Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 552 | "Big Fertility" & the Truth Behind The Surrogacy Industry | Guest: Jennifer Lahl

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Today we're talking to Jennifer Lahl, an author and filmmaker and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture. She is currently dedicated to raising awareness about the corruption of the surrogacy industry and the potential dangers of in vitro fertilization. Although many Christians support these things because they are pro-family, Jennifer explains why this method of having a family comes with a higher number of problems and victims and exposes the big money that the fertility and surrogacy industry rakes in. --- Today's Sponsors: A'del Natural Cosmetics is a family-run, holistic, handcrafted & toxin-free cosmetic company where ALL of their products are made in the USA. Go to AdelNaturalCosmetics.com & use promo code 'ALLIE' for 25% off your order! Carly Jean Los Angeles is more than just clothes — they want to make a difference in the lives of others through not only clothes that make you feel amazing, but through living with a heart of kindness & love for others. Go to CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com & use promo code 'ALLIEB' to save 20% on your first order of anything in their online store! Annie's Kit Clubs delivers an excellent way to encourage your kids' curiosity while providing fun activities in their Genius Box which explores exciting STEM themes like geology, chemistry, aerodynamics & more. Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 50% off your first box! --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV

or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Thursday. Today we are talking to Jennifer Loll. She is the founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture. We're going to be talking about a very controversial subject, which is surrogacy, egg donation, sperm donation. We're also going to be talking about this movement or this big industry of transitioning children using hormone blockers in all of that. As always, this episode is brought to you by good ranchers. We had our good ranchers last night. We had an amazing rib-eye steak with some butternut squash and some green beans, and it was so, so good. Thegood ranchers.com slash alley for an amazing deal. All right. Super excited for you to hear this conversation

with Jennifer. She's a very insightful person on this controversial topic or on these controversial topics. I know even as Christians and conservatives, we don't all agree on surrogacy, on IVF, and things like that. But it's so important for us to be asking these questions that no one really wants to ask because it's politically incorrect in a lot of circles. And we're going to run into the controversy and we're going to talk about a tough topic. And hopefully you will gain both clarity and courage from it. So without further ado, here is our new friend, Jennifer Law. Ms. Lal, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. Well, good morning from California. I'm Jennifer Law and I am the president of a

nonprofit organization that's based in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Center for Bioethics and Culture. And in a previous life, I was a pediatric critical care nurse for many, many years. And then I went back to graduate school to study bioethics. And tell me why you are focused on this subject of surrogacy. What got you interested in this? Yeah. Well, actually, it was really during the heyday of George Bush's presidency when we were debating all the surplus human embryos that were going to be destroyed for possible research to develop cures, secure people's diseases. And of course, as a nurse, I was very interested in the ethics around that. And I started asking myself, how was it that we came to have what is now almost over a million human embryos

frozen in the United States? And that led me sort of down the rabbit hole of looking into assisted reproduction. So making babies in the laboratory is all part of assist. reproduction. And in my work, I expanded that to encompass third-party reproduction. So women being offered money to sell their eggs or men being offered money to donate, donate in quotations, sperm. And of course, surrogate pregnancy. So I've written, traveled the world, spoken, produced quite a few documentary films on the whole area of assisted reproduction. the ethics of it, the good, the bad, the ugly of third-party conception as well. And tell us what is the problem with surrogacy, because even though this is a Christian conservative podcast

and you would think that a lot of people know, the fact is that many people don't know the problems with it. As you've talked about, there's a lot of money behind it, but tell us some of the ethical issues with third-party reproduction. Yeah, well, I think most people first just don't realize that a surrogate pregnancy is, a much higher risk pregnancy than a woman's own natural, spontaneously conceived pregnancy. So, in fact, my colleague and I, Callie Fell, both of us, both of us are nurses, took it upon herself during COVID to interview 97 gestational surrogates in the United States. And we compared their own pregnancies with their surrogate pregnancies.

And it's already in the medical literature, but our research has sort of expanded on that and underscore that these are high risk, high complicated pregnancies. And anybody who's been pregnant or anybody who knows somebody's been pregnant, we know that if the woman is in a high-risk pregnancy, the baby or in the case of surrogacy, often they're carrying twins. Babies are at risk also. So that is right out of the gate to me just a deal breaker. We don't have any business asking young women to put themselves in risky situations. And especially when we're paying them, we don't pay organ donors. and we know that being an organ donor carries its own risk, you're undergoing a major surgical

procedure. And we're also putting these children at risk that are developing in the surrogate mother's womb. And in California, we've had surrogates die. In Idaho, we've had surrogates die. We've had several, I think, five or six women in the United States across the United States die. And women in the global south have died. So these are risky pregnancies.

