a matter of who you agree with on a given issue – the real issue is what you're trying to accomplish.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

At a campaign rally in Philadelphia, vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spoke to a roaring crowd about his personal experiences with in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment that many Republicans are scrambling to support in fear of losing voters.

“This is very personal for my wife and I,” Walz said, describing his family’s experience with IVF. “When Gwen and I decided to have children, we went through years of fertility treatments. I remember each night praying that the call was going to come and it was going to be good news. The phone would ring, tenseness in my stomach, and then the agony when you heard the treatments hadn’t worked.” “It wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.” At rallies held across the country, Walz also emphasized that even if people wouldn’t make the choice for their families, it’s crucial that they mind their own business. “Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business. Look, that includes IVF.” The procedure is often used by same-sex couples who want to build their families, and it is the most common method of assisted reproduction. Because the procedure requires fertilized eggs to be created that likely won’t lead to pregnancies, many on the right oppose the procedure.

Walz is a fierce advocate for reproductive freedom. After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, he pushed through legislation that mandated Minnesota be a safe state for anyone trying to receive the reproductive health procedure. His position isn’t unpopular, either. Most Americans, including most Republicans, support access to IVF, according to recent polls. After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are legally children in February – a ruling that caused several clinics to stop providing IVF treatments – Republicans in the state rushed to pass legislation that protected the right to IVF without addressing the fundamental question of whether frozen embryos are legally children. But Republican support for IVF is often shakier. GOP vice presidential candidate and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is one such example. He’s previously voted against a Democrat-backed bill in the Senate that would have protected the right to IVF at the federal level. But he still says that he’s in favor of IVF.

At last Tuesday’s Harris/Walz 2024 kickoff rally in Philly, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told a touching story of his experience with IVF with his wife Gwen.

See Also:

Jezebel: Tim Walz’s Personal IVF Story Intensely Foils J.D. Vance’s ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Tirades

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Alabama chief justice Tom Parker wrote: “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God,

Full offence intended: Anyone as moronic as this worthless drooling goat-fucker and all of his brainless kind shouldn't legally be allowed to be employed in law, government or really any job where they're allowed any form of power or opinion.

Because seriously

We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by him to reflect his likeness.”

Letting someone who believes deranged batshit garbage like this make laws relating to reproduction is like letting John Wayne Gacy decide the age of consent