Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 554 | IVF, Embryo Adoption, & Surrogacy: Answering the Hard Questions | Guest: Jennifer Lahl

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Today we welcome our friend Jennifer Lahl back to the show by popular demand. Jennifer is the founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and as you may know, has dedicated herself to raising awareness about the ethical problems and potential dangers of 'big fertility' and the surrogacy industry. Last time, we talked about the corruption surrounding this industry, and today we're going into the ethics and philosophy behind IVF, frozen embryos, and surrogacy. As science progresses, more and more aspects of childbearing can be replicated artificially, which raises serious concerns about how we view women, family, and life itself. Unfortunately, there is major financial incentive to keep the myth of surrogacy going, as companies stand to make huge profits, and the women they deceive are convinced they're doing something morally right. --- (0:00) Introduction (3:23) Interview with Jennifer Lahl (5:00) Questions about surrogacy (39:17) Let's talk about IVF - what do we need to consider? --- Today's Sponsors: Chamonix by Genucel helps you look younger & promises results that make you smile —guaranteed — or 100% of your money back! Go to LoveGenucel.com/ALLIE right now to save 60% off their most popular package! Good Ranchers is giving away 40 free chicken breasts to every order that uses the code 'ALLIE'. That's a $150 value for free! Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use code 'ALLIE' at checkout! CBDistillery has over 2 million customers & if you haven't discovered the power of CBD, you're missing out! Go to CBDistillery.com & order online with no prescription required. Enter promo code 'ALLIE' for 20% off! --- Previous Episodes Mentioned: Ep 553: My Family's COVID Experience & Why I Lost Faith in the 'Experts' https://apple.co/35ocg8N Ep 552: "Big Fertility" & the Truth Behind The Surrogacy Industry | Guest: Jennifer Lahl https://apple.co/3oqGpLF --- 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. I hope everyone is having a wonderful week so far. If you have not listened to yesterday's episode on my family's experience with COVID and how I lost faith in the so-called experts, go listen to that. We are talking about IVF with the same guest, Jennifer Law, that we talked with last week about surrogacy. And this episode, as always, is brought to you by our good friends at Good Ranchers. Get you some better than organic chicken and some craft beef sent to your front door.

It'll make your life a whole lot easier and better. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash alley. So like I said, we are talking to Jennifer Law. if you have not listened to last week's episode last Thursday where we talked specifically about surrogacy, the ethical and moral questions that we should be thinking through when it comes to surrogacy in particular as Christians. She has been in this realm, studying this realm, advocating in this realm for over 20 years. And you can listen to all of her credentials and her stories and her story in that last episode, and you can listen to more about her work in this area in

the last episode and more about surrogacy. Now we are going to be talking a little bit about surrogacy, but we're also going to be talking about IVF. And look, I understand this is a very sensitive topic. This is a very personal topic. And I understand that there's going to be disagreement on this subject. Please know going into this that my desire, my heart is not condemnation. It is not judgment. It is not exclusion. It is not condescension. It is love. And it is a desire for clarity. It is a desire to have courage in an area that people, Christian, non-Christian, conservative liberal really don't want to talk about because it is so personal because we are dealing with such sensitive topics. But because we're talking about babies, because we're talking about

natural processes that have become more technological and artificial in nature, there's so much for us to think through when it comes to the biblical basis for this, when it comes to the morals and ethics of all of this. And so we're going to be thinking through and talking through a lot of lot of those questions today. If you disagree or if you have a different perspective, that is okay. Feel free to reach out to Jennifer and you can reach out to me on Instagram. I might not see your message, but if I do, I'll try to respond to you. It's okay. We are waiting into what we know is a controversial area and we're having what I think is a really, really important and a very informative discussion. I know it's going to get you to at least think about this, if not change

your mind. So without further ado, here is our new friend, Jennifer Law. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us again. You are back by popular demand. I had such a big reaction and response to our last episode, overwhelmingly positive, some pushback, of course. And I wanted to have you back on to talk a little bit more about the surrogacy industry, but also to talk about IVF. We kind of left everyone on a cliffhanger last time. And I got so many questions about that. Tell me a little bit first about the reaction that you got to our conversation last week when we were talking before. You said that you've received lots of messages. Yeah. And I too was pleasantly surprised by the overwhelmingly positive messages that I receive. People saying, I'm so glad we're talking about this. I want to

be better informed so I can talk about this to my friends. you know, people in my churches and my community, you know, moms that go to school with my kids. I had a lot of people share their own personal stories of infertility and how they used IVF, and now they have dilemmas that they're facing, you know, particularly around the space of leftover frozen embryos that were created through IVF. So, you know, I am tangling a little bit with an angry surrogate on Facebook who identifies as a Christian and says she's made her peace with God that she's done this selfless act. So, but overwhelmingly, I think the feedback has been people are, we scratched an itch and people want to know more. So that's good. Yeah. And you know,

you touched on this in our last conversation. You said that a lot of Christians and a lot of pro-lifers are pro-surrogate because they simply think, well, this is just another way for people to bring life into the world and who are we to judge someone for the decisions that they make. And in fact, I got into it a little bit with someone who is a Christian and, you know, we're philosophically aligned in a lot of ways. But I posted right after our conversation, Priyanka Chopra, I think is how you pronounce her last name. And Joe Jonas, they announced that they had a baby via surrogate. And I posted about it on Instagram just saying, wow, you know, there are a lot of questions that Christian should be asking about this. And the response that I got was from this person, you have no idea why they chose a surrogate.