So whether you're religious, you're not religious, whether you're conservative, whether you're a liberal progressive, you know, I work right alongside with Gloria Steinem in New York State to try to oppose then Governor Cuomo's the legalization of commercial surrogacy in that state. Wow. And tell us how this process works exactly, because a lot of people might push back and say, well, sure, there are risks that come with everything. This might be riskier for the baby and for the mother, but there's consent. And consent has kind of become the only standard of morality and ethics that a lot of people say that they have these days. So if a woman is consenting to it, and if this is how she is making money, then what's the big deal? She's taking on the risks

voluntarily. Yeah, I think, again, it gets back to the proper role of medicine. I mean, when was a time when a doctor asked you, even perhaps with money, incentivize you to take risk with your own body. And you've seen the absolute pushback in the United States around vaccine mandates, you know, forcing people to do things with their body. So, you know, doctors are not in the business of telling us to do things that are harmful to us. And they're not in the business of offering money for us to do things that are harmful to us. That's one of the main reasons why we do not allow organ donors to be paid. We don't want money to be a coercive element in the whole area of informed consent. So, you know, this, you know, this sort of argument of, it's a very

libertarian based on contracts. You know, I want to get in a car. I want to go to the, you know, the car dealership. I want to buy a car. I want to drive a car when I know that there's risk to driving a car and that people die every day from being, you know, behind the wheel of a car or being a passenger, being hit by a drunk driver. We know that. So we take those kind of risks. But those kind of calculus, if you will, do not play a role or shouldn't play a role in medical decision making. We want people to have as much decisions as they possibly can. And we have a lot of things that medicine won't do. You know, I can't just walk in today and say, you know, do X, Y, and Z because I'm paying you. And I've done my research on Google and the internet. And I want you to do X, Y, and Z.

Now, we've seen the corrosion of medicine where that is having an impact. You know, if you look at the transing of children, the whole area of transgender medicine. You know, chopping off reproductive organs, chopping off, you know, healthy breasts. And we should be rightly appalled that there are medical doctors who are willing to just do that kind of stuff. So our work is pushing back on that and saying that's not medicine. And medicine has never and should never be in the business of allowing people to do things that are medically risky.

And I want to talk to. That they have no medical need for us. Right. You know, it's one thing if you have cancer and the doctor is saying chemotherapy is very risky. You might die from the chemotherapy, but your option is to also die from cancer. But in the case of a surrogate, she has no medical need to do this. Right, right. And I don't think that a lot of people are considering that. And they're certainly not considering that there is a heightened risk, an even higher risk from surrogacy pregnancy than there is from your regular pregnancy. But I want to,

I want to hear before we get into so-called gender reassignment surgery and your medical perspective on that, because I've seen you talk a lot about that subject as well, I want to know what is the, what's the process if two men decide that they want children of their own and they want to hire a surrogate to do that because that would be one of the only ways to have a child that has any of their DNA. how does that process work? Yeah, well, let's use Elton John because he and his partner, husband, David Furnish, came to California twice, my state, and gay men almost overwhelmingly buy eggs. We don't even talk about the women who are asked to sell their eggs. They almost always buy eggs from another woman and rent the womb of another because that's by definition the gestational surrogate. The gestational surrogate is just the womb. And is that for ethical reasons? and I use scare quotes?

Like, what's the reason that they separate the egg donor from the gestator? Overwhelmingly, they want to make sure that neither one of these women can make a claim to having any maternal rights. You just provided the genetic material. You're just the womb. You have no rights. So legally, and we've had in, you know, U.S. law cases of disputed surrogacy, where the surrogate mother changes her mind and says, I cannot surrender the baby, even though I'm contractually bound

to. So I think it's a legal maneuver to make sure that neither one of these women has a right to this child. She has no legal standing to make the case that she is the birth mother or the genetic mother. So you're, you know, you're exploiting, if you will, and risking the health of two women. And again, for money. So the corruption of this decision making and this informed consent is corrupted. And in both of these women's health is put in jeopardy. So both of these women have to take high-dose fertility drugs for different procedures. In the case of the egg donor, you know, she's being put on high-dose fertility drugs to produce lots and lots of eggs, and they will then surgically remove from her. In the case of the surrogate, she is taking

fertility drugs and hormones, if you will, to prepare her uterus to then receive this embryo-triac. transfer, you know, the putting this embryo into her body. And what we're seeing in the medical literature, the reason that this woman is having high risk, things like preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, maternal diabetes, is because her body is recognizing this is foreign. Again, think of the organ donor. Right. You know, we can't just put my kidney in you because I want to help you and save your life. We have to make sure you're not going to reject it. And so that's that mother instantly her body says, this isn't my baby. This is foreign.

