Pints With Aquinas - IVF, Surrogacy, and Embryo Adoption (Stephanie Gray Connors) | Ep. 527

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Stephanie Gray Connors is an international speaker and author of On IVF, known for addressing complex bioethical issues like infertility, abortion, and assisted suicide. She has given over 1,000 presentations across North America and internationally, including at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Google headquarters. Stephanie has debated prominent abortion advocates such as Peter Singer and Dr. Fraser Fellows, and her audiences range from medical students to global conference attendees. She has authored multiple books, been featured in hundreds of media interviews, and holds a BA in Political Science from UBC and a certification in Health Care Ethics from the NCBC. 📖 On IVF by Stephanie Gray Connors: https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/products/on-ivf?srsltid=AfmBOoptVTxpvv5XkFRr3JZ86fxs1lkhpTQ-lgBk9OsVRu_XCrV_lboI 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early, score a free PWA beer stein, and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 https://mattfradd.locals.com/support 💵 Show Sponsors:  👉 Seven Weeks Coffee – Use promo code MATT for up to 25% of your first subscription order + claim your free gift: https://sevenweekscoffee.com/matt 👉  Exodus 90 – Join Exodus 90 on August 15 for St. Michael's Lent: https://exodus90.com/matt 👉  Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas 🎵 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas 👕 PWA Merch – Wear the Faith! Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com

Pines with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a ground-breaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your 7-day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App Store. Coming soon to Android. You look at abortion, you can pretend it's a virtuous, heroic thing, but everyone who's not insane goes, yeah, that is it. And then you have to try to put lipstick on that pig. But with IVF, it's like, you see the lipstick first. It seems so good you want children, but how many babies died for that child to come to be? 30 embryos are 30 human beings. They are not human parts. They are no longer, you don't

just have egg, you don't just have sperm. These are human persons. These are individuals made in God's image. They are unrepeatable. They are irreplaceable. And so this is where a very painful reality that couples have to come to terms with is that they bear responsibility for the death of more preborn children than someone who's had an abortion. Because someone who's had an abortion once has ended one life. God forgives but nature won't and I think the

thing that will make our culture open to hearing it is the two-by-four directly to the face of nature not forgiving IVF and we're gonna see devastation throughout the land. At that point someone will say, okay give me your argument I'm open to hearing it now. We wanna be able to say if someone was conceived in violence like rape, in lust like a hookup, or in technology via IVF, I can condemn those methods of conception,

but I can still say each individual conceived is equal to me and made in God's image and loved by God. One victim we haven't spoken about yet is the surrogate. Sometimes there are rules that the surrogate can't even see or hold the baby. And I cannot imagine giving birth and having someone take the baby before I can even see it. And then I will never see and never hold that baby.

What are your thoughts on embryo adoption? And then along that same line, is there a correct moral answer on what is to be done with frozen embryos? Yes. Thank you so much for watching Pines with Aquinas. Before we get into the interview, I'd like to ask you to please consider subscribing. Over 58% of people who watch this show regularly are still not subscribed. So please do it.

It's a quick, free, easy way to support the channel. We really appreciate it. What is IVF and Steel Man it for me? You know, people might be horrified. I'm going to say this. I don't even know what IVF is. Stephanie! I'm going to answer what IVF is, Stephanie. I'm gonna answer what IVF is,

but I honestly feel like every time someone uses the term steel man, I have to Google it and be like, what is that again? What am I supposed to do? Give me the strongest case. You know, it's a relatively recent term. People would be horrified, they'd be like Stephanie Grey-Goners doesn't know it's steel.

And honestly, I have to Google it every time. I'm like, shoot, what is it again? No, no, that's fine. I can give the best argument. Yeah, so you know what's funny?. And honestly, I have to Google it every time. I'm like, shoot, what is it again? No, no, that's fine. I can give the best argument. Yeah, so you know what's funny? One of my most viewed videos on the channel, it's got like 1.5 or 6 million views, was you. On the violinist.

Steel manning the violinist argument and then ripping it apart. Yes, yes. So what is IVF? Because there are people who are like, I don't really know, I think I should know. I feel bad that I don't know. Maybe how you feel bad

that you don't know what steel manning is. Yeah. And then kind of give the most compelling case for it. And then we can. Yep, and then we'll unpack it. So first we'll talk about what it is, and then I'll make that compelling case. So IVF, literally in vitro fertilization means in glass, vitro in glass, fertilization.

So creating life in glass. So what happens is instead of sex being the normal way that offspring would come to be, eggs are harvested from a woman, which means she is given injections of a drug that will cause her ovary to release more eggs than is normal per cycle. So in one cycle, a woman would release one, maybe two eggs, most likely one egg. So in hyper stimulating her ovaries, an IVF specialist will try to get maybe 10, 20 or 30 eggs. We'll see how many they get, but that would be a good harvest you could say.

Now, if you think about a woman releasing one egg a month, 12 months in a year, 12 eggs a year, we're talking if you get 24 eggs, you're getting two years worth of eggs in one sitting. Okay, so eggs are taken and they're extracted through a tiny needle from her body, kept in a lab. Sperm is obtained from a man. Typically through masturbation, technically a couple could have sex with a perforated condom in which some of the semen would go in her

body but some would be collected in the condom and could bring the condom in with what remains but that is not typically how it is. I was just going to say it's possible. Someone who's pro IVF probably isn't like hung up about masturbation. Worrying about masturbation, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But just because for the person out there who's like, well, I could do it in an ethical way. I could find, I could find a way around this.

Okay, so semen. And even that we could question. But anyways, so you get a semen sample and then that's also goes to lab. So then you've got your glass petri dish and you've got your scientist who takes the eggs and it takes an egg and then takes either a sample of sperm, puts them all in the dish and it's watch and see which sperm go and fertilize that egg. Or you can do a

procedure called ICSI where the scientist will take one sperm that they select to be of good caliber, a good quality, and inject it into the egg. Either way, you get fertilization in glass. They watch to see if that new human being starts to develop and grow through the cellular stages of one cell, two cell, four cell, eight and multiply each time. Then typically this embryo would be subjected to genetic testing to see if there are any genetic anomalies. Once a good quality embryo is identified, then a couple will return or even the woman could come by herself.

The man's presence is not necessary, which we'll go into as we unpack this topic, but then she goes and the embryo or a couple of embryos will be inserted via catheter into her uterus. And it's a watch and see whether that embryo then implants. So the doctors don't implant the embryo, they insert the embryo and then they wait and see if that human being burrows into the uterine wall and grows for nine months. So that's the basics of IVF. Those who want to argue that it's good, and let's talk about those who might think they have the stronger case.

The couple that's married that's having a difficult time conceiving, because in a moment we can talk about all these other cases like a homosexual couple, people that aren't even related, someone who just wants a baby and they go find a sperm seller. Let's take, you've got a married couple. Let's say they're Christian, whether it's Catholic or Protestant. They love the Lord and they love the Lord's Word. And the Lord's Word says, the first command is, be fruitful and multiply.

And there are passages in the scriptures that talk about the blessing of children, the reward that children are, and they are experiencing the terrible cross of infertility and can't seem to get pregnant. And they say, well, we're to be fruitful and multiply. We're a married couple and we believe in sex is for marriage because you should only produce children with your spouse. So we're going to take my egg and his sperm and not anyone else's and we're going to go to a lab. And just as I could have someone help me if I have a heart condition and need to take heart meds and I rely on external help to keep my heart healthy, I'm going to rely on

external help here to achieve the command to be fruitful and multiply, and I'm going to pursue IVF and I'm going to have a child that we raise to love the Lord. That's what I think someone could say is the strongest argument in favor. To say it more colloquially, something like why would it be wrong to use modern science to bring a new life into the world who we love, especially when so many are being wantonly killed. Right. So I would say, in general, it's not wrong to pursue modern science. That can be a gift the Lord gives us to end the intellect of other people and the skill

of other people can be how God works through others to restore shalom. And I have a chapter on shalom in my book where I talk about shalom, you know, was a word in the time of Christ. Jews would use that as a greeting like shalom, shalom, peace. It means peace. But there are so many more references to shalom in what it was intended at the time than simply a greeting of peace. Shalom was this wish for and a desire to work towards the total fullness of the person and how things ought to be in a right-ordered fashion. And so infertility is a sign of things going wrong. So it is good to want to have shalom, to want to right order everything to the way it was meant to be in the beginning when God gave us the command to be fruitful and multiply

at a time where IVF didn't exist. So obviously, at that point, to be fruitful and multiply would have to occur through sexual intimacy. Um, so where that has gone wrong and we don't have everything working together, Is it good to seek to restore and correct things? In principle, yes. In practice, we look at, have to look at morally how we do that. So if you have a woman whose, um, fallopian tube is blocked so that her egg cannot travel down to meet the sperm who are traveling up. The fallopian tube is supposed to be unblocked. So going to have surgery to unblock the fallopian tube is a good thing. If she has polycystic ovarian, a PCOS syndrome, and

it is difficult due to the leathery skin of the ovary for eggs to be released. Then she can have wedge resection surgery where a section of the ovary is cut out and the skin stretched to make it thinner so that eggs actually can break through that thinner area. And then when intercourse happens, then the sperm can hopefully get to the egg and fertilize it. So that's using science. That's using technology.

We're taking a body part that's essentially broken and we're fixing it. Like Jesus and His apostles did when someone was blind and they restored sight, or someone had leprosy and they touched them to heal them of that terrible illness. God did it Himself through Jesus, and then God worked through others like the apostles and used them. So he can work through others like the doctor who does that restorative surgery on the fallopian tube or on the ovary. The difference between using science there and using science in the creation of life is we're no longer taking a part that is broken and fixing it and restoring it to how it ought to be. We're taking an approach God designed for offspring to come into existence, sexual intimacy.

And we're throwing it out like you did my book over the shoulder. We're like, forget that. We're totally replacing it. Okay, Then we can say, well, is that necessarily bad? So then we ask the question, what are we replacing it with? Well, we're replacing it with a process which manufactures a human person. And that, I would say that word is the key reason why IVF ought to be rejected. That human persons are subjects and not objects. Objects are things we make and we manufacture and we use our skills to bring parts together to create something new. And if it isn't made the way we want, or if we change our mind, we thought we wanted it and we want something different, we can return, we can replace, we can discard. That's how we treat objects. Subjects are

different. Subjects ought not to be replaced, discarded, you know, returned for something, you know, money back guarantee. Human persons as subjects should not be manufactured the way objects are because we are different. We are made in God's image and we should therefore be received as a fruit of two people coming together in a communion of persons rather than our very existence being contracted out to a third party, someone who's not part of the marital commitment, and a party that is disconnected, unrelated, and then say, hey, can you make a baby for me the way you could make a car, the way you could make something else. When you do that, you're also creating a kind of a mindset. Like we almost have a right to a baby. Even when a couple comes together in sexual intimacy, there is no guarantee if they'll get pregnant,

what moment they'll get pregnant. You can have sex, but there's no egg until five hours after sexual intimacy. And then which sperm, from that sexual intimacy, which sperm is actually gonna fertilize that egg? When is that gonna happen? All of that through sexual intimacy is you're kind of your hands on, but your hands off, right? Like you're like, it's in your hands, God. Whereas the moment you go down the path of manufacturing, you're like, I'm going to force this person into existence. That's success.

Not getting someone is, is, is, is the failure rate of IVF. You want success. So you want to get the life. Then you want to make sure it goes to term. So what are you doing? You're starting to have a mindset of, well, we then do we do genetic testing because we want to make sure this is the highest caliber quality embryo, but what does that even mean? Right? So you can, you can unpack all of that. Um, but the whole point is you are making someone who should be received as opposed to forced into existence. Then there's all these other elements of, like we talked about, typically you're using masturbation to obtain the sperm. Um, and the way I kind of like to look at it as with sexual intimacy, you always have to have a communion of persons. The male and female have to come together. And then even

when they're apart, right? If fertilization happens while the husband goes to work and she's doing the dishes, there's still a communion of persons because the baby is now coming into existence beneath the mother's heart. With IVF, you have total separation of every aspect of the relationship. Can the man be there holding his wife's hand? Sure. While her eggs are being extracted, he can, but he's not necessary. Getting the eggs out does not require his presence. It might be a nice feature, but he's not necessary for the completion of that act. Could they have sex with the perforated condom? When he's masturbating, could she be in the room that the science lab has or that the IVF lab has for getting your sample?