What if she struggles with infertility? What if she can't carry a baby? You know, it's really presumptuous and judgmental to say that there could be anything wrong with a couple like this choosing a surrogate. What would be your response to something like that? Yeah, and, you know, I've seen all the noise, if you will, about the Nick Jonas announcement. And, you know, even radical feminists that I align with and work with are, you know, against this. You know, this is instrumental use of a woman's body for somebody else's gain. But, you know, for people that say that, you know, I ask questions.

Did you know that surrogate pregnancy is a very high-risk pregnancy? Did you know that surrogate mothers have died? Did you know that the babies these surrogate mothers carry have died? Do you know that we have so many embryos that are lost along the way in this whole IVF big fertility industry, which is why, you know, I mentioned last week we have, you know, roughly a million frozen human embryos just in the United States alone, over two million in the United Kingdom. So I just think the people that push back oftentimes are coming from, rightly, a space of grief, a space of sadness, a space of years and years of perhaps struggling to have a

child or seeing a sister or dear friend, or dear couple friends struggle with infertility. So I think for me, my first response is just to raise a lot of questions because I find in my work that overwhelmingly people think there's nothing wrong with this. This is just this good, wonderful thing people are doing to help people. And we can talk more about the industry, which maybe raise some of the dirty little secret behind a lot of what's going on in reality. Yes. And in this example of Nick Jonas, I think I said Joe Jonas, but it is Nick Jonas and his wife.

It actually brings up a lot of the issues that you're talking about, at least according to Daily Mail, they were reporting that this baby was born 27 weeks, 27 weeks. I mean, that's still the second trimester. That is barely after what they call the age of viability. And so if that is true, if this reporting is true, and of course they're saying their sources are solid on this, that child is going to be in the hospital for a very long time. And I do have questions. What happens to the mother, who I am guessing probably just had a very traumatic delivery experience. Delivering a child can be traumatic anyway.

But at 27 weeks, that's not supposed to happen. So my question is, you know, what go? what goes on with her, who's taking care of her? And of course, what went on during this pregnancy that caused this child to be born so early? And then you also have the report from the Daily Mail that Priyanka actually was not struggling with infertility. Not that that necessarily makes an ethical difference to all of this. But they said that they were simply busy, that they didn't have time over the last year to get pregnant, which of course my question is, how are you going to have time to have time?

raise a child, but that's a whole different can of worms. And so people just don't understand there's so many different aspects to it. But if someone said, okay, well, this woman signed up for that, though, she signed up for the risk. She knew that this could happen and she still took it on. What's the problem with that? If she consented to it, isn't that all that's needed? Yeah, you packed a lot in there. I feel like there's about 20 questions in there. I feel like there's about 20 questions in there, but I'm, you know, I think the fact that these babies were born premature just underscores the high-risk nature of the pregnancy. And, you know, for those who didn't hear our conversation last week, you know, I just remind people that I was a pediatric critical care nurse for many,

many, many years before going back to graduate school. So, you know, I saw firsthand in the PIDS ICU, these babies that were born very premature. Just last week after your show showed air, one of the first, you know, private messages I got was from a neonatal intensive care nurse who says she sees these babies in the NICU because they are born premature and high risk. And you're right, if the babies were born premature and high risk, that meant that that pregnancy was a high risk pregnancy. You know, women go into premature late.

labor because there's complications. You know, we, we know that our bodies are meant to hold on to our babies for 40 weeks. And it just does sort of underscore sort of the grittiness when you have people that just outright say, we're too busy. Pregnancy is too much of an inconvenience right now. We're just going to outsource this like it's a job. Time magazine many years ago had a, you know, top 10 list of jobs that you outsource. And pregnancy was number one on their list.

and it raises ethical and philosophical questions, this pregnancy is a job. Is it just work that women do? And therefore, you know, when we saw in India, all the women of poverty that were overwhelmingly signing up to do surrogacy because it was helping lift them out of poverty as if they were just being paid to do a job. So, you know, I don't know which direction you want to go with all of that.

But, you know, we have to, as women say, do we want to put another woman in harm's way and risk her life and risk the life of the babies we so desperately want. We obviously want those babies desperately that we're willing to ask another woman to carry them for us. And do we want to put those babies at risk too? And do we want to corrupt it even more by paying like it's a job she's doing? And commodifying her womb and commodifying the child.

because consent is so much more, it's really more than just a simple yes or no. I mean, we know that when we're talking about something like sexual assault. We look at things like power dynamics. We look at things like age. We look at, okay, did the yes that this person gave? Did it feel coerced? Did this person feel like they had to go forward with this relationship or interaction with someone? Consent is not a simple yes or no.