And she develops an immune response to that. So the medication and all the procedures and stuff are putting them at risk. And then once the surrogate is pregnant and that pregnancy is confirmed, she still will stay on these hormones for a period of time until they think that the embryo has really implanted. The uterine lining has done everything the uterine lining needs to do. And then we're not even talking about the psychological risk. that these women undergo. And the secondary consequences of the children. You know, do we want little girls and little boys seeing mommies have babies that

then they give away or they sell? Do we want our little children to think, well, this is what mommy's doing, you know, little girls do when they grow up? The impact on marriage, I've seen this has been really negatively impacted on some marriages that fall apart. You know, men feel like, wow, my wife has to sell her body. She has to carry another man's child because I'm not. I can't financially provide.

And so there's all these layers of things. In our particular research, we found that surrogate mothers have more postpartum depression with their surrogate pregnancies. And we think, well, they go home with empty arms. Right. You know, they go home with breasts that are full of milk meant to nurse a child. And that doesn't happen. Right.

And tell us, going back to, you mentioned Elton John as an example when we started talking about this. Tell us about his process to kind of shed some light on how this works. Like, is it a catalog? How did they contact these women? Yeah, there are, there really are catalogs. You know, good old Mitt Romney got sort of in trouble when he talked about binders of women during his presidential campaign. And literally fertility agencies have binders of women. So, you know, you can shop for the whole genetic profile, you will, of the egg don't. are smart, pretty tall, speaks of foreign language, high SATs, whatever. The surrogate mothers are groomed.

My word, they're very much groomed. They're told they're going to be on a journey. And so you'll see the profile of the surrogate mother is much different. In the United States, a majority of surrogate mothers are military wives. And one guest on our podcast actually was a military wife who has done, I think, two or three surrogacies now. and then went to work for the surrogate agency to recruit other military wives. So the profile of the surrogate mother in these binders of women is going to be much different than the egg donor that Elton and perhaps David Furnished provided.

And I believe if I'm remembering correctly, and this is also common in same-sex male third-party arrangements, oftentimes the surrogate is pregnant with two embryos And each man has created an embryo using his own sperm. So this gets to the sort of designer element of it that, you know, Elton got a baby that was genetically related to him. And David got a baby that was genetically related to him. And the surrogate was basically carrying, you know, siblings from two different fathers because it's kind of bizarre. Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.

So I don't have a medical background, which is exactly why I brought you on, but as the mom of 2Ks, a toddler and a baby, I am familiar with the process and something that you are told over and over again. And you just kind of instinctively know, but the nurses and the doctors reiterate how important skin to skin is as soon as that baby is born. Why is that important? Because you are the only home that that baby has ever known. And there are psychological benefits, as well as physical benefits to your baby being close to you. And the seconds right after birth, this is scientifically proven. And it's also just common sense. This is something that we have always known even before the dawn of probably, you know, modern medical science. And yet, you'll hear the same people who claim to be very pro science and would probably agree. with that or they would also maybe advise a woman, hey, make sure that you're doing skin to skin and starting to breastfeed as soon as that baby is born. That's so important. But for whatever reason, they suspend that knowledge,

that scientific principle when it comes to talking about gay couples, taking the child or children from the surrogate mother. All of a sudden we have to pretend that that fact that we have known for probably all of human history doesn't exist and that it's not a big deal, that that bonding that women are preached about constantly, or preached to about constantly, that it just doesn't exist, that it's fine, that that baby is going to be okay, taken away not just from his or her biological mother, but then the only wound, the only home he or she has ever known for nine months, that the lack of bonding to the mother

or to the gestator, if you will, is not going to have any. negative impact on that child whatsoever, when we know for a fact and have always known for a fact that it has a negative impact. I mean, there's that very famous book, Primal Wound, that talks about the internal wound that children who are given up for adoption, even though adoption is a beautiful, redemptive, wonderful thing, they still suffer from the detachment that happened at a young age from their mother and from their father. Why are we pretending for the sake of, I guess, political correctness that that that initial bond between mother and child just doesn't matter when it comes to surrogacy. Yeah. I mean, why? Because we want what we

want since the beginning of time. Our natures are selfish. We talk about now we have a right to a child when in fact we do not have a right to a child. We have a right to our own child. When I saw the pictures of Pete Buttigieg and his husband with their new twins. And, you know, they've never disclosed how they came about getting a twin boy and a girl. I have my hunches, but, you know, we saw them in the hospital with those little babies on their chest. Those babies don't know them. I've interviewed surrogates that at least the intended parents, the intended parents are the parents that that child is going to eventually go home to, to be raised by, acknowledge that. So I've had surrogates that have been given teddy bears and blankets and things that they're to sleep with

every night. So when that baby goes home, that baby goes home with those blankets and stuffed animals that have that mother's smell on them. You know, they've been told to record themselves reading stories so that when that baby goes home with these strangers, they can play those audio tapes of that, which again is baloney. You know, I always joke, and I use the example in California and probably many states, you know, we have animal cruelty law. When we, my husband and I went and got our newborn puppy, we had to wait by law eight weeks because it would be seen as in a cruelty to that little puppy to remove him from his mother until that eight week mark had happened. And in the case of, you know, my years and years of working in hospitals as a pediatric critical care nurse, we moved heaven and earth to allow mothers to be with that newborn baby if it was born. severely premature and had to be in a, you know, on life support and in an incubator, you know,