She could be, but is she necessary for the sperm to be collected? She's not. So that all is separated. Then could the couple say, well, we just want to be in the lab and hang out while you're making life in vitro. We just want to, we want to look through the window. I guess if the lab lets them, they could.

I don't know if anyone's ever asked for that, but the point is they're not necessary for that to happen. Their presence is not necessary. Communion is not necessary. Everything is separated and broken. Whereas with sexual intimacy, you absolutely must have communion with life beneath the heart. You must have communion. Um, when you have sex with your spouse and an embryo comes into existence, 100% guarantee that's your child with your spouse. There is no like sperm flying from a house next door coming into the picture here. The moment you go from a receptivity perspective in sexual intimacy through that communion of persons, the moment you shift

from that to the manufacturing mindset, the moment you contract out a third party and instead of parts coming in or staying in, parts are going out to that third party, you are now inviting in natural human error that can then lead to the creation of life that if we're coming from a Judeo-Christian perspective that you should only create offspring with your spouse and we use that first example I gave and there's a whole bunch of other ones we can talk about but if you just use the woman's egg, the wife's egg and you just use the husband's sperm, you manufacture and contract out to a third party you're inviting in human error where they might use by just mistake the wrong eggs.

They might grab the wrong sperm or they've got one right, one wrong. Oh, it happens. And increasingly all the time. I'm going to give you some examples, put them together in the lab. So they now created an embryo who's the wife's baby, but not the husband's they don't realize it so then they insert it or they create the wife's the baby with the wife's egg and the husband's sperm and then they watch the embryo grow and then they freeze the embryo for a bit and then they're ready for Insertion and human error. Oops. We've grabbed the wrong embryo and inserted this embryo in the woman. So now technically this husband and wife are bringing into the world, I mean, the child already exists through IVF, but they're bringing into the world now someone who,

from their Judeo-Christian perspective, morally speaking, should never morally come into existence because it's now offspring that's not theirs that's growing in her body. So does this happen? Absolutely. I mean, if you go onto YouTube or just Google in general and you type in, IVF gone wrong, mind will be blown. And these are the cases we know about. So there was a story I read recently of an Asian couple who pursued IVF and give birth

to a baby with absolutely no Asian features. They become suspicious as time goes on and their child is developing and they go back to the IVF clinic. We think something might be wrong here. So then the paper trail begins and they start looking at things. We implanted the wrong embryo or we used the wrong. I don't remember which one it was, but then there was the realization once that's the case.

Well, then does that biological child go to the actual biological parents? So there are stories now, and again, I'm not making this up. You can see it all over the internet of couples who have gestated a child they think is their own, birthed a child they think is their own, spent the first couple months raising and loving and bonding with a child they think is their own, birth the child they think is their own, spent the first couple months raising and loving and bonding with a child they think is their own, realize it's not, and then having to legally hand that child over, not only severing their bond with the

child, but the child's bond with them. Again, we go back to what I was talking about, like Erica Commissar, in terms of the bonding a child has with their primary caregiver. And you are ripping that bond because of an error in a lab that just can't happen with sexual intimacy. You will never get that error. So even if a couple says, well, we'll only use mine and his, and we'll do this, there is just always a risk that, you know, there was another case of a woman who, a white woman who pursued, picked a sperm seller. It's so funny how people think because she thought his features were a lot like hers. Isn't that funny? I mean, it just sounds so self-absorbed. It's like I picked him because

he was like me, you know? So anyways, she picked him because he looked like her. Here, she is a white woman. She gives birth to a baby that's half black. So she's like, that's not the sperm cellar I picked. Now in the interview, she's like, I'm not racist. Like I have no problem with a black baby. It's just, it's not, it's not who I picked. So therefore not only did she realize it's not who I picked, but then she realized, well, then who's sperm made this baby? And is there a legal right that that father, biological father has to this child? And she actually had to relinquish the child. So when you manufacture a subject, the way you manufacture an object, you are going to get all kinds of problems that you naturally get

when you manufacture things. But the problem is humans aren't things. Humans are people and people are subjects and ought to be treated differently. And we're seeing, I won't name names because I don't really want to go after people, but certain homosexual couples, let's say, in the conservative movement. Yes, I know who you're talking about. Tell us what a travesty that is. Yeah, so beyond then, the person listening who thinks, well, can I not do IVF ethically by just doing

what I've described with my spouse and I? The moment you open the world and say, open that Pandora's box and say, I can Pandora's box and say, I can enlist a third party external to my primary relationship, my permanent relationship, I can enlist a third party to manufacture a human. The homosexual couple says, well, why can't I? The person who's not even in a relationship, homosexual or not, says, why can't I? So the weird pervert who actually has a fantasy to fondle children, all he has to do is find himself an egg seller, find himself a surrogate, and use his sperm and create a legal relationship with that surrogate so that upon birth, the child is his because he's the biological father and he could raise that child in an intentional abusive relationship. And as long

as he doesn't disclose that that is his plan, it goes uncaught. So once- But I mean, yeah, fair enough. So that's the extreme. Is there examples of that? And even if there are- I actually did read an article recently. It wasn't quite as laid out as that, but like this guy that was basically weird and strange. And then, yeah, goes and pursues having a child kind of-

It's an accidental argument, isn't it? Because of course a weird pervert father could presumably impregnate his wife for the same purpose. Correct. I would assume it's a lot less likely for a number of reasons, but... Correct. So yes, you can always get, because we're sinful humans, in the natural course of things of conceiving children through sex, you can still get people who are going to mistreat their children and so forth. But the point is that when you manufacture humans,

you're creating a situation where there's almost a market. Not almost, there's definitely a market. There is a market. So then you can go to the extremes of the example I gave with the married couple, this other example of some weird pervert, and then you've got kind of this middle case, like you've said, of maybe a homosexual male gay couple that clearly have no female

in the relationship that can just date the pregnancy. But they really want as a couple to have a child. So now you have a child being intentionally created to be raised by two same sex parents. Now people would say, well, you can adopt a born child as a same sex couple. So again, you can always find ways. That's also immoral. You shouldn't. That's also immoral. Yes, you shouldn't. But the fact that you can find these other ways

doesn't mean we just add more messiness, complication to the picture. But the other thing you look at is, okay, even if a homosexual couple adopts a born child, this child is in need. I don't agree with gay adoption. However, this child is in need and this couple says, we'll bring you in and we'll care for you. In the case of a homosexual couple that pursues

IVF, there's no child. And they say, we want to make a child, but they're going to make the child on the backs of many children. Because it's not like you just take one sperm and one egg and get one embryo and insert that. The IVF industry is about success rates, which means success, yes, begins with a fertilization happening, but ultimate success is a healthy birth. So to get to that healthy birth, you want to be sure that you not only get an embryo growing in the lab, but the embryo in implanting in the uterus and then actually not even miscarrying, but growing for nine months. So you want lots of embryos to increase the odds of that ultimate success. So a homosexual couple might say, well, we're going to take my sperm and your sperm,

and we're going to get two egg sellers or maybe even one egg seller because we want the children to be related by being half siblings. So you get one female and you say, we're going to buy your eggs. So then there's again this manufacturing kind of objectification of the human person. Could someone give their eggs without selling? Yeah, they could. And in some countries they do ban selling gametes. But here you can totally, here in the United States, you can totally buy and sell eggs and sperm.

And it can be very profitable. I mean, egg, IVF industries market, especially to college students, and incentivize them by saying, look, we'll give you 15 or 20,000 per egg harvesting. And so you can pay off student debt. You can go on a vacation, you can get a down payment for your home. And does it take a lot? And are there health risks for women to hyper stimulate her ovaries and so forth? Yeah. So she does it less frequently, but even if she does it once, she gets a whole whack load of money. A sperm seller can do that often. So he gets less per sperm sample, but he

can sell regularly because weekly or monthly, right? So it's, it's, you can have a whole side gig. I write about this in my book. There was during, during COVID, there was a IVF clinic that was incentivizing men by saying basically in these hard times during COVID, you can get an extra thousand dollars a month by becoming a sperm seller. Of course they say sperm donor, but I'm sorry, if you're making a thousand dollars a month, I'm going to call you a sperm seller. And if you get your friends in on this gig, then we will give you a kickback for bringing someone into the market.

And so, and they were also offering like a share of, you know, getting someone in. So, so there's this whole industry. So back to the homosexual couple. So they find one egg seller and she sells, let's say her 30 eggs, okay. They take sperm from him, sperm from her, maybe they divide the eggs by 30, by half.

So now you've got 15 eggs that go to one guy's sperm and 15 eggs that goes to another guy's sperm. Let's just say for the sake of doing math right now that all of the eggs get successfully fertilized. What does that mean? 30 embryos are 30 human beings. They are not human parts. They are no longer, you don't just have egg, you don't just have sperm.

You have now genetic offspring of that egg seller and half of them of this guy and half of them of this guy. These are human persons. These are individuals made in God's image. They are unrepeatable. They are irreplaceable. And now that you've got 30 human beings, 15 from this dad, 15 from this dad, so these men are no longer just men. They are now biological fathers. They have become fathers in this very moment of fertilization.

What happens? So these guys might say, well, we're going to get a surrogate because we need a woman to gestate. We can't just have embryos. We want to hold babies. So now they're going to implicate more people into this little scenario and we're going to get a surrogate and we want to have our babies at the same time. So we're going to get two surrogates and one or two of our embryos over here and one of our two or two of our embryos over here are going to be inserted into the body of, of each of these women. So of the 30 embryos, you can't put 15 in each woman all at once because what if all

15 implant? I mean, we remember the stories of the Octomom who had eight babies at once, which was a massive life in dangerous scenario. You're not meant to digestate that many human beings. So even the IVF industry, which used to more commonly carelessly put in a lot of embryos at once. Now the norm would be to put in one or two because if both embryos, see you put in two, if both embryos inserted actually implant, then you're going to have twins, but that would be fraternal twins. You can also have identical twins. So an identical twin is when a human being who's already come into existence after at fertilization, but before they implant, which happens about a

week after fertilization, that one human has an ability to split into two. So that's my mom. My mom and her twin are identical twins. My mother-in-law and her twin are fraternal twins. So my husband and I keep saying, what if there's twins in our future? Anyways, so you could put in fraternal twins and they each split into identical twins and you have inserted two and now you have four. That's a life and that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a risky scenario. You've, you're going to have to monitor that pregnancy. A lot of places would say do selective reduction. Now we're introducing another moral situation. Let's selectively reduce and abort two or three of these four babies. So let's say you just put in

one each and let's say they don't become identical twins. But now you've got one each and let's say they carried a term in the surrogate. And then at birth, they're given to the homosexual couple and they say, oh, look at our twin boys that are actually genetic half siblings thanks to the egg donor, egg seller. That's two. What did we start with? 30. So what about those 28 other human beings? Are they ever going to come to term?

And coming to term does not mean are they ever going to become human. They already are human. It doesn't mean are they ever going to come to term? And coming to term does not mean are they ever going to become human, they already are human. Doesn't mean are they ever gonna become alive, they already are alive. The question is, are we gonna let them grow to their natural development into adulthood that is inherent to the very nature of the type of thing they are?

And in all likelihood, no. They're not going to get 28 other surrogates and they're not gonna to raise 28 other babies. So then in all likelihood, what's going to happen with the 28 embryos? Well, already some of them were probably destroyed right away because they were deemed, uh, not viable. They were considered to be low grade. Embryos are typically graded the way you'd grade an essay in school. You get an A minus, you get to be plus, you get to see embryos are graded the way you'd grade an essay in school, you get an A minus, you get a B plus, you get a C. Embryos are graded that way based on whether they're good enough, good quality, whether they're likely to go to birth or not. Again, on what basis can we actually be sure

what you label as a C is not going to go to term and maybe that would be better than the A. But again, there's all these like manufacturing mindset to this scenario, but of the 28 that are left and that's on a quote unquote good day where the two that were inserted actually implant and grow to birth, but we're just using that in the scenario. Of the 28 that are left, in all likelihood, the vast majority are either killed right away, donated to science, where they will be killed in the process of being experimented on to learn things,

to quote unquote help people in the future. But I thought we learned from the Holocaust that we shouldn't experiment on other humans, you know, in the Teskegee experiments, I thought we learned from that we shouldn't experiment on humans. So the point is we're killing some directly because they're not good enough. We're killing some indirectly through researching on them scientifically. We might freeze some of them saying, well, we might be so happy raising these two children that we want more, but how many more are you realistically going to want? So maybe of the 28 left, you freeze five and maybe you go back for all five or some of them, but look at all the human beings

who lost their lives in order for those two human beings to come into existence. So even if someone has no qualms about having a homosexual couple create life and have, you know, say it doesn't have to be a married couple and you can involve other parties for sperm and egg. If we believe that all humans are equal and we shouldn't directly and intentionally end the life of innocent human beings, there should be moral outrage over the fact that if not 28, close to 28 human beings are going to lose their lives for two to be created who didn't exist initially. Remember, when we were looking at the adoption situation, regardless of what you think about gay couples adopting, this is a child in need who already exists. We say, okay, come to

our house, we'll take care of you. Over here, no one exists. Now we've made 30 come into existence intentionally, but we say, I'm gonna get rid of 20-80 you and I'm only gonna take these two. But Stephanie, an embryo is not a human being, someone will say. Clearly, it's not. And even if somehow scientifically you can sort of show this seamless thread, it's so different. They're not conscious. They don't have any awareness of being alive.