So a woman who maybe is manipulated or recruited or is being told that surrogacy is your only option if you want to get out of poverty, can that even count as true consent? And I think the direction that I want to go, because you mentioned these women in India, these impoverished women who are using surrogacy to try to, quote, lift themselves out of poverty. Do you know, like, how did this all start? How did how did surrogacy become this lucrative industry, especially? in impoverished places. Do you know the answer to that? Yeah, well, in medicine, which I will say has sort of lost its way, but medicine was trying to, in the early days, look at infertility and see how we can help through proper ethical medicine help couples who are struggling with infertility, male infertility, female infertility, a combination of both. There's even

You know, we don't know why this couple can't conceive. Every test we've run shows everything's working just fine, but for some reason they can't. So, you know, in that trying to develop treatments and therapies, we were able to create babies in the laboratory. And then from that, it just sort of took off without any kind of road guards or any sort of ethical stop signs to the point where, you know, we have post-mental palsy women having children through egg donation. You know, their eggs are too old, but for, you know, they can often still carry a pregnancy if they can implant, you know, an embryo in their womb. We have, you know, my state, California, litter births, actumum. You know, we have grandmother surrogacy.

You'll read in the news about grandmothers are now carrying their daughter's babies or their sons babies. We have post-mortem conception. You know, there's been a couple of high-profile cases where, you know, one, you know, for example, a male military person died, and they went in after he was dead and took his sperm out of his body so his family could conceive children using his sperm so his legacy could, you know, go on. And, you know, we have artificial wounds just around the corner, and they're busy making artificial eggs and sperm to the point where pretty soon we won't even be needed to have babies.

It can be totally, you know, manufactured in the laboratory. That is very brave new world. and to people who say, well, okay, what's wrong with that? Like, okay, the exploitation part of it, okay, but what would be wrong with, for example, a grandmother carrying her, you know, son or a daughter's child, or what if it's a sister carrying the child? And they're not getting paid. They really do see this as a selfless act.

Is there anything morally or ethically questionable about? that? Well, you know, in the case of surrogates who have died here in the United States, you know, the surrogates that I know who have died were doing it commercially for strangers, not family members. But the risk of death doesn't go away because you're doing it for free or you're doing it for your sister. And can you imagine the guilt that you would carry, you know, every time you looked at this precious child that was born, knowing that it cost your sister her life. You know, I always compare big tobacco with big fertility and how we work like crazy to get people

not to smoke, even though statistically most people who smoke don't ever get lung cancer. You know, it's a very small percentage of smokers that actually get lung cancer or, you know, other chronic lung disease. But in the case of helping people have babies, we just sort of don't, we just ignore the risks. And we're willing to say, well, this person is willing to take these. these rests and they're willing to help me and I'm not paying them and they've agreed. I just think medicine has no business of putting healthy people at risk. If I have cancer and my doctor says to me, you need chemotherapy, you need radiation.

And we know chemotherapy and radiation have all kinds of risks, you know, to the point where chemo and radiation can kill you, you could die from the treatment. But you weigh those risks and you say, well, I know this cancer, if I don't treat it, I'll die. So I will take the risk of chemo and radiation in order to try to save my life. In the case of a surrogate, she has no medical need. She has no medical need to inject herself with fertility drugs. She has no medical need to implant herself with a foreign embryo that puts her into a high-risk pregnancy. She has no medical need to tell herself, don't bond with this baby, don't bond with this baby.

I'll see on the Instagram, the surrogate says, hey, you know, they're bun, my oven. You know, to sort of disassociate their body from the baby that's growing in them. She has no need to do this. And we have no right to ask her. Yeah. I think that is, that's the thing for me. Although it does seem different if a sister voluntarily was surrogate, maybe her sister has cancer or something like that, that does seem different than, you know, getting a stranger, picking her out of the catalog.

and, you know, getting eggs from one woman and then taking the sperm of two gay men and planting the embryos into, you know, into another stranger that does seem different than someone who is a family member taking this on voluntarily. But I still think that the emotional toll, especially, yes, physical, but also the emotional toll of carrying a human being in your womb and growing that life with your own. body and then surrendering that life at the end of the pregnancy and that baby is not yours. I do think that, man, that is such a sacrifice to make and is so complicated. But I don't know. It does seem morally better and ethically different to me than the whole catalog commodification of women through the commercial surrogacy industry. Well, let me raise a couple of points to sort of push back on that.

And again, I hope your audience listens through the spirit of charity and sympathy and understanding, you know, and how I've come to have the positions I've had. There's this whole area of what we call interfamilial conception. That's families helping families. You know, is it okay for a sister to donate and give her egg to her sister? Is it okay for a father to donate his sperm to his daughter's husband if her daughter's husband is sterile? Because I want to help my daughter have a baby. You know, it's okay for sisters to help sisters. But when we go, okay, so this woman would basically be pregnant carrying her father's child.