having them, you know, put their hands in the little peephole so they could touch their child and talk to their child and sing to their child. And I remember as a nurse, you know, taking these babies that are hooked up to every single machine and out of the isolate into the mother's arm, if only for just a few minutes because that was so important. Because that, you know, as Nancy Varyer, the author of Primal Woon, who happens to be my neighbor, says that that trauma is real. It's real to the mother, as evidenced in our research, it shows these higher rates of postpartum depression, and it's real to the child. And to just wish it away, I think it's cruel.

It's cruelty to these little babies and it's cruel to these women. You know, the sexual revolution in the United States and in the West in general has moved very quickly, especially since about 2015, since Obergefell, all of these things that, you know, people were called conspiracy theorists and fear mongers for warning

about have really come to fruition in a lot of ways. The arbitrary redefinition of the family for the sake of the sexual revolution has been implemented

at the expense of the most vulnerable and probably the most marginalized group in the world, and that is children. And the only reason that is the case is because children can't consent, because they don't have a voice, because they can't push back, they can't speak up and say, you know what, I have a right to a mother and a father, which is, of course, what I believe, that every child has a right to a mother and a father. And because they can't articulate that, because they can't speak that when they're babies, because they can't say, hey, I want to go back and bond with my mom, because they might not be able to be able to articulate the questions that they have when they're

toddlers about where they come from and how they miss their mother or father, this person that they have never met before. We think that they're okay or because they have happy lives or they are taken in by a rich couple. We think that, well, look, they're fine. They get good education. They're taking care of. They're provided for.

but that is denying as we've talked about this innate characteristic in all of us to want to know who we are, where we come from, to whom we belong. Can you talk a little bit more about the psychological and potential psychological impact on children that this has to be separated from their parents, either if they're, if they come from a sperm donor, a dad that they never know, or an egg donor. donor and then a surrogate. Yeah. And, you know, Hollywood likes to tell us, because they put out movies called The Kids Are All Right, that this doesn't matter. And we're seeing, you know, I often say that this whole area of

assisted reproduction in general, as well as in particular third party conception is one of the largest human social experiments of our time, just waiting for the train to crash. And, you know, nowhere is that more evident than. in the voices of those that are called donor conceived. You know, people that are on this planet because somebody donated or sold their sperm and or eggs or rented their womb. And this group of now young adults and even getting older because, you know, especially sperm donation has been around much longer than egg donation.

You know, the first test tube baby was Louise Brown. And then five years after Louise Brown, we had the first IV up baby donated through donor their eggs, whereas we had years and years before that of sperm donation. You know, they're growing up and they're using the power of social media. They're all doing their 23 and me testing. I just got a text the other day from a donor conceived person who found another half-sibling through DNA testing. What was sad is that when they found this other half-sibling, this half-sibling at that point

did not know that they were donor-conceived. So talk about sort of a bomb being dropped in your lap to all of a sudden find out that the mom and dad that you were raised with your whole life had lied to you and were in fact not your biological parents. They're lobbying for laws to be changed. Australia in particular, you know, has been able to be successful in passing legislation that doesn't allow anonymity. You know, some countries have laws that don't allow sperm donors to donate more than six times. I think more than one time is too many. But, you know, so it's going to be the perhaps the children as they grow up. You know, just think about finding out that, you know, somebody was paid $125 to masturbate.

And that's your conception story. You know, just, you know, the fact that you might have 10, 15, 20 siblings out there. The fact that your parents lied to you, the fact that nobody seems to care about your rights. when, you know, everybody's talking about my rights, my rights, my rights, my rights. And these people literally have a fake birth certificate. It's a legal document. It should be a legal document. Therefore, it shouldn't be fake.

It shouldn't be full of false information. So I think it will be the casualties that we'll see in the young people. And, you know, we're also seeing a lot more research because assisted reproduction is relatively new technology, a lot more research that's showing that children created through these technologies have their own set of unique health problems. We're just not understanding yet why that is. Is it because of the technology? Is it because the man and the woman who were having difficulty conceiving that normally

nature or evolution or God didn't want that couple to pass on something? We're ignoring that and we're forcing this couple to conceive through this new modern technology. But again, it gets back to the point that this is one of the largest social human. and experiments over time. Yes, it is. And it just kind of goes back to that arbitrary redefinition of the family for the sake of a new era of accepted definitions of marriage and family. And I like to say that kids are always the unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments.