There's no pain in their destruction. So what's the problem? Yeah. And aren't you kind of trivializing abortion really by, by, cause fair enough, maybe I'll go along with you and say a baby and it's seventh month of pregnancy, you know, clearly has all the features we have and feels pain. Sure. Right. But you want us to now believe that an embryo is a human being. It seems like you're actually doing your side of disservice because those who would be open to

your argument and now like, okay, you're crazy. This is clearly not a human being. Right. So this is where we see an overlap in the IVF world slash debate and the abortion world slash debate because yeah, people will say if you don't believe life begins at fertilization, then it doesn't matter what you do to these very early embryos. I'm okay. I'm okay at being a life. Clearly it's a life. I'll grant that an embryo or a zygote.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But that it's not a person it sounds like because it's not feeling pain. Right. Yeah. So when people bring up you, bring up things like, you know, thinking conscious, feeling pain, you know, thinking conscious, feeling

pain, you know, maybe later at seven months of pregnancy. First of all, as a pro life person, I would say abortion isn't wrong at seven months of pregnancy because the fetus feels pain at time of death. Abortion is wrong because the fetus is a human person with a right to life. And we may not take that life away from that child. It's their life, not ours. So they have a right to it. So I think when pro-lifers actually make the abortion is painful argument, the danger that

arises from that perspective is then when it comes down to life at the very earliest stages that involves issues like IVF, then we find ourselves in trouble saying, well, I guess the embryo doesn't feel pain and I'll grant that the embryo doesn't feel pain, but it's not wrong to kill someone because they feel pain at time of death. If that is why it's wrong to kill someone, then all we need to tell people who want to commit murder is anesthetize your victims and then commit murder and then they won't feel pain. You know, if, if Hitler had only anesthetized

all the Jews he killed, would the Holocaust have been okay? I mean- So I'll grant that, that's a good response. And yet these are conscious beings who wish to live with embryo, you don't even have that preceding desire to live. So it's clearly different. Okay, so then if someone says that, I would say,

well, is a will to live what makes it wrong to kill someone? And if so, what if someone is going to commit suicide tomorrow? Can I commit homicide on them today? If I put them to sleep first. Put them to sleep first, yeah, or they're already naturally sleeping and I know they want to kill themselves and I know they're bent out of shape about it thinking, oh, it's going to be kind of difficult.

So I think I'll just put them out of their misery first. What's difficult is the more atheistic and materialistic we are becoming as a society, the more people are willing to bite the bullet. Like, yeah, then I could see a situation where so long as I agreed to kill the almost suicide, then yeah, that would be fun. Right, right.

Which is why we have to get back to basics and we have to get back to God. But this is where in, on the issue of IVF, there's a lot of work to be done in our own backyard. Whether someone is Catholic, whether someone is Protestant, there are a lot of people who identify as Catholics and Protestants who pursue IVF.

To give you an example, when my book, this book came out just in the last two months from Word on Fire, I got an email within days of a woman who got the announcement. And she said, I can't thank you enough for writing on this topic. She said, if anyone you encounter wants to know whether this issue matters and whether people should think differently about it. She goes, in my naivete, years ago, I pursued IVF. I didn't realize what I was doing. I now have 20 children that are stuck on ice and I don't know what to do. Even just this morning, a friend reached out to me and said, she's been consulted by a friend and she's wondering what I would do in this situation. She said, a woman who has consulted me, um, made a pursuit IVF with her husband in another

country and they now live in a different country and they have two frozen embryos back in that other country. They pursued IVF years ago at the time it didn't work and instead of going for the two frozen embryos to try to get it to work, they gave up. They actually ended up conceiving naturally, but they have kept those embryos on ice. Over the years, this woman has had a conversion and has decided to become Catholic. Her husband is not. He's an atheist.

She is now in a situation where she realizes, dear Lord, I have two children in this other country. I want them inserted in my body. And her husband is like, I don't want these embryos. No. So now, what do we do? So yes, there's the whole problem of the atheist who doesn't believe in God and doesn't care about these types of standards and how do we win them over? And I think we can, and some of the arguments I go through, you know, the fact that it dehumanizes humans, you subject them to scientific testing and a eugenics mindset, but setting all that aside, the number of Catholics and Protestants who think as long as it's my eggs and as long as it's my husband's sperm and as long as we just create a few embryos and as long as we's my eggs and as long as it's my husband's sperm and as long as we just create

a few embryos and as long as we create these parameters, then you know, you could have a situation where a couple does all of that and they insert one embryo because they don't want to do two that could multiply into four, you know, twins and so forth. So they insert one, they freeze four and a year after they give birth to the one child that's successfully inserted, and they have plans to go back for the four, the woman gets sick and has to have a hysterectomy. She now doesn't have a uterus to return for the four babies that are hers and her husbands that she planned to get all along, or she dies in a car accident. He doesn't have a wife with a uterus, so he doesn't have a wife at all.

So there are so many scenarios that we're not thinking through. And it's not about, well, I hope to have children one day. It's you've already created these children. They already are yours. They already exist. But can we actually follow through in meeting their needs? And in a lot of scenarios that will arise? We just can't The book we're talking about is on IVF by Stephanie great Connors We'll put a link in the description below and I highly encourage everybody to get this because it's not a big read, right? It's 150 or so pages. Yes, nice and short. So I hope people will pick it up. Um, I You know the more common this becomes the more likely it is and will be that we

have a woman watching this or a man watching this who's participated in this. And you know, it's difficult to make a really dumb decision and then admit that you've done it, especially when the entire world is telling you, you ought to be celebrated, right? Because you then have two options. One is to go, you know what? I am a hero, actually. I'm a pioneer and all the good things this fallen world is saying about me, they're true. That's one route. The other route is I've done something terribly evil and I have to figure out what to do with that. That's a lot. That's a real hard path to walk down, which is why I've always had such respect for women

who have committed the grave evil of abortion, right? Where to quote the late Pope Francis is to hire a hit man to kill your child. I have such respect for those women who will stand up and say, yeah, I regret it. Like how much courage that must take and just humility to say, I stuffed up. Right. And I even knew I was, it wasn't a mistake.

Right. I committed a grave evil. Right. All right. What do you say to women and men? And you can comment on that, but I also want you to comment to the men and women who are watching who've participated in this evil. Right. Well, it's hard for people to hear that, let alone admit that they've committed Grave Evil, because with abortion, it seems more disordered.

And in one sense, it is more disordered. Now, saying something is more disordered doesn't mean the alternative is not disordered or wrong. But with abortion, you have a life, you naturally have a mother-child bond that is good and beautiful, and then you're severing it and breaking it. And so people say that's just disordered, that's dysfunctional. Whereas with wanting a child, someone might really be struggling and saying, it's so different because I'm the opposite of that person. I actually want a baby, I want offspring, and I want to raise that offspring to know and love the Lord.

So even though it looks different, two things. One, but how many babies died for that child to come to be? And so this is where a very painful reality that couples have to, or individuals might have to come to terms with is that they bear responsibility for the death of more preborn children than someone who's had an abortion. Because someone who's had an abortion once has ended one life. And if you've created 20 preborn children who were just the youngest of our kind and only two were ever inserted, then that's 18 human beings who have lost their lives or

have been deprived the right to grow up and are living frozen. And like some of these women who've reached out to me, you don't know what to do or what you even can do, if anything, with them. That is a heavy reality to come to terms with. So a few things, I mean, as is always the case from the Christian perspective is God is merciful. As we talked earlier about me and my mother and realizing, okay, like God, I need to be merciful. We talked earlier about me and my mother and realizing, okay, like God, I need to be merciful. You can both hate a sin and still be merciful to the sinner, right? It's Jesus who was presented with the woman caught in adultery. He looks at her with love and says, has no one condemned you? Neither do I.

And then he follows it up with go and do not sin again. So it's not has no one condemned you, neither do I continue your adultery. The first step though is mercy. Has no one condemned you, neither do I. Followed up with, don't sin again. Don't keep doing this. Get off that path and come on this one. And so the first thing then for the person who is feeling convicted by guilt of having done

wrong in pursuing IVF is to actually remember, has no one condemned you, neither do I, is to actually remember the mercy element. Because if you don't start with the mercy, you might become overwhelmed with self-condemnation. And we are to be like Peter, not Judas, right? Judas upon realizing what he did and betraying Christ, ran and committed suicide. He was so filled with despair. Peter, on the other hand, felt, one could argue, perhaps just as terrible, if not even more terrible, but he didn't stay there in the self-condemnation and the despair. He trusted in the mercy of

God. He repented. And what did Jesus do? He didn't just forgive him, He transformed him. And He says, Peter, you are the rock on which I will build my church. So, Jesus takes the man who betrayed Him in His moment of total need, when Christ was suffering and in total need of his friends, and betrayed and denied, denied to even be a friend by the man he had cared so much for. And he takes this man who comes to him repent and says, you're the rock on which I'll build my church, feed my sheep. He puts him in a position of leadership. That's how much I trust you, Peter.

You betrayed me and I still trust you. I trust that you can bring good out of evil. I trust that you can lead my church. And so that's the first message for anyone who hears this and is like, well, if what you're saying is true, you're saying I'm responsible for the deaths of all these humans is remember Peter, remember the cross, remember God's mercy and let him transform you. Let him make you be so transformed that good will come from the evil. And it doesn't make your choice to do IVF good, but it might mean by going public about your regret

that you will stop someone else from pursuing IVF. So instead of being responsible for the death of, let's say, 18 embryos and then telling everyone that you pursued IVF because you have one living child and saying, and they look at that child and think, oh, that's so great. You start to say, as great as my child is, that's God bringing good from bad. I never should have done IVF because there are 18 siblings that are no longer alive today. And I regret that. And I wish I could bring those babies back, but I can't. So I'm telling you to warn you, don't do what I did.

And there will be 18 other children who never come into existence only to be killed initially because you've shared your testimony of regret. Right? So that's how God passed it. That's one example of how God could transform such an ugly, messy situation. So to remember, has no one condemned you, neither do I. But then remember, go and do not sin again. Regret what you've done. And if you've spoken publicly about its goodness, you have to speak publicly about its badness. Not everyone has spoken publicly about pursuing IVF. Sometimes it's a big secret and people act as if they've conceived naturally. And in those situations, if someone isn't so inclined to go public about what they've

done, I don't think they have, have to. But if they have publicly shared with others, and I don't mean by publicly like online, it might just be in their circle of friends and family. I think they have a duty upon realization they've done something wrong to tell others so others don't follow their example and pursue IVF. If you're anything like me, you sometimes reach the end of summer feeling a little spiritually drained and in need of rest. That's why I'm excited to tell you about St. Michael's Lent with Exodus 90. Rooted in an ancient tradition practiced by St. Francis of Assisi, this 40-day journey was born out of his deep devotion to St. Michael the Archangel.

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Michael's Lent starting August 15th. Be a part of reviving this ancient tradition in the church and rally with brothers from around the world to follow the example of St. Francis and St. Michael. Go to Exodus90.com slash Matt to find out more information. Join us on August 15th for St. Michael's Lent and get ready to fight the good fight. That's Exodus90.com slash Matt. I can't remember what I was supposed to answer. Are we seeing that online? Are we seeing women do that? Are we coming out? There are some people that I haven't seen a lot online. I mean, I know people are regretting it.