Is that something that happens? Is that not incest in a certain way? Well, why could it? Why could it not be? Why couldn't it not be incest between sisters? I mean, you know, your face said it all. It's kind of like, okay, if sisters help sisters, because we, you know, let me do your hair and makeup for your wedding because I love you.

And sisters are always helping sisters. Let me teach you how to cook this new recipe I just learned on, you know. Well, I guess I'm thinking if it's just using her womb, like if it's the egg and the sperm of the couple, but then they're just implanting that embryo into the sister's womb, that wouldn't be, you know, in any form incestuous, it would just be, that would be a sister helping out a sister. So I guess that would be my contention. Yeah, but sisters do give their eggs to their sisters. So you're saying it's okay to use my womb, but it's not okay to use my egg. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just kind of posing. Why is one part of your body okay to share or use to help or sell? But one part of your

body isn't and why isn't it okay and why is it okay for grandmothers to carry their daughters or what if their daughters are infertile and their daughters had to go to the egg donor bank but their grandmother their mother's going to carry that grandchild you know it's so there's a whole area that's that's complex stuff we have to think about because it's happening yeah it's happening with all this families helping families you know like I said the case of the the dead you know military guy where they took his sperm you know and they're going to have to use a woman to have babies now the other question you raised about, again, families, do we want our little girls seeing their mommies do this? Mommies keep some babies. Mommies give some babies away. Mommies help other people, but, you know,

mommies do this because they need money. Mommies do this for free because they're nice. I mean, is this really a lesson that we want our children to grow up and think, this is how families are made. This is how babies are made. This is the design of how children come into the world. I think we haven't even thought about the impact, especially on daughters, little girls. You know, maybe we need to think about it too for little boys. Is this something they want their wife to do when they grow up to help somebody or money's tight to do these kind of things? So those are just two big things that I ponder and think about.

Hey, this is Steve Deast. 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 Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcast. I hope you'll join us. And I think it's real, it is really important to think about because, as we already mentioned as people who love babies and love families and are pro-life, it's easy to just

think, well, you know, whatever works, whatever makes the baby is totally fine. But you're right. There are a lot of things to think about and to ponder and to try to analyze as Christians. Let's talk a little bit more about the industry. We touched on this when you talked about the industry. Indian women who use surrogacy to make money. But one of the messages that you got, and I've heard of this before, but only briefly, and I just don't know very much about it, that there are Chinese agencies who use American

surrogates to gestate the baby. And then once the baby is born in an American hospital, Chinese representatives from these agencies take the baby. They take care of the baby for a little bit. and then they take the baby back to their parents. And there was a NICU nurse that message you about this. What in the world is going on there? Well, there are actually U.S. agencies.

There's quite a few of them in California, my state where I live. And I was a few years ago, I got an email from a woman who works for one of the largest fertility agencies in Southern California. I think it's in San Diego. And she's what I would call a classic whistleblower. And she wanted to tell me her story of working for this agency. And she said to me, I was in charge of the VIP clients. And I said, well, what are the VIP clients? Who are those people?

And she said, I only dealt with people in China, the Chinese couples. And they are considered our VIP clients because they have massive wealth. And they come with, you know, literally buckets of money to do surrogacy. because in China, all surrogacy is illegal. And if you look at the basis for the law, it's illegal because they do not want women to be exploited. So it's kind of a little bit of irony that China, who can be human rights violation.

I mean, I keep getting my NGO status at the UN denied because the Chinese will flag my organization and my work because of my stance on surrogacy and their human rights abuses. So she only dealt with the Chinese couple. China is it China is against your stance on surrogacy, even though China has made surrogacy illegal? Is it because they, I don't understand that? Well, most of Europe is surrogacy is illegal too. Okay.

So, you know, surrogacy is now, commercial surrogacy is now illegal in India and Thailand, in Singapore. They close their borders and shut this all down because women and children have been harmed and exploited. So business is booming here in the United States. The Spanish come here, the French come here, the Chinese come here. But the Chinese come here, and you're right, they will hire surrogates in order to carry Chinese babies that are then born on U.S. soil. So at birth, they, you know, get a social security number, a card, and they get a passport, and they are a U.S. citizen. Because our law say, if you are born in the United States, you're a U.S. citizen. It doesn't matter how you were born or to whom your parents are.