And we see, I mean, obviously we see throughout. human history, the natural definition of the family. And there's so much hubris in saying that now, after all of this millennia of the family being one way, that we can redestruct it or reconstruct it and we can redefine it without any consequences. It's kind of like that I think it was Chesterton that talked about the, um, the metaphor of a like wall in a field and a liberal would go up to it and say, okay, there's no reason for this wall or for this cage or for this fence to be here. Let's go ahead and take it down, whereas the conservative would ask, why is it there? And it seems like in this case and in several cases, progressive simply tear down what has always been, institutions,

the family, because they see no use in it. Instead of asking, if science tells us that it's supposed to be one way, won't there be sociological, psychological, emotional and physical repercussions to that. It seems like not very many people are asking those questions, I guess, because it's politically unpopular. No one wants to be called homophobic. No one wants to be called a bigot. That's probably the biggest fear that a lot of people have. Is that why so many doctors are unwilling to ask those questions, are unwilling to, I think, uphold their Hippocratic oath to these women and to these babies, kind of incentivizing them to take risks that they shouldn't really be taking? Yeah, I think it gets back to some things I said at the beginning is that

this is a corruption of medicine. You know, when I left clinical nursing, and I always worked in pretty large academic hospitals, so we would have a lot of medical students, we'd have interns, we'd have residents, as well as the seasoned, you know, career physicians that were teaching all these students. And I used to ask them, you know, what did they see their role as, um, a physician. And, you know, I saw that shifting to when I finally left clinical nursing, you know, they were getting no ethics training in universities anymore during their medical school training. Or if they were offered ethics, it was, you know, it was an elective. So they didn't even have to have it. But then, again, ethics is like, well, what kind of ethics are you teaching, too?

So that can be a whole problematic thing because ethics is kind of eroded as well. But, you know, you know, one one young resident told me, he said, I'm a service provider, you know, and my, you know, my, my patients are my customers and my clients. So I just offer them what they want. And I think, wow, that would be like me taking my car in and saying, well, here, this is what I want you to do. My car's not writing, writing correctly and it's making all these noises. But, you know, I think you need to, you know, put in leather seats and tint my windows. Yeah. And then you go, okay, well, you're my client. and that's what you want. I'll just give you what I want. And also this area of medicine is very, very lucrative. And we've seen that with the whole trans debate. You know, this is a new field of

medicine. Assisted reproductive technology has not been around that long. It's a new field of medicine. And it came about, you know, just sort of arrived under the scene as this miracle thing that was going to help people have children that so desperately wanted children. And it's very expensive. It has a high failure rate. So it's not on. comment on to hear women that go through many, many, many rounds of IVF, never ever get a baby. You know, the famous comedian Gilda Radner went through six rounds of IVF, never was able to conceive and then went on and died of avarian cancer, wink, wink, risk fertility drugs, cancer, reproductive cancers.

New York Times had an article many years ago that show that, you know, the fertility doctors at big university hospitals like NYU and Columbia and Stanford, those are cash cows. They bring in the big bucks. They're like the football team for the university. So, you know, money changes everything, right? Yeah. And why are you going to stop doing something? And why are you going to do research?

We don't have a lot of research in this field, one, because it's new. And two, why would they want to do research to find out if there's problems? Because that stops the flow of money. Yeah. And, you know, there's no research because they don't want their research. And then they pull this manipulative rhetorical trick that they say there's no, evidence showing. They'll say there's no evidence showing that kids who are taken away from their biological or mother or biological mother or father through surrogacy and sperm donation have psychological

damage. There's there's no evidence that shows that this is bad for individuals, bad for society. And that's because, I mean, there is evidence, but that's because so many people are afraid to study it. They're afraid to even find any kind of evidence. And if they did find evidence, they probably wouldn't want to publish it. Because again, it's politically incorrect. And no one wants to go against the LGBTQ lobby. And look, there are people who are, you know, very pro-LGBQ, whatever, who can still objectively say, look, you know, this is not good.

This is not good for women. This is not good for men and fathers. This is not good for children who then grew up to be adults. This is not a good situation that we have now manufactured in the name of acceptance, but at the expense of the health of society. And so I guess I'm a little pessimistic. I mean, I'm optimistic because people like you are fighting for this so hard and are trying to reveal really what's behind it. But because this is big business, like you did a documentary, you did a movie in 2018 called Big Fertility. Because there's so much behind this and this is just

such a behemoth industry, it's hard to imagine how it's going to change. Like you said, money changes everything. It can corrupt things. It can prevent the truth from being revealed. And so, like, what are you seeing on that front? Are people kind of waking up to the madness of this? Or do you just kind of seeing it more, are you seeing it more shrouded in darkness than ever before? Well, I'm the forever optimist. That's why I've been able to do this work for so much. And I do hate the corruption of medicine and the injustice that keeps me going. You know, egg donors are told there's no evidence that, you know, this is risky to your health. And they should be told we've never studied this.

