Politics & Power Quote by Lois Capps

A pinhead is doing heavy political work here. Lois Capps compresses an intricate, emotionally charged issue into a single image you can hold between your fingers: embryos rendered both astonishingly small and quietly precarious. The scale isn’t a biology lesson; it’s a rhetorical pivot meant to disarm the grandstanding that often surrounds IVF. By shrinking the embryo to something almost mundane, she nudges the listener away from absolutist language and toward the procedural reality of fertility medicine: lots of embryos are created, and that fact is already normalized in practice.

Then comes the kicker: “with the support of Congress, by the way.” It’s an aside that functions like a courtroom flourish. Capps isn’t merely stating policy; she’s exposing selective outrage. If lawmakers have long backed IVF (funding, regulation, constituent services, implicit legitimacy), then moral panic about embryos can look less like principle and more like opportunism, activated when it’s politically useful.

The intent is defensive and clarifying: to protect IVF from being collateral damage in broader fights over reproductive rights, especially as “personhood” arguments threaten to criminalize standard clinic practices like embryo storage, selection, and disposal. Her subtext is blunt: America already lives with embryo creation at scale, sanctioned by the same institution that claims to be scandalized by it. The line works because it forces a choice: either admit a complicated ethical landscape, or own the hypocrisy of treating embryos as sacred only when it scores points.