And she was finally left because she said, because of the wealth, it was not uncommon for the Chinese couples to get three surrogates pregnant. And then once the pregnancy and the ultrasounds were confirmed and they knew, oh, she's pregnant for twins or girls or boys or one baby or, you know, whatever, they would have the other surrogates terminate the pregnancy because they wanted to increase their odds. You know, most of fertility cycles fail, you know, a lot of. of time surrogates have to go through multiple implantations to get the surrogate, you know, pregnancy to take. And she said one, you know, intended mother, Chinese woman, wanted the baby

terminated because it's an ultrasound. It looked like the baby was missing a finger. So she just got, you know, appalled. And when she first went for her job interview, she told me. Sorry to interjects, but we haven't even talked about that. I don't know how that works. But so if parents in this situation or other situation, if a woman is carrying, a surrogate is carrying their baby and the parents say, we want you to terminate this pregnancy, we want you to have an abortion. Is that allowed? Does the surrogate then have to get an abortion? How does that work? I have so many surrogate contracts on my desk. The first thing I do in a surrogate contacts me is they say, let me see your contract. That is like that is standard language in all surrogate contracts.

Language is called selective reduction or termination. Wow. And the surrogate agrees contractually before she's even pregnant that she, if asked, will terminate or reduce down the pregnancy, if so triplets, reduced down to twins or singleton. And she's bound by contract to do that. And most of the time the language says for no reason. So the intended parents do not have to give a reason. They can just say, we changed our mind.

we don't want two boys. You know, we want to try again to get a girl. At any point in pregnancy? I mean, according to the state's laws. Exactly. Depending on where the state. Like one surrogate, who's in my, one of my surrogate films was in Arizona. So she was asked to terminate the pregnancy.

But Arizona law, I think it's 24 weeks. I don't really remember it. Sorry. So she waited until that clock ticked out and just avoided them because she didn't want to terminate the pregnancy. Wow. Oh, my goodness. They hadn't even touched on that.

Just once again, once again, there are so many different aspects of it, and it's not as easy as well. A woman consents to this because even a woman who consents to carrying a child, she might just be hoping that the parents don't want to at some point terminate the pregnancy or hoping that she doesn't miscarry or hoping that she doesn't have preterm labor. There are so many things that she's not necessarily knowingly consenting to when she consents to carrying that child. and that's why it's, gosh, so ethically complicated. Sorry to interrupt you. I just wanted to make sure people understand that. The doctors that are doing this to surrogates and agreeing to these contracts and operating under these horrific abusive arrangements are the same doctors that are treating

people who say, you know, but I used to surrogate and I did IVF. They're the same doctors. It's not like, oh, I can go to the good doctor. The same clinics, the same doctors are doing this. So, you know, and this particular woman just finally, she had to leave. And she can't go public because she, of course, signed a nondisclosure statement upon her employment. And during her interview, she told me because she showed up wearing a cross. And they said, oh, you're Christian.

You're probably going to have a problem working here. And she said, oh, no, no, I'm very pro-life and pro-babies. And I think what you're doing, helping people is just wonderful. So I don't think I'll have any problem. But then she got into the underbelly. and she saw what was going on. And so she eventually just quit and terminated her employment with them. But, you know, we had a surrogate mother in California.

She was all over the news when she contacted me and told me her story because she also was pregnant for a surrogate pregnancy for a couple in China. And she's a Caucasian woman who's married to an African American man. And when the twins were born, she gave birth to twins. one baby was Chinese and one baby was mixed race. So they found out that she had gotten pregnant with her own child and also gotten pregnant with the Chinese embryo that was transplanted, transferred into her.

And it took her three months to get her own child back. And what the NICU nurse told me who sees all these babies through Chinese arrangements is that they are cared for by the agencies in the U.S. by people. So this baby is taken away from the only mother it's ever known. It's delivered in the hospital. Then it goes to live with strangers for three months until all of its papers are set. And then that person flies that baby to China to hand that baby over to basically strangers. And I, as a nurse again, I just think this is unconscionable.

We still have babies locked down in Ukraine. COVID babies, you know, through surrogacy. that countries that are still locked down have not been able to go pick up their babies. So these babies have literally for like the first year of their life have been cared for by just caregivers like nannies. And now, you know, we see all the tension in Ukraine with what's going on with Russia. And you wonder what's going to happen to these babies. Wow.

And, you know, I read a study recently that I thought was stunning. And I'm sure it's not necessarily a new discovery. It's just kind of reiterated. It talked about the importance of the first year of life for a child and the affection and even just the skin to skin and being in the care of someone that you, of the people that you actually belong to. A child who in the first year of life has that consistent affection and presence with parents.

Actually, and then say after that, after that first year, they endure some serious trauma. they get taken away or something happens or their parents die, they have to go live with someone else. That child actually does better behaviorally and has a better sense of self-identity and self-worth than the child who, say, for the first year of their life, they were abandoned and they were taking care of people who they didn't know and who weren't showing them that same kind of affection and a sense of belonging. But then after that first year of life, they go live with great adoptive parents, the trauma that that child, that latter child endured in the first year of their life actually makes it much harder for that child to be able to develop normally

versus the child that may have had more trauma longer, but had a secure first year of life. I hope that I explained that correctly. That was kind of jumbled. But all that to say, the first year of a child's life, the first months of a child's life, just because they can't remember it, just because they can't articulate what it felt like to be abandoned or to not have the mother in the first few moments of life doesn't mean that that is not having an impact on that child. And that is literally happening thousands of thousands of times a year for money, right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, this is all part of the whole attachment, you know, the category of attachment and have babies attaching, you know, maternal child bonding. I mean, why is the breast so close to mother's eyes and baby's eyes, you know, and making that kind of on, you know, that eye contact? And when you think about the international, you know, these Chinese babies born in the U.S., probably being raised by people who only speak English, who are culturally Americans, and then find themselves in, you know, a whole different land.