So we have no idea if this is risky. Yeah, right. But I get emails all the time, Allie. I got an email just, I think, last month. From a young woman, she said, I'm a single, you know, low income under the poverty level mother in, I think it was like Vermont. or New Hampshire or Maine, somewhere over there. And she said, I just had signed up with an agency to do a surrogate pregnancy because I needed the money. And I stumbled upon your films and your YouTube channel.

And I'm so thankful for your work. I get emails all the time from young women who said, I saw an egg exploitation. Egg exploitation is my film. That's a feature film on egg donor. You know, that I won't sell my eggs now. Thank you for your work. So I know that there's those stories. Again, I don't have statistics to quote you that this many people change.

their mind and no longer are in favor of this. You know, I'm always trying to reach the people, the purchasers. You know, if you're an in for a couple, please, please, don't ask another woman to have a baby for you. Please don't ask another young girl to sell her eggs to you. Just stop it. You know, there's all kinds of other ways for you to fulfill your desires to mother and father children that don't have to risk another woman's life, family.

I mean, it agrees me to know that we have surrogate mothers in the U.S., their husbands lost their wives. These children lost their mothers in order to help you. Please, let's stop that. You know, you have, I would imagine, a pretty large audience of people that go to church. What was the last time you ever heard any of this talked about in church? When we have in Genesis, the first story of infertility in the barren womb, you know, please, Let's talk about this.

We have all this new modern technology to address a problem that's been with us since the beginning of time. And our people that are church-going, God-fearing people aren't talking about this. And this is rampant in the churches. I'm following so many surrogates on Instagram. And in their profile says, you know, I love Jesus. I love, I'm a Christian. God called me to do this. I'm like, no, stop.

Why is it that a lot of Christian women don't seem to understand the exploitation that is innate in this process and the ethical, and I would argue, biblical issues with the surrogacy industry? Why do you think that is? Bad theology? Yeah. I guess that's the easiest answer. And, you know, even women who aren't perhaps identical. I mean, we see this in Catholic, you know, because I speak to so many groups. Mormons and Catholics are big surrogate people.

You know, you know, we love babies. We love helping people. Women by nature, whether they be religious or not, we're just kind of, you know, we're, we're maternal. We feel sad when people want children. We go, oh, they'd be such great parents. let me help them. So, and, you know, and unfortunately, a lot of people in churches are caught up in the money stuff, too. I mean, not that all surrogates are paid.

But, you know, it's like, hey, it's win-win. I help her. I help them. They help me. And we're all just one big happy family. But yeah, I think it boils down to bad theology. Yeah. And, you know, what is our body for?

And who is our body for? so whether, you know, we don't have a good proper understanding from an anthropological standpoint or from a Christian worldview standpoint. You know, what and again, you know, why aren't people able to understand that on their own, even if they're not being taught it in their church? People say, well, surrogacy isn't in the Bible. And I go, well, yeah, it kind of is. You know, read the story of Sarah and Abraham. didn't go too well. Yeah, that's very true.

So many of the issues that we're discussing today, issues of identity, issues of human nature, issues of origin, really, go back to Genesis 1 through 3. So many of the social, cultural conversations that we're having today are really rooted in what people think about where we came from and what we are for and what the human body is and who says what the human body is. You mentioned what we are to do with our bodies and just the understanding of that. I do find that a lot of professing Christians don't seem to understand that the body is, as scripture says, a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 619, talks about glorifying God with our body because we were bought with a price. Really kind of the secular view of the body sees it as, secondary to who we say that we are or what we want to do, kind of our self-identification,

but really our body and our identity and what we do with our bodies and how we feel on the inside, all of these are inextricably intertwined, which is exactly why, at least in my amateur opinion, why you do see so much even greater levels of postpartum depression in the women who give up their babies and, of course, the psychological issues that you see with kids, not knowing, not knowing where they come from as well. Now, how do you see this connected with what is happening in medicine among children who are, quote unquote, transitioning into the opposite gender? Are these things intertwined in any way?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is just, again, not understanding of our bodies, how we were created how we were made, how we were designed, what is the purpose of our body. So this notion that I was born in the wrong body, you're not born in the wrong body, you're born in the body you were born in. You cannot change sex. You know, you can surgically remove things. You can put harmful drugs inside your body to block puberty or to make a woman grow facial hair or to make a man, you know, become less hairy. But you're still genetically, biologically, male or female.

You know, I love, you know, in our film, our most recent film, Transmission, what's the rush to reassign gender? We, you know, we interviewed Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who talks very, you know, poignantly and very forcefully on, you know, human biology is real. And we can't wish it away and we can't alter it. You know, if there's a crime scene and there's blood evidence left at the crime scene, the police are going to know whether they're looking for a male suspect or a female suspect, not somebody who identifies as a male or no, somebody who dresses like a male.