What's so tough about it is like you look at abortion. It's it's you can pretend it's a virtuous heroic thing But everyone who's not insane goes yeah, right is it right? You can pretend that child mutilation is a good idea But then you have people like Chloe Cole and other awesome courageous people come out and go I regret that I that this happened to me, you know, and the parents might regret it too, hopefully. Yeah. But I see what you mean because it's like the initial layer of abortion and transgenderism to me, at least just stinks.

It's disgusting. And then you have to try to put lipstick on that pig. Right. Um, but with IVF, it's like you see the lipstick first, and then you realize it's a pig. Do you see the difference? Yes, it seems so good to want children. And so I think that's the,

and you know, the thing is like we were talking earlier in our conversation, most people either don't have the time or they're distracting themselves to death, such that they can't think at any great length or depth on a particular topic. And so when it comes to IVF, I think a lot of people just aren't interested in thinking deeply about it. And they stay at the lipstick level, which is, this is a scientific method that can help

people have children who otherwise couldn't. Yes. And what do we do about that? Even when they're in that situation, they allow themselves to be misled, like by saying things like, oh yeah, we have 15 eggs frozen when they actually have 15 embryos frozen. And that's a big difference. One is a part and the other one is a whole human person.

So even the language that sometimes our own people who pursue IVF will use is language that's inaccurate that makes them therefore not feel convicted that anything wrong is going on here because they've merely frozen a part of a human, which again, we could call into question, but it's very different from freezing a whole human. So I think we need to do widespread education on this. I mean, it's why I wrote the book, but it's my hope that from the pulpit, our pastors, our priests will speak to this issue because they're already being asked about

it. Please buy this book, Priests Who Are Watching. Yes, and use it. So one of the things I wanted to do in the book too, is I mean, we've talked very heady and intellectually, like the craziness of pursuing IVF in the culture and what it can lead to. But I really wanted to get across is an acknowledgement

of the profound suffering that is infertility. And I have a number of friends that have faced that reality and carried that cross. And I asked them if I could interview them. So there are a number of interviews I've included in the book. Some friends ultimately conceived, some friends never did. In fact, one of my favorite stories is a friend who I'm in the book named Bethany who never conceived. And back to what we were talking about as idols, she realized early on in their infertility journey that she was putting having a child as an idol. And she goes, the moment I dealt with that, everything changed. And I was able to accept

not having children. And she has been pretty much most of her adult life and still is involved in a very significant ministry. If I named the ministry, you would know it, it's all around the world. And she shows just this beautiful testimony of how she has countless spiritual children who love the Lord all around the world because God has used her in her quote unquote barrenness biologically to produce a spiritual fruitfulness that is more children than any physical biological mother could ever have. And so, dealing with the fact that she turned having children into an idol, rejecting that, asking God for a right-ordered perspective, she talks about how she just, she doesn't live anymore with what we're talking about, a disordered sorrow, a deep-seated depressive sadness that she doesn't have something she really wants because she

actually has what she really wants, which is maternity. And it's so beautiful to read about. But I do share the stories of some friends who pursued what I would describe as ethical responses to infertility. IVF just completely ignores the problem and finds an alternative method to manufacture someone into existence. Whereas what I talk about in the book as an alternative is restorative reproductive medicine. In the Catholic world, we often talk about NAPR technology and Creighton technology, but all of it comes under this umbrella of RRM, restorative reproductive medicine. And the idea is let's restore the reproductive system to its natural functioning.

You're not meant to have babies after menopause, but you are meant to have them after puberty and before menopause. So if you can't conceive in this window when you naturally should, Shalom says, let's try to restore your reproductive powers. What's wrong with the man that can be corrected physiologically? What's wrong with the man that can be corrected physiologically? What's wrong with the woman that can be corrected physiologically? So as I mentioned, there's an ovarian wedge resection surgery that can happen for people who have PCOS. A friend of mine had that surgery and has had four live births. She's also had a couple miscarriages, but four babies she never would have had that she's raising to this day because of restorative reproductive medicine. Friends of mine who have the wife has endometriosis and stage four endometriosis, super severe and advanced. And she and her

husband eventually conceived. Friends of mine who pursued fostering, friends who pursued adoption, some who pursued adoption thinking they would never have their own biological children. And in the end they did conceive naturally. And so now they have this beautiful blended family of adoptive and biological children, but some who've only adopted because they never truly were able to conceive.

There are some conditions that can't be corrected. And that is hard when you're not, when you reject IVF conditions that can't be corrected. And that is hard when you're not, when you reject IVF and you try to pitch restorative reproductive medicine as an alternative, as I do, there still is that aspect I have to be honest about and say, it doesn't work for everyone. Not all physical woundedness can be healed in this world, as we know with cancer and other things too.

So it doesn't work for everyone, which is why we have to get the right mindset. And we have to make sure we haven't idolized having a spouse, having a child, whatever other issues going on in our heart, as you alluded to in your own life, whatever that thing is. And I quote John Piper, he's actually a reformed evangelical, but he talks about idols. He goes, whatever the thing is, whether it's music, whether it's sex, whether it's having children, it's you put it ahead of God and you put your happiness to that thing instead of God. And God has to be our source of happiness.

We have to remember we are not made for this world. We are pilgrims on a journey going to heaven. And that is where we will have no more tears. That is where we'll be happy. Yeah, that's beautiful. And yeah, so the opposite is true. If I believe heaven ought to be had here, then is it any wonder I get so angry

or why people get so depressed when they can't make Eden work? Yeah. Yeah. What is a right and why do, and do people have a right to a baby? There's a lot of, there's a lot of talk about rights and I'm not sure people know what they mean when they say it. So what is a right? Yeah. I had to define it. I would say

a right is something you can claim to. You have a claim to. So if you want to attack me, I can rightfully say, no pun intended, I have a right to life. Life is something that's mine. And you wanting to attack me is to take that from me. I have a claim to it. You don't. So, so that's violating my right to life. claim to it, you don't. So, so that's violating my right to life. So then if we say we have a right to a child, then we're saying, I can claim that. But if we get back to a child, like an adult is a human being, a human person, and by virtue of that is a subject and not an object. Can I say I have a claim to another person? If we think about, and I write about this in the book, just to understand the point, if we were to think why is slavery wrong? Why do we reject it? Is we say, well, it's one human person looking at another human person saying, I own you. I have a right to you.

I can claim you as something that's mine, that I possess. And so then we take a relationship of equality and we create inequality where one is superior and one is inferior. And so we rightly reject slavery because we say you don't have a right to another person. We're equals. You can't possess another. And so if that's true in the context of slavery, it's true in all other contexts. That's why when I talk about the desire for a spouse, there are moral means to pursue that desire. You could go on setups, you could do online dating, you could do online dating, you could do

speed dating, you could just live your life and meet people wherever you are and find a spouse. But then I cite there's also an immoral way to pursue the desire for a spouse and that's human trafficking. And I cite the example of China where for decades, because there was a one child policy China, where for decades, because there was a one child policy in a culture that preferred and prefers male children, males to females, you have a profound imbalance now decades later in China, even where they've tried to increase it to as a two child policy or maybe three now, but there still is this idea of the government can limit. But regardless, back because you had decades of a one child policy, you have a bunch of girls that were aborted or victims of infanticide. His parents wanted the boy.

So now some estimates I've seen have said there are 35 million more men than women in China. So as a Canadian, someone who has lived in Canada, you'll know that roughly the Canadian population is about 35 million. Maybe it's around 40 now, but imagine if every single human being in Canada right now was male. That's the sheer number of excess men to women in China, which means there are a whole bunch of men who will never find wives that they desire. So what's happening? Well, some men in China are pursuing human trafficking and there are these whole elaborate networks both within China, as well as involving women in Cambodia and Vietnam, where they're being trafficked in into forced marriages. And I've watched some documentaries where this one

guy before it showed that he had essentially trafficked a wife from Cambodia, your heart breaks for this man. He's just a young guy working in a largely male dominated village who just wants a companion who's not a man who wants a wife. And your heart breaks as he talks about feeling inadequate as a man, as a human being. And, um, but then the story goes on and you see he has now essentially purchased a woman and she's come in, doesn't speak the language. All the other people in the village are gawking at her. And you're like, ah, I felt pity for this man. And I still do, but this is really wrong, you know, like, and now you've got a victim here. So you could say he's a victim of his culture by, by, uh, living in this imbalanced world,

but now he's chosen as victim to become victimizer. So now a new person is introduced to the picture who's now a victim. Um, and whether the person who steals the woman and makes her a wife, uh, is quote unquote, kind or overtly abusive. As some of the stories I read were just total nightmares. This one woman was, was trafficked in and forced to have sex multiple times a day. And she was at one point, I think, six days postpartum with a child that he'd impregnated her with. And he was beating her because she refused to have sex with him. I mean, horrifying, horrifying stories. So if you can find a man who says, well, I'm not that, right? You could find a man who says, I wouldn't do that, but I've

still trafficked in a woman and she's still forced to be my wife. It's still wrong. It's like, it's like the kind slave owner versus the abusive slave owner. One is better, but better doesn't mean good. Or what's less bad, we should say. Right. Less bad. So all that to say, can I have compassion for the person who desires the spouse? Yes. And are there ethical ways to try to address that desire being fulfilled? Yes. But there's a glaring obvious unethical path over here and we got to shine a red light. Stop. Do not go forward. So the same that is true analogously when we're talking about the desire for a child is that good and ordered.

Yes. Are there ethical means to try to make that happen? Yes. Correct. Underlying infertility issues and so forth. But if those don't work, or if we just ignore them entirely and we want to go down this path of manufacturing humans into existence by involving a third party glaring red light, we have to say, no, stop, do not go forward. Um, but it's hard as you say, because it's an ordered desire, having a spouse, having a child are ordered. Whereas I don't want to be pregnant anymore. That's obviously, you know, disordered. I don't want the physiology of the sex of my body that matches my DNA making me XX versus XY. I don't want this part anymore. That's obviously disordered. And so these other ones that are more ordered can make us feel a little differently,

but it doesn't follow that just because we feel a little differently and feel a little better that the pursuit of this particular path is in any way an ethical pursuit. Yeah. My friend, John Henry Spann has said, God forgives, but nature won't. Nature doesn't forgive. And you can think of that in regards to somebody who has multiple partners before they're married. Will God forgive her? Yes. Will nature? No. Like you're going to be left

with those scars and there can be healing, but nature doesn't forgive. And same thing could be true with abortion and all sorts of things. And I wonder sometimes, I think it's so crucial and that's why I'm so glad this book exists, that we educate people, but I think the education has to come when someone's open to hearing it. And I think the thing that will make our culture, if we can call it that this open to hearing it is the two by four directly to the face of nature, not forgiving IVF. And we're going to see devastation throughout the land. And at that point, someone will say, okay, give me your argument. I'm open to hearing it now.

Right. Like the teenager who just didn't listen to anything their parents didn't ended up in a terrible place. It is now open to hearing the advice. Yeah, it takes, it takes hitting rock bottom. And so we're starting to get rumblings of rock bottom. And I have a whole chapter in here where I talk about that, where I talk about the effects of IVF, not on the pre-born, which we've already discussed about killing some pre-born in order to get some babies born. I talk about the devastating effects of IVF on born children who grow up to eventually learn they were conceived this way. So there are some powerful documentaries out there.

I highly recommend one's called Anonymous Father's Day about children that were conceived by sperm sellers slash donors. One man in the interview says, I have 500 to a thousand half siblings around the world and I don't know who they are because they all share the same biological father. What toll mentally does that take even on your view of God as father? When the father you now realize is yours, not the one that raised you, if you even had a father raise you, you might be raised by a lesbian couple, but when you realize the father who, whose DNA brought you into existence cares, nothing about you just profited off of giving a part

that ultimately led to you. I share a story of someone in here. There's a whole website called anonymous us, the anonymous us project of children, whether they're in or adults now, but they were conceived as a result of sperm sellers or egg sellers and or IVF. And this one girl was like, I tried to find who my father was and he wanted nothing to do with me. So she actually found him. And then there was rejection and then there was extended family. So there's this just natural yearning and desire to know our roots, to know who we're connected to. And when you find that those people exist and they want nothing to

do with you, that's profoundly wounding. It's one thing if a stranger wants nothing to do with me, right? Like we go back to that coffee shop example I gave of, I thanked the barista. I was like, that was a great cappuccino. If he like didn't receive my compliment and ignored me, but obviously heard me, I might feel like just a little bad. There's something about you wanna give

and when your gift is rejected, you're like, but whatever, I move on. I'm not gonna think about it all day. He's a barista, I don't know. But what if I complimented my husband on something and completely ignored me? My children, like anything where you have a relationship of natural connection, you expect certain behaviors.