where language is different and culture is different. And the interactions, you know, we interact facially different than other cultures where it's seen as often rude to look at people in the eyes. Whereas in the United States, if we don't look at people in the eyes, people go, well, what are they hiding? They're kind of shifty. And those are so big parts of early brain development in babies and cognition and language development and just a sense of security.

And those attachment things are real. And so, you know, I think about these kind of things. And I think, what are we doing? And again, I call this space that I work in the largest human experiment of our time, the largest social human experiment. We are experimenting on mothers, women, and children. And finding out as we go all these problems. And what will we see in the fallout, 10, 20 years from now,

as these children grow up and we learn about the problems that they have. Yeah, and of course it will be very difficult to get anyone to link the problems that we are inevitably facing in the future with, you know, these children and how they're developing to their conception and gestation and the first few months of their life. Because especially when you're talking about creating families for gay couples, it's very politically incorrect. Talk about the problems with surrogacy. and the need for a mother and a father. It's very politically incorrect to talk about those things.

And so that's why it's important that you do what you do because there are so many so-called scientists and sociologists and psychologists who will never talk about the negative impact that this is potentially having on children. I mean, talk about a lack of consent. Everyone's saying, okay, yeah, well, the mom gives consent. The woman is giving consent. Well, the child isn't giving consent. This child isn't giving consent to be taking. away from her mother or her father. What about the consent for the child?

The consent to be frozen in a freezer for five or ten years and to be given away to somebody else. We had the most recent embryo adoption, which I love to quote this story because the embryo was frozen for more years than the mother who rescued and gave birth of that child's age was. Yes, that is crazy. And you talk about human experimentation. Do we even know what?

the long-term effect is on freezing a human embryo for 20 or 25 years or even one year. I mean, I joke and say, I take hamburger meat out of my freezer and if I see freezer burn, I throw it out, you know, and we put, you know, our tiny little human embryos in the freezer and leave them for years and they ought to be fine. We know a lot of embryos die making their way out of the petri dish and into the freezer. We know a lot of embryos die in the thawing. process just because we weren't meant to be frozen. Right.

And that phrase, I think, is what is the trouble with a lot of this? I mean, of course, I don't think all technology is bad, but we weren't meant to be. We weren't meant to. And that is where a lot of the complication and the complexities and the questions lies. What was meant to happen and what is happening? And is there anything that falls through the cracks in that process from when we go from what was meant to to what we can do now technologically. That doesn't mean all technology is bad, certainly.

I don't believe that. But when it comes to human life and when it comes to, like you said, women and children and children who cannot consent, we do have to ask, okay, this is how it was created, this is what technology is allowing, what's being missed in the process. And that's really, those are the questions that we're asking. So let's talk more about that. Let's talk about IVF. This is very controversial.

I've got lots of wonderful mothers with wonderful blessings of precious children in this audience who had their children through IVF. And they don't want to hear that there are any ethical questions about it or that how their child was conceived is in any way immoral. And I do understand that. But like, let's talk about. Let's talk about what exists in that gap between natural conception and IVF that we need to consider. Yeah. Well, let's start on a positive side of the, you know, and I often tell people in the case of heterosexual couples who are struggling with fertility, which is a different category from like the Nick Jonas people who we just can't be bothered.

We're just going to do this. So the first thing I say, please, please, please, please. get yourself a really good proper diagnosis if you can find out what's going on because there is some really good things that medicine ethically can offer couples that are having trouble with conception um you know women have black flopin tubes one of the women who messaged me talked about her you know her struggling with endometriosis um we know that men often need a little help and assistance in sperm production and sperm quality because they might have not enough swimmers or um swimmers don't swim fast enough to make their destination. So find a good doctor that's not going to put you on what

I think it was Miriam Zoll's book, cracked open where she talked about her years of infertility and being put on the IVF super highway with no off ramps. You know, because once you get into that fertility doctor's office, sometimes there are no off ramps. And one of the women who messaged me talked about the fact that she was going for really low dose fertility drugs because she didn't want to have a lot eggs produced. You didn't want to have to deal, you know, deal with the ethical problem of a lot of embryos and ended up with still way too many, you know, eggs, which meant way too many embryos. So think if you can first do, do, you know, a good diagnostic workup, you know, kick the tires, look under the hood, what's going on, what can we do? That's not the big guns idea.