So it's a level of absurdity that we can do all these things. And again, medicine has just happily jumped onto this bandwagon because it's another field of, well, I'm just a service provider. And if you want me to do this surgery on you or prescribe these medications, find my me and I'm happy because I can laugh all the way to the bank. But we will see a train wreck as we are seeing in the area of assisted reproduction with, you know, shattered lives and broken bodies and people being harmed. Just look around the world and the laws that are in place in countries that do not allow

any of this. And if you look at the basis of those laws, it's because people are harmed and people are exploited. It's not because we're mean and we don't care about people. I don't want anything I'm saying today to be misconstrued that I'm not sympathetic to people who want children and can't. I'm very sympathetic. But I draw a very bright line that we cannot just, you know, wish our things away and put our problems onto somebody else and let them bear the burden of harm and exploitation. And in the case of children being medically and surgically transitioned, it's unconscionable. In my mind, doctors need to lose their license.

Yeah. People need to go to jail for doing the things that I read about and I hear about that people are doing all in the name of medicine. This is not medicine. Yes. This is butchery. This is a butchery. I'm sorry. It absolutely is.

And I mean, when you think about that lady who transitioned and it's hard, I don't even like using the language because it seems like I'm giving into the premise. I don't believe no matter what kind of surgery or any amount of hormones that you have that it's actually possible to transition. you are still biologically male or female, but on the cover of the New Yorker, there was this woman who transitioned into a man. And it was so disturbing and just truly heartbreaking to look at. I mean, you're looking at someone who has a beard, had her breast cut off, has kind of chest hair, and you can tell has a little bit of broad shoulders, a female waist, female hips, looks still like a woman is probably never going to fully look like a man. And of course, that is especially true for a man who tries to look like a woman.

And it's just really heartbreaking, like the disassociative feelings and the dysphoric feelings that someone must feel to put themselves through that. But also, the praise that they get from society for doing that so that people who do struggle with different kinds of mental disorders can kind of look at the attention and the praise and the accolades that someone is getting for butchering their bodies, as you put it. And they think, well, that's how I'm going to gain some kind of acceptance as well. And I know that might be a controversial to take, but I do think that is what is behind a lot of young people in particular who are all naturally looking, especially for belonging in an affirmation, why there is just this

new huge wave of self-identity as something other than the gender that they were born in. Of course, Abigail Schreier has written about the social contagion aspect to all of this. But I think that it wouldn't have gone as far as it has and it would be able to stop in its tracks if there were more doctors who simply stood up and said, look, this is not medically right. They can maybe even leave their own personal moral views out of it and just say, look, this isn't medically, ethically right for us to be pushing children, especially into this. Here are the risks of it. But there just don't seem to be enough loud voices. And I'm guessing the reasoning behind it is what money, politics, the same thing as the reasons for pushing big fertility. Is that what it is?

Yeah, I think, you know, I just have to say something about that cover magazine that you brought up to, because I just want to say, woe to us, you know, that the culture has become so depraved that this is celebrated on the cover of a magazine instead of people, you know, being moved to tears and being grieved by this kind of, again, abuse. But yeah, I think it's fear. where are the, you know, the Old Testament prophets that are willing to be out there screaming in the streets? It's, it's, you know, I read the beautiful article yesterday that Dr. Jordan Peterson posted on why he's, you know, leaving his academic post in Toronto where he was, you know, scolding everybody from, you know, corporate America or big corporations, not just corporate America. Hollywood, the media. Is it because people just want to be popular? they want to be invited to the big parties. You know, I don't get invited on a lot of shows because even people that are friendly to

what I believe in don't want to talk about it because they get kind of, I don't know what kind of, you know, coals will be heaped on you, Allie, for having me as a guest on your show. Yeah, but people. We're used to it. We run into the controversy. We don't care. Yeah, well, that's good. But yeah, there's a few of us out there.

We don't, I don't care. I wake up every day and going, I don't care. I can't get fired from my job. I mean, I run my own organization. I'm sure my donors could stop funding our work, but I would still do it. Right. I would just do, you know, I'd have to figure out creative ways. But I do, again, back to the fact that I am optimistic.

I think we'll win. You know, we know the end of the story. I think the more we're bold, you know, we will gather more and more people that will go with us. You've seen that with, you know, I just love watching what the parents were able to do in the state of Virginia. Yeah. And we see parents who are just in this whole transient of kids. You know, we're getting ready to have an event in a few weeks in my office in the Bay Area on dealing with the transing of children.

And we've already almost sold out in the events a month away because so many people are hungry for the truth. They're hungry for to fight the like-minded people so that we don't live in our little, you know, what do you believe? Do you agree like me? Yeah. So we'll smoke them out. Yeah. We'll win. I don't know. Are you familiar with Katie Faust and the organization, Them Before Us?