So therefore, if you discover, oh my goodness, there's a biological grandma out there, there's a biological father out there I didn't know about, and you find them and they're like, please stay out of my life. Please don't contact me. Profoundly, profoundly wounding to your spirit. And think of the popularity of those ancestry sites. Yes.

Why is it that we so desire, you know, this? Yeah, it's baked into us. Well, and it's through those sites that sometimes people are discovering they were conceived by the app. It's going to get really complicated. Their parents lied. They didn't tell them. You know, one thing, one victim we haven't spoken about yet is the surrogate.

Oh my God. What does she go through? What does it mean to come into a contract where I now have a right to some part of your body, I suppose, legally? You start looking at these stories, surrogacy gone wrong. Just type that in and you get nightmare scenarios. First of all, in this country. And then we can talk about in other countries where then the poor and disadvantaged are taken advantage of by rich, wealthy Westerners who then want to use them because they're a cheaper hire for surrogacy. We can talk about that in a moment. But yeah, there are people who might think they sign up for surrogacy thinking, um, I want to help people, right?

Like I've had a baby and I know it's beautiful. So I want to help someone who can't have a baby. So that's often how surrogacy is presented. And even people who begin the process will, we'll, we'll talk about it. And then, uh, you have the surrogate and the, these stories are out there. I'm not making this up. You can Google it. Uh a surrogate who halfway through the pregnancy gets an ultrasound and they realize there's something genetically wrong with the baby. So then the biological parents say, we want you to have an abortion. Now the surrogate has been pregnant for 20 weeks and she knows she's giving the baby up at the end anyways. She doesn't want to have an abortion, but the legally, the couple who have a legal right to the child are saying you have to have an abortion. And

if you go through the legal paperwork that she would have signed initially, it would have said if you know, X, Y, and Z happens, yes, this couple can authorize an abortion. I even found an IVF clinic online that advertised's different payment structure. Like if you carry the baby to term, I think you got like at least $70,000 or something. But if a couple changes their mind, it's any duration of the pregnancy and wants an abortion, the surrogate has paid $10,000 to have the abortion. She's actually paid cause she's not going to get the 70 grand. There's no baby at the end, but we'll at least incentivize you to have the abortion because we're going to give you 10. grand, there's no baby at the end, but we'll at least incentivize you to have the abortion because we're going to give you 10. Like this is the craziness. So then what happens to the surrogate

who doesn't want the abortion? And then what happens to the surrogate who thinks, yeah, I'm just going to place the baby in the loving arms of a couple at the end of pregnancy. Sometimes there are rules that the surrogate can't even see or hold the baby. We're talking immediate. I just think of the two babies I have had as soon as they come out. Give it to me. It is skin to skin. Like the umbilical cord is still attached and they are literally, they have been placed on my chest, right? And I cannot imagine that giving birth. God, it's so terrible.

My God. And having someone take the baby before I can even see it or hold it. And then I will never see and never hold that baby. It's terrible. And you think of the woman just laying there on the table. And then I will never see and never hold that baby. It's terrible. And you think of the woman just laying there on the table, the baby's been taken and there she is and there. I mean, yeah, again, there's so many of these stories.

People reveal them. You don't, I mean, as, as someone who's kind of has a researcher band, like if I had the time, I'd love to just be a researcher and interview people and get more stories, but I'll never forget seeing online on YouTube, it's been all over the news, Paris Hilton has pursued IVF and create all kinds of embryos. There's this one video that made me just, I felt sick. I literally felt sick. All that showed was Paris and her husband waiting

for the baby to be brought to them by, it was the nurse or the doctor, whoever, after their surrogate gave birth. And all the video shows is Paris, who has not been pregnant with this child, who has not had the bonds of pregnancy with this child, having this child put on her chest. And all I could think of was like, there's a woman back there that no one cares about who has to heal from this, who has to. And then some people might say, so there are people who go through the experience and they

feel like their heart has been ripped from them. And I know someone watching will say, no, like it gave me joy. It gave me joy to sacrifice in this way. So there's always going to be the people that say that, right? And you say that about abortion too. Exactly. So there's, you can lie to yourself. You can convince yourself of things.

You can also be so self-interested that you say, I got my 70 grand, you know, I got my money. But again, as you said, you know, we can forgive each other, but nature doesn't forgive. There is going to be the natural hormonal connection that will have an impact. And then there are cases where there's these whole homes in like India where you've got, literally there was a documentary called House of Surrogates, but it's homes of surrogates in India where rich Westerners will go

because it's cheaper to get a surrogate overseas than in the United States. And these women leave their families because they're dirt poor. will go because it's cheaper to get a surrogate overseas than in the United States. And these women leave their families because they're dirt poor and they so badly want their children to be educated and go to school. So they leave their own husband and children for nine months because in order for the Westerners to be guaranteed that the babies gestated are going to be healthy and properly nutrition and stuff, all the surrogates have to live in a home. And I've seen a video where literally it's just rows of Indian women laying

on their backs, which also is someone who's been pregnant. Like there comes a point where you don't lay on your back anymore, right? They're just laying there, bellies out to here. And then in one documentary I watched, they were going to remove the babies via c-section. It was just kind of the norm to do C-section. Well, if you know anything about pregnancy and birth, like C-section, yes, a lot of people do it, but it is a surgery that comes with it complications, as well as the fact that you need to think

about subsequent pregnancies, the proximity of your next pregnancy, how many more pregnancies you have. So how many poor women are just thinking, I will get money for the children I already have to go to school. But they live in a culture where it's normal to have a lot of children and they themselves might want more children. So they have a child now via C-section, their other, their own children, they deliver vaginally. They go home to their tiny shack and then they get pregnant really quickly having not been with their husband, let's say for the last nine or 10 months. And then how soon after that, do they have good medical care?

Now they're, they're having a, uh, is it a vaginal delivery after a C-section? Do they now have to pay? They're really poor. All the money they've made on getting a C-section. Are they going to need a C-section? Cause they've already had it. I mean, there are, there are so many things like, is anyone thinking about the next stage and like the possible implications?

So again, it's layer upon layer of, of people, whether they consent or not, who are being taken advantage of. And some people are, are quote unquote consenting, but they don't really realize what they're consenting to. There's also, by the way, cause if you're going to hire a surrogate, you want to be, and you're putting in way more money than just IVF because you're now hiring another person to gestate.

You want to be sure that this person can handle a pregnancy. So now there's this whole like online world of finding military wives who will be surrogates because who's a better candidate than someone whose husband's overseas but wants some extra income but has other children to care for so they want to be around for their kids. But the fact that they have other kids is proof that they can gestate pregnancies well so they become perfect candidates to have babies for other people and to be surrogates. But then what happens when something goes wrong and your husband is overseas and your other children need your attention, but you now have a complicated pregnancy. Maybe you have preeclampsia, maybe you have other things that have arisen.

How will this impact your ability to gestate your own children with your husband when he returns because of something that went wrong with this pregnancy? What is the emotional toll on your children to see their mother pregnant with someone else's child? Like I said to my husband the other day, we were talking about this and our daughter Violet is three and a half, really smart. I mean, every parent who thinks they're good is smart, but she's really smart. She knows babies, she loves babies. And if I were to be pregnant

as a surrogate, Violet would know as my belly grows that there's a baby in there. We would be talking about the baby. If I were to then not let her in any way be connected to that baby, because the rules of the surrogacy are I go give birth and I don't even see the baby, let alone my child who is bonded with this child in my womb. The toll on the other children around the pregnant woman who's the surrogate is huge. And people, I really think they're not thinking about it. And they might not even be thinking about it right away. But as time goes on, as you say, when we hit and we're starting to hit rock bottom, rock bottom, and these stories are coming out already,

adoption takes a toll. You know, and this is another layer I talk about in here because some people say, well, I mean, adoption is caring for someone else's child. Sometimes someone might give birth and then call the adoptive parents to the hospital and they're kind of doing the Paris Hilton thing, right? Where they're in the room. There's a profound difference. In the case of the adoption, the child already existed and the mother, the biological mother for whatever reason thinks she can't meet the child's needs and chooses another couple

to care for the child. But it's actually still a tragedy and needs to be acknowledged as such and that there is a loss for every party involved. And that there also should not be an immediate taking away of the child, the biological mother for a healthy adoption, I believe, needs to hold and see that child and to some degree stay in touch. Even if, you know, there needs to be a detachment in terms of like helping the child understand these, you know, the adoptive parents are the ones raising you, to stay in touch, not this secrecy.

Because then what happens when that child becomes 20? They now go on a pursuit for their biological parent if that head only, you know. So, so even with adoption, we have to acknowledge that's not the way it should be. Adoption is a response to something that has gone wrong. The difference though between that and the surrogate is nothing has gone wrong before the surrogacy, before the IVF. There was no baby. Now we're creating the situation and then all these layers of just fractured relationships, breaking up communion of persons, dividing and destroying. I want to tell you about some amazing coffee we were sent recently. It was from Seven Weeks Coffee,

which is America's pro-life coffee company. They are on a mission to fund the pro-life movement, one cup of coffee at a time. The reason they're called Seven Weeks Coffee is because it's at seven weeks that a baby is the size of a coffee bean. And it's the same time a heartbeat is clearly detected on an ultrasound.

They donate 10% of every sale to support pregnancy care centers across the country. And they've raised over $900,000 for these centers and have saved thousands of lives. Now, let me tell you about the coffee, because it's one thing to have a great mission, but is the coffee any good? And I can assure you that it is excellent.

I had a cup this morning. My wife and I both love it. It's mold-free, pesticide-free, shade-grown, low acid. It's organically farmed. It truly checks all the boxes. So go to 7weekscoffee.com and save 15% forever when you subscribe. Plus, exclusively for my listeners,

use the promo code Matt for an extra 10% off your first order. That's a 25% total savings on your first order plus your free gift. Remember your order will directly help support a network of over a thousand pro-life organizations across the US. Seven weeks coffee.com. You just asked me off air if I know Brandon or Bintound.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's awesome. He's a really good guy. Yes, yes. It's cool. I mean, you probably have this experience as well. I mean, I feel this way about you and Brandon and others who, you know, we've been kind of doing this

for a long time, right? We're old. Yeah. We're all gonna be 45 this year. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, you can really tell a lot about someone who's sort of like, you know, I know all of us, it's possible for all of us to go AWOL. I get that. But when you've been in the trenches with people as it were, evangelizing in season and out of season, you know?

For like, I mean, a lot of us had been doing this where, you know, we couldn't afford meat or gas for our car. Right. Yeah. So the fact that now YouTube has made it maybe more viable, but you know, or whatever. But back in the day. Back in the day, like it's kind of cool. And you really can see the moral character of someone

like Brandon or yourself or others who've just like, just kept proving themselves. None of us are perfect, but they're really good people. And just when, like in the case of Brandon, like I know him outside of the professional setting. So seeing his children, like that's why I've consulted his wife on things about my own motherhood, because it's like, I have seen the good fruits

of her mothering. Like I'm around her children, I'm children, whoa, what an amazing child, even down to their toddlers. Yeah. That says something about them, right? Like what are they doing? Who are they as people? And how is that bearing fruit?