Other things like, you know, are you a little bit overweight? even if you just lose a few pounds, husband or a wife, you know, being overweight negatively impacts our fertility. So, you know, some couples, you know, if you're overweight, you can lose five or 10 pounds and you have a boost in your fertility. You know, don't smoke. Don't eat horrible. Don't drink a lot of alcohol or any, you know, because those all negatively impact fertility. Don't wait too long. I was on Dr. Oz once, which was the show was all about when is it too old to have a and it was women in their 40s and 50s and pushing that 60 envelope through technology. Don't, you know, the biological clock is real.

So, you know, all those things are a first thing to do. Then we're going to be left with the fact that, yes, there will still be people that for whatever reason can't concede. You know, infertility is not a new problem. It's been with us since the beginning of time. So then what can you do? Maybe you need some hormonal adjustments to regulate ovulation or to help. with sperm production.

Those are some things that can be done. Then once you get into the IVF, you know, to me a bright line is taking egg and sperm out of the body. Once you take egg and sperm out of the body, you are, you know, you're going to be dealing with high doses of fertility drugs. You're going to be dealing with, you know, lots of production of embryos because this is very costly. You're going to be dealing with all the quality assurances, grading of eggs, grading of sperm,

grading of embryos, which are the good ones, which are the bad ones, which will we try first, which are the lower quality ones we'll put in the freezer and try later because we know that this is going to fail, fail, fail. And this is expensive and not without risk. You know, I said last week on your show, you know, Gilder Radner went through six rounds of IVF and tried to concede, was never successful and then developed ovarian cancer, which caused her death. You know, we know the fertility drugs are not without risk. So I'll stop there because I dumped a lot out there on you. So what you're saying is that in your view, there really, you don't believe that there is a great way to do IVF because just the process of taking the egg and the sperm out of the body opens up this whole ethical can of worms, right?

Yeah, then it, you know, whether you take your cue from C.S. Lewis's abolition of man and the man molders, the chest beaters, you know, man's final conquest will be the abolition of man. Or there's a great book called begotten or made, which once we take egg and sperm out of the body, then our children become like a project that, you know, that we are making and manufacturing. And you, you know, you see all. the add-ons. Do you want to do sperm sorting? Do you want to do egg sorting? Do you want to do gender selection? Do you want to do prenatal embryonic testing to find out if it's a boy or a girl or if it has Down syndrome? You know, and then you're left with the quandary of all these surplus human embryos. You know, you were sharing with me that one woman told you that was fine that she gave them up for adoption. And then I had another woman who contacted me who's in angst. And she said, I can't give away my future children.

But every year when I pay the frozen storage fee, I just feel weird about it. And can you imagine telling these children? You know, I wrote an article once and ran it as a thought experiment. You know, and we know an adoption that we know that the best interest of the child is to know early on their adoption story. You know, you don't wait until they're 16 and say, we're going to have the talk until we adopted you. You know, so those children grow up knowing how they came into the world. And I think in the case of embryo adoption, for those who've done it, those children are due the same treatment, you know, to know early on. So here's the story.

Your mom and dad so desperately won the children. And they made a bunch of embryos in the laboratory. And you didn't get picked first to be implanted into your mother's. womb you got put in the freezer. And then your mom and dad had a baby or had two babies or whatever. And then they were done having their family. And they decided that they didn't need you or they didn't want you or they were going to give you away to somebody else.

I mean, you would have to tell the child that's how they came to be in the world. And that child would go, oh, oh, okay, I wasn't wanted or I wasn't wanted at first or I wasn't wanted by them. It means I have brothers and sisters out there. I have a mother and God. I mean, I just think that's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. Yeah.

And our children deserve much better than that. Especially for, and just to kind of catch people up, I got a message from a very sweet woman who I really appreciate her listening and then taking the time to reach out to me who said that she has, I think is two frozen embryos that she wanted to wait for a few years. So before she gave them up for adoption because she didn't want them to be close in age to the children that she has, that she birthed and that she conceived through IVF. And she said there's no moral problems with this.

There's nothing morally questionable about this. She said she's not going to discard these embryos because she's pro-life and she's a Christian and all of that, which, you know, I, again, appreciate. her for reaching out, but to say there are no questions about that. Maybe you disagree with the questions that we're posing, but there are certainly questions about if you believe that that embryo is life, which scientifically it is, we all started as embryos, that is the earliest form of a human being. I mean, just the fact that that human being is being frozen indefinitely, that's a moral question. There's a question about the morality of that. And then to give them up to parents that I think in a

of cases you don't personally know. You don't know how those parents are going to treat the child that they adopt. Do you know for sure that those parents will be Christians? If you're a Christian, I imagine that that's really important. And then again, you're giving away siblings. I mean, that is your child. There are, of course, so many questions about that. But for the people who say that, okay, but we only created the embryos that we were willing to implant ourselves. And I, they only created through IVF, the embryos, that they were going to, you know, gestate in birth. What about that? Isn't that okay? Well, I think that gets back to this, the woman who reached out to me early this morning and