Oh, yeah. I know I've known Katie for years. So yeah. Well, I just appreciate what both of you do and talking about this stuff. I mean, we talk about the gender subject so much on this podcast. I'm sure you also know Brandon Show Walter. He is. Yeah. He's a journalist and he's talked about it really is butchering when you're talking about what's being done to. adults, but also minors, teenagers, sometimes in some states, without the consent of their parents. I mean, it's a huge travesty. But I think, honestly, the even more taboo subject is not the gender stuff, but is actually the surrogacy stuff. I honestly think that is more controversial to talk about because, as we mentioned, there are a lot of people, you know, on our side, people who are Christians. and I'm not, I don't know if you are a conservative, but people who call themselves Christian conservatives who don't realize that there are any problems with this, who because, like you said,

they like babies, they like families, they want everyone to experience the joy of parenting, which I do too. They don't want to talk about this and they certainly do not want to talk about the ethical problems with IVF. And I know I'm kind of looping back to something that we already talked about, but I do want to get your take on that. they're an ethical way to do in vitro fertilization? Oh, I wish you would have asked me that sooner because that's a whole other talk.

It's still risky. You know, I raise all kinds of predatory arguments against assisted reproduction. It's very expensive. You know, is that being a good, wise steward of your resources when you know that a take-home IVF baby is a six-figure baby? These are issues of poverty versus wealth, you know, low-income women who have no insurance and can't conceive, don't have access to this very expensive technology that overwhelmingly is covered very little by private insurance and most of the time it's out of pocket. You see a lot of go-fund me accounts. The same risks apply as far as the fertility drugs.

You know, I said Gilda Radner early on, you know, went through six rounds of IVF to have her own child with her then husband Gilda Radner and was not. successful in conceiving and then went on and died of ovarian cancer. So it's well documented in the medical literature that fertility drugs do have links to various kinds of reproductive cancers and other cancers too, colon cancer and such. You know, there is this problem with a world full of children that needs homes. So perhaps, you know, if you can't conceive and you don't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on maybe a large failed. technology that might cause you to have ill health. Maybe you want to welcome a child into your

own home that needs a home. And again, the research coming out now on children that are conceived through these technologies is not, you know, a rubber stamp seal of approval that these children are a okay fine. You know, we see problems with heart disease, obesity, various kinds of cancers coming out in some of these studies, whether these will bear out to be, in fact, true or not because this is a social experiment. You know, we're experimenting on these children and studying them as they get older and grow up. So we're learning as we go. So all of those kind of things come together to say, do you really want to do this?

Yeah. There are a lot of things to consider. And I think the point that we kind of have to end on just because, like you said, it's another huge topic is that not enough people are publicly asking those questions. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it is. is beneficial. Technology in itself doesn't have a morality. It doesn't really have a limiting principle. If something can be done, it will be done. So it's up to human beings. And it certainly is up to Christians to lead the charge of asking the ethics and the morality and the impact

of these different kinds of technologies. And I know a lot of women who have conceived through IVF, they have wonderful, beautiful children who, of course, are made in the image of God and are wonderful people and these people are wonderful mothers. They're simply are questions to ask about the ethics of it. And I have heard great discussions and debates that I know local churches actually are having about, you know, is there an ethical way to do IVF? There are some ways that are worse than others. And then there's embryo adoption. So many questions when it comes to reproductive technology that I think more people should be having and I'm very thankful. I'm very thankful that you are and that you took the time to come talk to

us about this today. A lot of people have these questions and your courage will give other people courage. So thank you for that. Where can they, where can they find you? How can they follow you and watch the movies that you've produced? Yeah. Let me just, if I could just add one more thing and then I'll give my commercial. Yeah. What I like to tell people that are struggling with infertility is you know, get yourself a really good diagnosis as your first step. I'm not Catholic, you know, my Catholic brothers and sisters would love to talk about napro technology and the ways that perhaps napro technology can help couples conceive. But the last thing you want is a doctor who pushes you straight to the IVF doctor. Get a good diagnosis. Find out what's going

on. And there's all kinds of things that can be done before you even get on that IVF superhigh that might be beneficial in helping a couple to more naturally conceive. But that starts with just a good proper diagnosis of both the man and the woman. Because we know that fertility affects men as well as women and sometimes both of us. Now to my commercial, we do have a YouTube channel. It's the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. And all of the films that I've produced in many, many different languages are all available for free as of this last summer on our YouTube channel,

as well as lots of contact, you know, interviews that I've done with surrogates and donor-conceived people and such. Follow our podcast, Venus Rising. Venus Rising. It's on all the platforms, Spotify, iTunes, Potomatic, Amazon, everywhere. And I am very active on Twitter. So people can follow me on Twitter just at Jennifer Law. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jennifer.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, me too. I'm glad it finally worked out for us to chat together. Yes. Do it again. Yes, definitely. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.