Yeah, yeah. So word on fire. Congrats on the book. Thank you. Is it selling? If I have to be honest, I would think that a book on IVF wouldn't sell that well. Well, yeah, you know, my husband and I joke that I write on the topics that are like the least likely to sell because who wants to sit and read a book on IVF or assisted suicide

or abortion? So if you want an unpopular topic for a book, call me up because I got a bunch. It was Scott Hahn because I went to his library in Steubenville, in his basement and there's just gazillion books down there. And people say, have you read them all? And he says, books are like tools. It's good to have them when you need them. And I think that's what this book is. It's good. We need this. Right. Yeah. And people, yeah, good. All right, Stephanie, we have questions from our local members. Katie Diddit says, a couple in my former Baptist church

were celebrated for successfully adopting an embryo and giving birth to the child. What are your thoughts on embryo adoption? And then along that same line, Shane asks, is there a correct moral answer on what is to be done with frozen embryos? Yes. It was, I think, Dignitatis Personae that came out under Pope Benedict that said it seems there is no moral solution to this ethical dilemma. And when it comes to what

to do with frozen embryos, there is a debate, one could say even a heated debate amongst theologians and philosophers as whether adopting frozen embryos is ethical or not. What both sides of that debate agree on is that IVF shouldn't have happened to begin with and that there is a very obvious sin in the act of IVF that creating humans in a lab instead of naturally coming to be through sexual intimacy, coming into existence in glass as opposed to beneath the mother's heart, that is all wrong and shouldn't have happened. The debate about what

to do with frozen embryos lies with one side that says, well, the sin is over. Now we have these humans in freezers. They're not dead because they can be thawed and inserted and will implant and grow to birth. So they clearly aren't dead, but they are being denied the ability to grow and develop at the natural stage of development. So that almost seems like continuing to freeze them is an injustice to them and their ability to grow up. It also means by not being dead and not being able to grow up being in the stasis that they're also being denied eternal life, because there still are on this earth, but so there seems to be an injustice in continuing to freeze them. So some people would say the sin is over, let's insert them into the bodies

of whoever will volunteer to be candidates for embryo adoption so that they- I gotta say that does not pass a smell test for me. It doesn't sound right. Yeah, when you start to like- When you start to just explain, you know how there are certain things that you know just seem wrong

and you don't need a study and you don't need an argument? Yeah. You might be able to convince me, but right now I'm really just opposed to this idea. So I will say that I have gone back and forth and I still have a hard time landing one way or the other, which is why the appendix in my book answers the question, what to do with frozen embryos, by basically presenting both sides and then not really giving an answer. But I lean against it now. I lean that way. The alternative perspective is to say, although the sin was creating life in a lab, some argue that the fertilization of life is so closely connected to the gestation of life that to have someone else's child in my womb seems to somehow be wrong. In the same way as we were talking earlier,

like if morally speaking, the only child that should come into existence in my body is that created between me and my husband through sexual intimacy, that if I adopt a frozen embryo, there's now someone in my body who's not my husband's and my child. And through sexual intimacy, that never could have happened morally now someone in my body who's not my husband's and my child.

And through sexual intimacy, that never could have happened morally because that would have mean I would have had sex with someone outside of marriage. So therefore some people would say that just doesn't sit right. So some would say we should keep them frozen until the second coming. And then when we all die, then they die then and go to heaven.

Some people would say there is no ethical way to continue to care for them. So because it would be disproportionate and extraordinary to keep humans in freezers, an inability to carry on their life means that we can almost like unplug and withdraw support. And as they thaw, we pour holy water, baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit, and give them the respectful burial that they are due. Some people are like, well, that doesn't sound good. And the analogy I use is to help people see, well, it doesn't sound good, but it could still be justified. That makes sense to me. I'm with that one. That

does make sense. As someone who's not thought all this through, I'm with that one. I'm not with planting embryos and adopting them in that sense. I am okay with pulling the plug and baptizing them. Right. Because the argument being it's extraordinary to keep humans alive this way. Because humans weren't meant to be in freezers. They were meant to be in not just any- Hot take. Not just any uterus, but the uterus of their mother. So all my children can claim a right to my uterus cause it exists for my offspring more than it exists for me.

But in the case of these frozen embryos, if they don't have their mother's uterus as an option, then there really isn't a place for them. So therefore the analogy I use is to say, imagine you have an unethical scientist who decides to create a bunch of humans in a lab and has the capacity to do that and gestate them in a lab, not in a human, till birth, but it wouldn't really be birth, they just come out of whatever they're in. But for some strange reason, he intentionally creates them without properly functioning

kidneys. And in his other lab, he's working on creating kidneys because he wants to see if he can create babies without properly functioning kidneys and then insert the lab-made kidney into these babies to see if it works. Well, let's imagine he fails in creating lab-made kidneys, but he succeeds in creating lab-made babies that all have no kidneys or not properly functioning kidneys. So when these lab-made babies come to birth in the lab, they don't have kidneys to keep them alive.

So they're going to die. Well, we could keep them alive if we got kidneys from children who were already born. Would it be ethical to take a kidney from all the born infants in the world or whose parents consent to this in order to transplant it into these lab-made babies who need a kidney? I would say I don't think so. I don't think we should start taking kidneys from babies that can't consent to becoming organ donors just to keep these other babies alive.

I therefore would baptize and care for these babies until they die naturally, these lab-made babies. That's not the same as directly killing them. That's basically saying we don't have an ethical means to keep these lab-made children alive. What happened initially was wrong to begin with. They are owed respect and we will give them comfort and care until they die naturally. But because we don't have an ethical way of keeping them alive, then letting them die isn't killing them. The actual cause, you know, or the implication of, not implication, but the responsibility for

their death lies with those who created them unethically to begin with. So therefore, by analogy, we could say someone who says, look, you really shouldn't have another person's embryo in your body because the only way embryos should get into bodies is through sexual intercourse. So therefore thawing them and baptizing them and burying them is the same as letting these babies in the lab made baby lab die naturally. It's a tragedy. It's a loss of life, but the ultimate responsibility lies with people who created the ethical conundrum to begin with. So that side would say, so basically it's better to thaw, baptize, bury. I do think on the side that says, well, these babies already exist, the sin already happened, can't we keep them alive? They will

often, that side would use the argument, look, what if I wet nurse someone else's child whose mom has a hard time breastfeeding and maybe can't breastfeed at all. And in fact, if there's no formula around for a certain period of time, would it be ethical for me to keep an infant alive by way of my breast milk, even though I'm not related to the infant. And I think we'd all agree. Yeah, there's no problem with that. So why can't I keep an embryo alive by way of my uterus?

It's kind of like being a wet nurse, except I'm providing the uterine environment. Well, you could argue one of the differences is feeding someone else's child, you know, temporarily via my breast is not preventing me from having my own children. Whereas if I, as a generally fertile woman, my issue is being able to sustain pregnancies, which is why I've had multiple miscarriages. I can get pregnant easily, but have a hard time maintaining them. Um, but so therefore with the ability to get pregnant with the child of my husband, if I rescue a frozen embryo and adopt that embryo, I'm essentially occupying my uterus for the next nine to 10 months with someone else's child, which means for that time period

and any natural infertility that would follow birth, I am not having children with my husband when I am physically capable of having children with my husband. So a lot of people say that doesn't sit right with me. Like our default should be openness to having children with our own spouse. And if you're occupying the womb with someone else's child, right? Like I can adopt a born child and still conceive my own child, children with my husband. But if I adopt a preborn child, I can't conceive a child with my husband in that period because I lose my own fertility at that point because I'm not going to ovulate. So, so there is that factor. So, but at the

same time, for people who would say, so again, you can see how the debate goes back and forth for people who would say, well, the implanting, Oh shoot, dang, I lost my train of thought and it was a really important point. Well, here's what I was gonna object to, but then I realized why it was wrong, right? Because we say that, well, the sexual act exists, and you cut me off whenever you remember it. Yeah, yeah. The sexual act exists primarily for babies and then for bonding.

And so for sex to be separated, you've got contraception that wants the bonding without the babies, right? You have IVF that wants the babies without the- Without the bonding. So the reason I was going to object and say, well, then if you insert this into a woman, you have the problem of baby without the bonding.

But the difference of course, is it's a living human being at that point. The baby already exists at that point. That's right, the conception. And the other, so for those who would object to embryo adoption, they might also say that you shouldn't have a third party insert an embryo in your body. Like the, so yes, the sin was creating life in a lab outside of sexual intimacy, you're manufacturing a human.

But those who object to embryo adoption might also say there's something that doesn't sit right about having a third party also insert an embryo in your body. I don't know though, if I would go so far as to say it's inherently wrong to have a third party insert an embryo in someone's body. And here's why. If you have a couple that pursued IVF not realizing it was a sin. So they've already committed the sin five times of creating babies in the lab. And they have four embryos frozen. Do the biological parents have a moral duty to go back for their children?

I have to say, I lean to the answer they do. I think they do. But then for them to rescue their own children would necessitate a third party inserting those four embryos on two or four separate occasions into the woman's body. And if we say it's inherently wrong to have a third party insert an embryo ever, then even if you're the biological mother, the church never says you can do evil to bring about a good. So if it's truly evil to insert an embryo, then you couldn't even allow the biological parents to rescue their own children. Oh, that doesn't sit right with me.

So, so therefore, if I say no, I think actually the parents, if there's a uterus available, they have a duty to go back and rescue their own children. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. So therefore, if that's the case, then could someone who not to solve their own infertility, but for the goodness of children in need, want to rescue those children? Could they reasonably enlist a third party, especially let's say if they had an infertility where, in the case of my husband and I, we can conceive our own children. What if you had a couple where it was determined their own conception will not happen? Then at that point, they're not occupying the womb with a child that's not their own and preventing their own child from coming through if they truly can't have their own kids.

So would they, would it be not everyone's a candidate for embryo adoption, but certain select couples would be and they do it not to fix their own infertility, but for the needs of a child. And they acknowledge the sin of how the child was created, but they're just trying to provide the basic care needed over and above the call of duty because they know they're not the biological parents. So it's very messy, which is why I address it. I give both sides and then I say, we shouldn't have done this to begin with. So the first step is to stop IVF, to like stop entirely, no more IVF.

Now that's going to be a hard sell. But the point is if we, if we want to correct the situation, we have to stop at the very beginning with what we know is the gravest of evils. And then we have to figure out, okay, what seems to be the best solution right now. Who is, you know, so if people are listening to this, and they want to hear the arguments from both sides, who is a proponent of each side that you might... So Father Tad Poholchuk, who I greatly admire and respect, who works with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, has, my understanding, has taken a position against embryo adoption and has debated it.

I think if my memory serves me correct, and this goes back, see if you can find it on your phone on the internet, I believe he debated Janet Smith on this. I remember Janet Smith being part of this. I don't remember in what capacity. I feel like, well, see if you can find it, but it's old. I think it might be 09. Isn't it funny how 09 is now? We're like really old.

So old. But certainly looking up the arguments of Father Ted, and actually, I love the National Catholic Bioethics Center. I have had formation from them. I have relied on their ethicists in a number of ethically demanding situations I've been consulted on. So they have presented arguments on both sides of this in their different journals and writing. So going to ncbcenter.org and looking up embryo adoption, the frozen embryo debate, that will provide some good information. And of course my appendix, but that's just a start.

That just gives people a tease. Do you know what Truthly is? Truthly is a- I feel like your wife now, you're like, ask me all the questions, do I know that? Truthly is an app that I helped co-found. Oh, oops, I should know. No, no, you shouldn't.

What kind of a friend am I? It's like ChatG an app that I helped co-found. Oh, oops, I should know. No, no, you shouldn't. What kind of a friend am I? I'm telling you, it's like ChatGPT. Okay. Went through OCIAA. Which I vaguely know. Got baptized and became the world's greatest evangelist. So if you go to ChatGPT or GROK or any of these secular AIs

and ask about the benefits of IVF or arguments for abortion, you're gonna get an answer. Okay. You go to Truthly and you're gonna get what the church teaches. It's been programmed with hundreds of pages of instructions. So I just typed into Truthly, what does the church teach on embryo adoption?

And I won't read much of it because it's quite long. The Catholic Church's teaching on embryo adoption is a nuanced and developing area within bioethics. At present, the church has not issued a definitive magisterial teaching explicitly for or against the practice of embryo adoption adoption where couples adopt and bring to birth embryos that were frozen and left over from in vitro fertilization procedures." And then it gives arguments for and against.

But anyway, I'm going to have to hook you up with this so you can try it out. Actually get truth. Yeah. That's great. It says, the Seiko congregation of the doctrine of the faith document dignitatis personae addresses issues related to embryo adoption, expressing caution, but without condemning those who pursue it for noble reasons. The church encourages faithful discernment prayer and when faced with these ethical dilemmas,

ideally seeking guidance from knowledgeable and faithful Catholic bioethicists or moral theologians. So, and I will say, I know two couples who were very involved in the pro-life movement who pursued embryo adoption truly for the good of the children and to rescue them. One couple, it failed every time, so they never saw a live birth. She miscarried. The other couple had multiple miscarriages, but the last insertion of the last two of, I think it was six or eight embryos, I actually cite them in my appendix, successfully implanted and grew for nine months and she gave birth to twins.

In both cases of the couples I knew, given that they were activists in the movement, they had a very right-ordered perspective. Their attitude was, these are children, they are in need, we want to rescue them by meeting their needs, and we want the most vulnerable. So in both cases, they pursued embryos that were lots of siblings to take all of them, because of course, what if you have like a sibling set of six kids and you want to adopt a frozen ember, but you're doing it to address your own infertility? Are you just going to take one and now you're leaving five siblings, but then will someone else come along and take those siblings?

And then are we going to have siblings brought to birth that are actually long lost siblings that will eventually find themselves one day? So both of these couples said, no, we want to keep all siblings together. So we will adopt all of them and we just won't have them inserted all at the same time. And at least one of the couples, perhaps even the other couple had the attitude of, we also want the ones that have been frozen the longest because they'll be the least popular because people are less likely to adopt embryos frozen long, worried that they could be damaged, not have a high success rate. So the attitude was we want the least loved

and we wanna love them. The Catholic Church being the church Christ established has been thinking of these issues for a long time, which is why you see Catholics on the front lines, right? Of abortion and condemning contraception. And when you understand the logic as to why contraception is intrinsically evil, you can see why the church has a sophisticated approach

to these special issues. And you see why maybe Protestant groups have less of a leg to stand on when they seek to condemn sodomy and these sorts of issues. So I guess my question is, what are you seeing, not that you live in the Protestant world, but the different Protestant communities out there, how are they seeking to address this or failing to? Yes. I mean, again, you look online, you can see a number of stories of evangelical pastors getting up in front of their congregations and sharing their journey of infertility and their joy and success of IVF. God have mercy.

And in front of big congregations. And so that and it's, and so that's really troubling because it's, again, it's couched in all positive lingo. It's the, it's the lipstick on the pig and you don't realize there's a pig. It just sounds good and beautiful and you feel their suffering and your heart hurts for what they went through. And then you see they literally are holding babies on stage and you think, well, geez, if I say IVF is wrong, like, you know, and that's actually a point I make in the book that it's very important. We talk about condemning IVF does not mean condemning the people conceived that way. I condemn rape, but I have a friend conceived in rape and I'm grateful for his

life, but I'm not grateful for how he came to be. He's grateful for his life, but he's not grateful for how he came to be. So when we condemn a particular method of conception, we're saying how someone came into existence was wrong. The key word is how. But then there's another word, who. Who has come into existence. And the who in the case of human, is always an unrepeatable, irreplaceable, unique individual made in God's image. Willed by God, loved by God, ought to be

loved by us. And so we want to be able to say if someone was conceived in violence like rape, in lust like a hookup, or in technology via IVF, I can condemn those methods of conception, but I can still say each individual conceived is equal to me and made in God's image and loved by God. So, you know, and I have friends actually conceived by IVF, one of whom publicly has criticized IVF. So she says, look, I know this is how I came to be, but I condemn it because I don't think I should have been manufactured. I don't think I should have been graded.

And I don't think any siblings that were lost should have been lost for me to come to live, but can still be grateful for her life. That's really important because not only are we going to have mothers and fathers who have been engaged in the evil of IVF through manufacturing a child, we're going to have children who were manufactured through IVF watching this show. Yeah, yeah. And so there needs to be a sensitivity to what the truth means for them, which again gets back to this has implications on the born as well as the pre-born.

Once you realize you were conceived that way, what tool does that take on you spiritually, emotionally, psychologically to think, well, if IVF shouldn't have happened, then I shouldn't be. And if IVF shouldn't have happened, then yes, but IVF did happen. So therefore God brings good even out of evil. And so we can say the evil happened,

but you're the good that came from it. And so, that's good. And that's proof of God's redemption, God's majesty, that He can take even our sin, right? Oh, happy fault! We learn this at Easter. We say the exultate at the Easter vigil. Oh, happy fault! Oh, sin of Adam that brought about what?

The cross in Christ. So great a Redeemer. Yeah, so great a redeemer. Marty Stafnik asks, I saw Seth Gruber on Alex Clark's podcast talking about the negative health effects of abortion for the women, including increased rates of preterm birth in later pregnancies, increased rates of depression and suicidality, and pretty incredible increased risk of breast cancer. Why aren't these points talked about more, especially by pro-life politicians? I definitely think there is merit to talking about these things.

We're always up against people who will say if they've had an abortion, well, that wasn't my experience or those studies are biased. And if our whole argument is abortion is wrong because it kills a human person, then whether or not those involved in the killing get hurt is a secondary issue. There's still merit to talking about it because it's true and it could dissuade people who don't want to take those risks, especially for example, if you have a family risk of breast cancer and then you choose the act of abortion, which is going to even without a family risk of breast cancer, increase your risk of breast cancer. And then you choose the act of abortion, which is going to, even without a family risk of breast cancer, increase your risk of getting that. So we need to warn people, but we

don't want to hinge our whole argument on it because that's ultimately the end of the day why it's not wrong. Because then if that is why it's wrong, then the other side will simply say, then let's make it safer. Let's change our, our method of abortion. Right? So like the risk of subsequent pregnancies resulting in preterm births, which come, which is with its own risks for the baby, for example, who's now going to be in an incubator and NICU, NICU, um, is because with a surgical abortion, you were forcing the cervix open when it's tightly shut. So that means in order to get the abortion, this instruments in there, right? In order to pull

the baby's body parts out. So, um, if you're forcing a tightly closed cervix open, then that means when she next gets pregnant with a wanted pregnancy, that tightly closed cervix might open on its own too early. And then you're going to have an early delivery and then all the complications that can come with the fat. Um, with breast cancer, when a woman gets pregnant, her estrogen, which is what can risk estrogen exposure is what increases your risk of breast cancer. So when a woman gets pregnant, her estrogen goes through the roof in a form of estrogen called estradiol. And that's what causes her breast cells to multiply at a very rapid rate. Whether you have good or bad cells in your breast, they're all multiplying initially.

And they're what's called undifferentiated, which means they don't have a specific purpose yet. And it's not until about the 32nd week of pregnancy that the undifferentiated cells become differentiated and take on the role of milk producing cells. And hence a woman would be able to breastfeed at birth. The vast majority of abortions happened before the 32nd week of pregnancy, which means you cut that pregnancy off with an abortion when those breast cells have multiplied and aren't

differentiated. They're undifferentiated. So any of the bad cells, you had some of them. Well now with the multiplication, you have a lot of them and you don't let them get to the differentiated stage. So that leaves them in a vulnerable state so that down the road you might increase your risk of developing breast cancer. Is it a guarantee? No, but it is a risk and people need to know about it. The consequences of more intrinsically disordered actions are usually far more emotionally heavy and compelling than the reason the act itself is wrong. So I agree with you. And in my book, the porn myth,

I tried to do that, right? I tried to show why here are these negative effects of porn, because again, a fella might be more interested to learn that he might be led to say erectile dysfunction, then a person should be treated as a, not as a means to an end or something like that. Do you know what I mean? But we can never lose sight of the fundamental reason the thing is wrong. Because as you say, like for example, with pornography,

if the only thing wrong with pornography are the consequences, then okay, mitigate the consequences. See to it that people aren't trafficked and then filmed. See to it that people don't use it so much that they end up with erectile dysfunction and so on and so forth. So it's good to keep the main things, the main things, while I think using those sort of circumstantial or consequential aspects of the evil act to sort of drive the point home.

Yeah. And often to bait people in. That makes them interested. Oh, but then, yeah, to broaden their horizons with a more fundamental point. Michael Wheeler asks, I remember in college learning about NFP and how it differs from a contraceptive slash abortive mindset.

Can you talk about the options available to couples who want kids or don't want kids? I guess NFP is the broader question, yeah. Right, so yeah, in the world of natural family planning, it's about learning the natural rhythms of the body, not to be confused with a rhythm method, but the natural rhythms of the body where for the woman, there is a time of fertility every month and a time of infertility, which is the majority of every

month. So the man is always fertile, but the woman is only temporarily fertile at a certain time of the month. And so natural family planning says, I want to identify when those times are and rather than just calculating on a calendar when I think I've ovulated, you can use a method called Marquette where you you pee on a calendar when I think I've ovulated, you can use a method called Marquette where you, you pee on a little stick and you put it in a monitor and the monitor tells you, you know, basically it reads your hormone levels from the urine in order to tell you, are you low? Which means you have a low likelihood of conception, but are you high? Which means your body is starting to get to the point of what's called peak or

when an egg is going to drop in the next 24 to 48 hours. And based on the responses to, from the machine that can then influence a couple. If we want to conceive, then when we see a high reading on our monitor, we know peak is going to come maybe within the next few days, five days, six days. So we're going to increase our sexual activity with the hopes that there's plenty of sperm in the body so that when an egg gets released, fertilization is likely to occur. Another couple might say, we have good reasons to avoid pregnancy this month. So rather than

engage in the act of sex when we're fertile and use a condom, which then takes that which is naturally fertile, making what God made fertile infertile by using a barrier method, we're going to say, okay, God gave me a fertile period and he gave me an infertile period. So when I'm in the God given fertile period, I will use my human will to avoid having sexual intimacy. And when I'm in the infertile period, I will then resume sexual intimacy with my husband. And in some people, perhaps Protestants or Catholics who don't ascribe to this view might say, well, that just sounds like a Catholic birth control. And I would say it's different, but we need to be careful. The first point is it's different in that birth control takes what I alluded to in a

moment ago, that which is naturally fertile and makes it infertile. So if I'm naturally going to release an egg and I take a birth control pill to suppress my ovulation, then I'm changing that which is healthy and normal and shalom the way things should be. And then I'm maiming it. I'm suppressing that which God gave me. Um, or if a man has seed to give to his wife, um, I, he's using a condom to hold that seed back. So again, that's not the designs God made.

God made it so that we're pouring forth so that we're receiving so that we have the fertility. But God also made it so that the majority of the time the woman doesn't have an egg. Um, so therefore the couple times their sexual intimacy based on that. Now I say that with caution because could a couple use their knowledge of a woman's body and a man's body and how they work together with selfish motives? Yes, they could. But I would say the issue at that point isn't the having sex or not per se, it's the attitude of the heart. It's saying I selfishly don't want children. So to give an example in my own case,

as I mentioned, my issue is being able to sustain pregnancies and I have had a number of tests and things done to try to figure out why do I keep miscarrying? And we've had really no explanation. The only thing is I am low in progesterone. So when I do get pregnant, I have to take progesterone, which is a hormone that essentially you can think of as progestate. It is, is for the gestation of the baby and helps the baby grow. So I take that, but five out of my six, sorry, three out of my four

miscarriages I was on progesterone and I still lost my baby. So there isn't really an explanation, but I do credit progesterone for keeping the two babies alive that I did have. But my point is there was a time when my fertility had returned where we were trying to figure out for the fertility have returned after my, my one live birth, we were trying to figure out why do I keep miscarrying? Cause I had had three miscarriages in a row at that point. And there was a very

invasive ultrasound that needed to be done, but I could not be pregnant for that ultrasound to be done. Because if I was, there was a special injection that needs to be put in the uterus that could kill a baby in me. So we needed to use natural family planning to avoid pregnancy. That was a serious reason to avoid pregnancy, but using a condom wouldn't have been justified. Even if the reason for avoiding pregnancy would have been good, the condom itself would have been taking the naturally fertile act and making it infertile. But what we did instead was taking our knowledge of the natural time of infertility that God has naturally given my and every other woman's body every month and saying, okay, well, we

will time our sexual intimacy around that and avoid sexual intimacy when I could conceive in order to do this test that will help future pregnancies. But we don't want to jeopardize a pregnancy that I could have, but then miscarry but we don't want to jeopardize a pregnancy that I could have, but then miscarry because we haven't figured out what's wrong with me. So each couple has to discern what are our reasons if we're avoiding pregnancy, what are our reasons for doing that? And they're going to be varied. But the key is for a couple to be in communion with each other, with God, and if they need a spiritual director, they may not need that, to be prayerfully discerning, you know, what the reasons are. I think it's important to say too that if somebody has been, is selfish in that regard,

they're not thereby guilty of contraception. When we say a contraceptive mentality, this is different from the sin of contraception. I would say the guilty of selfishness. Yeah. You know, it's, yeah, it's not, if they haven't contraceptive. One thing interrupts the sexual act. The other abstains when the, so I say that because you are seeing people trying to say that, uh, NFP is immoral. Yeah. On the Catholic side, which is just not a Catholic position. Not a Catholic position. And also some people like, well, when you need NFP, then learn it, but don't have the knowledge. And it's like, once you know, once you know, figuring out a woman's

fertility, especially postpartum, which changes everything, it can be very confusing. Once a woman has had a baby, when you're waiting for her, her cycle to return, um, you don't wait until you're in the situation of needing to avoid pregnancy by using natural family planning to learn natural family planning. You need the knowledge in advance because it's, you know, I've said to friends like the, the monitor isn't as obvious as you think. I rely on someone to help me interpret the monitor, you know, which is the method we use. We use the pee on a stick, the monitor.

I find it helpful than just some people can use just their body signs of cervical mucus and the changes to cervical mucus to determine, uh, we've ovulated now or we haven't. Uh, but you don't, for people who say, oh, it's contraceptive unless you really, really need it and just learn it then you need to know before you're in this situation. And a woman should just know anyway. Yeah. My wife would swear to you that it was because of her knowledge through natural family planning. We use the Creighton method that we were able to conceive at all because she had really bad endometriosis and was told multiple times by different doctors that she shouldn't expect to conceive.

Yeah. Yeah. So that knowledge, people just think, oh, well, it's, it's just going to be used to avoid. No, it can help you conceive or also sustain a pregnancy. So something a lot of people don't realize is once a woman has ovulated, um, from ovulation to the arrival of her period, if she doesn't get pregnant, should be, I believe it's at least 11 days.

Typically it's 14 days. And a lot of people think, oh, that's your classic 28 day cycle. I'm not talking about from period to ovulation, that might vary. But from ovulation to period should be roughly 11 to 14 days. If it is less, if it's on the low end, if it's like five or six days from ovulation to period,

that is a sign a woman is low in progesterone. That's really serious because if she does get pregnant, then she's super low in progesterone is likely to have a miscarriage. So even just this knowledge of the body and being able to time from ovulation to period can help a woman know if she's just physically healthy or not. So in my case, even when I'm not pregnant, I take progesterone. I take it from three days after I ovulate to a timed 10 day period to make sure I have a healthy long enough cycle just to make sure I have shalom, that my body is healthy holistically in its entirety. So again, if we're afraid of the sinful, when we run from it

saying, Ooh, if I become aware of that, then I'm guilty of contraception. No, because again, you always come back to the heart. Am I open to life? Am I asking myself, do I have serious reasons to avoid a child right now? Am I doing it flippantly? I just want to go on vacation and don't want to be pregnant when I'm on vacation versus, you know, there's maybe postpartum depression, who knows other things going on for someone. Final question. We have many more and yet we've addressed a lot of them and a lot of them had to do with embryo adoption. Yeah, I know, right? Matthew says, as a third year medical student, how do you approach doctors who have given

their lives and careers to abortion or IVF and tell them that you cannot participate in or endorse these options while maintaining a relationship to get good evaluations. Well, I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music,

including my lo-fi. Hallow has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hello.com slash Matt Fred. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray.

Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. You can, and I'll tell you how in a moment, but it's not easy because oftentimes we think we can't when something is hard. So it will be hard to present to one's superiors in the medical field, a viewpoint that is different from the norm and from what they themselves have done. Because saying you hold a different view could make them feel, are you saying I'm wrong? Are you saying I'm guilty?

So a couple of things I would in general, I can give some basic advice, but recommend people in that situation to, first of all, make sure they are plugged in and connected with other medical professionals in the Catholic Protestant world, even just the pro-life world of medical professionals, who are living that pro-life viewpoint fully, which often is perceived as Catholic, although I know Protestants that are against birth control and Protestants who are against IVF, and make sure you're plugged in with them for moral support, as well as ideas for what they've done, because they are in those situations and can say, actually, this is how I frame things. This is what I did. So a couple authorities to go to,

the first is the National Catholic Bioethics Center, which I already mentioned, just top of the line. John DiCamillo is the new head of the organization, awesome ethicist, Joe Zalot, I've worked with awesome ethicists, Father Tadpaholchuk, awesome. I mean, they're just all around fantastic. And they can be consulted with through their ethics consult line 24 seven. So connect with the NCBC. The other thing is even just my catholic doctor.com is an awesome Catholic website my husband and I have used for our family's medical care. if you can do telemedicine for certain conditions. They're great as a patient, but then those are all Catholic doctors practicing from a Catholic perspective. So approaching them, trying to be put in touch with a mentor in your specialty that you're pursuing that they can help guide you.

The other point then in general I would say is when you have to approach someone is make sure that you have good science to back up your claim. But in this world of relativism and tolerance and acceptance of diversity, you could use all that language to say, especially when you aren't there period and you're inferior to them, but you don't want to be involved in medical school or during your residency in something you don't agree with because, but you don't have the authority because you're not the ultimate head is maybe it would be good to use the language of this is my view. And in, I know that the medical school is really known for being tolerant of diverse views and I know my view and my position is diverse, but I'm really hoping

that there can be an inclusive spirit of acceptance of this. There's nothing so narrow minded and bigoted as the person who keeps talking of being open to ideas. But if you're talking to someone, because I will say, for example, people often know of me through my talk at Google. And the person who pitched me speaking at Google kind of came from that perspective and said, look, we've just brought in the head of Planned Parenthood and Google is all about tolerance and including all kinds of views. And so in a spirit of inclusivity, I wanted to put forward a suggestion that that we bring in this

speaker, you know, so, so you could try that. Um, you could use the argument of look I've used. I've, I've looked at the medical research. I've looked at the data on, on embryonic embryonic development and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is why I can't be involved. You could say my religion excludes me. I know that there are special exceptions and measures given for Jewish students and Muslim students for what their religious views tell them. And so I also have religious views as a Catholic, as evangelical, whatever their viewpoint and use those other religions that people are more inclined to be respectful of to then frame this is a religious view. I think you could make a non-religious argument,

but in these moments you might need that to be protected as you go through medical school. Cause you don't want to do evil to bring about a good, it is good to have good Catholic doctors, but we can't commit evil on our journey to becoming a Catholic doctor. So this person and anyone else is right to look for ways to avoid involvement in IVF, avoid involvement and insertion of IUDs, um, and abortion and so on and so forth. So, but plugging into these other Catholic institutions can give people a good idea of the type of lingo to use. Also cowardice is a vice that we ought to repent of. So if you sort of think, well, I'll just bite my lip and not correct anybody or give a different

answer to what I actually believe until I have some power and then I'll start, you're probably just training yourself to be a coward with a bigger bank account at the end of the day. Yeah. So it's about, it's about getting creative. So instead of being a coward, we want to be creative and we want to be, what is our blessed Lord say? Why is this, why is this serpents and simple as stuff? So there are times that you, where wisdom might cause you to be very strategic, but you, you cannot participate in the evil, refer to someone else to participate in the evil you're not doing. Right?

So if an authority above you says, okay, you don't have to do an abortion, but you have to counsel a patient and refer them to the other intern over here, a resident over here who will do the abortion. Well, if you're passed them on to someone else, no, you can't do that. So I remember it's also been said, courage is not the absence of fear, but a will to do what's right in spite of your fear. So to acknowledge you have fear, to acknowledge that there might be a bad outcome, but that God's really creative. Like if God can bring good out of IVF in that a human being made in his image comes into existence

from a really bad thing that shouldn't have occurred. Then he and His Majesty can figure out something amazing that I can't even premeditate in this conversation, but praying and doing the right thing and seeking Godly counsel and having the conversation, it's amazing. It's just amazing when you say, when you let God work and you don't get in the way and you say, Holy Spirit, do something profound. Show your glory. I love that prayer. God, show your glory. Show your glory. And it's extraordinary what He can do. Another prayer I love is God, blind the people who should be blinded and give sight to the people who should be given sight.

Make that your prayer when you have to approach the authorities. Again, back to the Google talk, that was my prayer. And there are so many intricacies and aspects to getting in there. But in hindsight, when I look back, I was like, holy smokes, the number of people that were blinded. That prayer was totally answered. Like I can't- Blinded in the sense that they had no idea what they were about to receive?

They were receiving, and then even after it happened, the fact that it got on the YouTube channel, the fact that it's still not off Google's YouTube channel, the fact that at one point, now that I'm saying this, maybe it'll come down, but at one point in my presentation, I have an abortion victim image. I tell a story and that's the type of thing

that would be censored on Google. It's in the video. It's on Google's YouTube channel. Like it's embedded with, and they embedded it. Their video people asked for my slideshow files and they embedded it and did it all nice. And then their people chose, you can watch the part where I talk about the Rwandan story.

They literally pan in as I'm speaking on the aborted baby image. So, that person was given sight, whoever that person was, they were given sight. And I prayed, there were other people that I totally prayed for blindness to. And just, so I use that as one example to say when you pray those prayers, when you give surrender and you say, God, I want to do the right thing. And guess what? Here's the other thing.

He might close the door. Something bad might happen. And it's often the bad thing that might happen actually happening that makes us think, Oh, I should never have done that. We have to remember when the bad things happen, and let's say worst case scenario, someone's actually kicked out of their medical school or not able to finish their education. A whole bunch of other doors are going to open up. Opportunities are going to arise that will be better,

but you won't know until you continue down that right path than whatever could have happened if they'd stayed on that original path. If that truly is what's gonna happen, it often doesn't come to that. But when I think of my first engagement ending, I remember when I was going to have a conversation that I thought might result in things breaking down, going to the Adoration Chapel. And I remember where I was in Vancouver, this beautiful Adoration Chapel, looking at our Lord on the altar.

And in my mind's eye, laying my then fiance down on the altar as Abraham did with Isaac. And I remember laying him down and saying, God, I want to marry him so badly. I want this so badly. But he's yours, not mine. I beg you don't take him from me. Let it be like Isaac and Abraham, like don't make me make this sacrifice. I beg you don't, but it's he's yours. And I thought, beautiful prayer surrender. God's not going to make me.

He didn't make Abraham sacrifice Isaac. And then He did. And I was like, what? And right, so then I go to Madonna House, have this whole experience, all these years go by and I'm like, why did you do that? Like, why God? Why? And then now, now 10 years later, I mean, I could say five years later,

really, because I've been married almost five years now, but I can look back and say, praise God, I surrendered. Praise God, my attitude was this God is what I want, and I'm telling you what I want. But I'm also saying at the end of the day, right, it's what Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane. If it be your will, take this cup from me. Jesus himself asked that the cup be taken from him. But then he followed it with, but not my will, but yours be done. So for that person in medical school to say,

please, I don't think I'm meant to be out of this med school. I don't think I'm meant to be kicked out. So I beg you, don't let me be kicked out. But then hands off. Not my will, but yours be done. And if his will is not what we thought, trust me, it will work in the end. Not right away.

You won't get it. You might even be angry. You might get bitter. You might have turned med school into an idol. But trust me, as someone who's kind of been there with another issue and can say like, praise the Lord. So it's the same with fertility, getting pregnant.

Someone can think so badly, I want to have a child. But can we say please and then let go. So there's a, with IVF, it's like a forcing and a making. And with sexual intimacy, you can time things down to what you think is optimal fertility. And you still have to be like, God, your will be done. And then when you get pregnant, it's still God, your will be done. That's my fear. I live with a fear that every pregnancy I'm going to miscarry because that's been the majority.

But am I willing to step out in faith and say, I want this, I want this, but open hands, your will be done. You know, I know of a family whose child was recently found drowned in a pool. And you think that's something no parent ever wants to envision. But can we say even for our children, once they reach birth, right? We think, well, if we pass the miscarriage risk, we've got our kids for life until we die. No guarantee.

No guarantee. And so with whatever child we have, can we say, please Lord, may I see my children's children? That's a prayer from the scriptures. I've already prayed about my kids and I'm an old mom. So I pray that, that I may, my husband and I both may live long enough to see our children's children. But can I, I say that's my prayer, Lord, and then have open hands and say about whatever

you want, because this is not our home. Heaven is. Amen. Beautifully put. On that note. Let's wrap up. Thank you so much for taking the time to come here and share your beautiful wisdom. So articulately, as you always do with us, your book is called on IVF.

People can get it. Word on fire. Word on fire. Technically Amazon too, but it's always better to get through the publisher and sometimes stock on Amazon is sketchy. So anything on fire. Anything else people could look up of yours? Yes.

My website is love unleashes life.com love unleashes life.com. So it has all my other books. My IVF book through word on fire is part of a new series that word on fire is released called the dignity series. And actually the first book through the series was another book of mine on assisted suicide. So I kind of take both ends of life. It's not just my series though.

So after this, they have multiple other authors releasing other topics that are often more on the periphery not like, you know, abortion is the one we're always hearing about, but assisted suicide, IVF and the other ones coming down the pipe are gonna be great resources for people. And then there's other books I've written too. So loveunleasheslife.com.

Amen. Thank you.