she gave me permission to talk about this on your show. You know, they, they intentionally did low dose hormones because they didn't want to get a lot of eggs produced, you know, for creation of embryos. And what happened was. was because we don't know how women will respond to these drugs. Some women respond very, very well, and she obviously was one of those because they got way more eggs than they expected. And then I'm sure what happened was they went ahead and fertilize them all because we know that overwhelmingly the embryos don't survive. And if you've already spent all that money and gone through all that treatment and all those steps to get the eggs, you're going to get on

that super highway and go, well, yeah, let's go ahead and fertilize them because we know all that a lot of them won't get fertilized. A lot of them won't end up into being viable embryos that are, you know, will be suitable for implantation or even suitable for putting in the freezer. And so here was a woman who started out saying, we don't want to do that. And in fact, they ended up with more than they intended to, which is why she's in this quandary now with these surplus embryos that are in the freezer. You know, I would step back and say, you know, federal law in Germany,

prohibits the freezing of human embryos. It's illegal in Germany, under federal law, to freeze a human embryo. Why? The country has not forgotten their bad history of, you know, heinous experimentation on human beings. You know, you can say Joseph Mendele, in the way that people were treated. We need similar policy like that in the United States. We don't need to just create an industry to adopt frozen embryos while we're continuing to make. them and freeze them, we need to stop, we need to stop freezing embryos and stop putting them in

the freezer because I don't think it's, it's a dignified place for a human embryo to be. Yeah. And now I just want to. Right. And I just want to reiterate, and I know you know this, but because there are people, this is a highly sensitive, understandably, highly sensitive topic. Everyone, every mother and father who created their child through IVF, we are not questioning whether or not you are a good parent, whether or not you love your child, whether or not your child is a blessing to you, made in the image of God and so precious. And so this is not about that. This is about asking questions that because of the reasons that I just listed, people don't want to ask because it can be so

understandably sensitive, but as Christians who care about image bearers and who care again about that gap between natural and technological and ethical and moral questions that exist there, we have to ask those questions and talk about these uncomfortable things. And look, if you went through IVF, this is not a question about what your children are worth or whether or not your child is a blessing. Or, and we're also not diminishing. And this is a question. And this is a is the message that I get when I do get, you know, messages that are pushing back against this saying you have no idea what it's like to struggle through infertility. You have no idea what it's like to suffer, you know, month after month, that heartache of wanting to have a child and not

being able to have a child and to be able to have the gift of life given to you through IVF. And, you know, and then to hear someone, they feel like tear it down. That is hurtful and heartbreak. and I understand that. I do. I don't, I didn't suffer through infertility, but what's your response to someone who is just feeling all of those understandable emotions as they listen to this? Yeah, I would agree with probably everything you just said.

I don't want anything that I'm saying today to be seen as I'm heaping judgment on people who have done this or I'm denying the dignity and worth and the beauty. of their children. I do not, I do not agree that they are horrible people. I'm very sympathetic to people who can't conceive and have struggled for years of impotility. You know, I think, you know, it's similar to, I have many friends that don't feel called to singleness. No one desperately to have a partner and a spouse. But for some reason that Mr. Wright or Mrs. Wright hasn't come along. We're all in a position where there's something that we've been given that we really wish would be removed from us. You know, take this cup away from me, please. I don't

want to have a cancer diagnosis. I don't want to be infertile. I don't want to be single. I mean, you know, you could just rattle a list of things that we have been given that we would prefer not to be given. What I'm questioning, though, is my grief is overwhelmingly with the medical profession. You know, good medical doctors should be not putting in people, putting people at risk, putting people in positions where they're faced with, well, I didn't want to end up with, you know, embryos in the freezer, but now I have them. You know, where are doctors that are not going to do that? That's risky to your health. That's risky to the health of your unborn child, whether you do surrogacy egg donation or you do IV up on your own. Yeah. And, you know, you know,

I just, again, it gets back to the fact that we all have to come to terms with that. There's things that we've been asked to carry that we would really otherwise not have to carry. And how can we be welcoming to couples? You know, I have friends that are church-going friends that have never been able to conceive and have felt convicted not to do IVF. And they will avoid Mother's Day and Father's Day like the plague at church. because they feel like they're left then. You know, they're, you know, there's, it's a hard day.

You know, they don't want to go to another baby shower. Yeah. They're happy that you're pregnant and you're expecting, but it's just too hard for them to go to another baby shower. And so how can we be more sympathetic, you know, for people who do believe in the Bible, I like to recount, you know, in the story of creation and Genesis. you know, I don't want to say, and so here comes Eve, but there were no children in the garden.

A husband and wife who can't conceive are a family. You know, there's nothing you've done wrong. You're not lacking anything. You know, you are a complete family. It's not like you're a family once you have children. No, if you're a husband and wife, you are a family. You are a new family. You have left your mother and father, and he has left his mother and father.

and you have formed a new family with or without children. So what I'm hearing you say is that we can show the utmost sympathy to people who are suffering through infertility at the same time trying to protect life, trying to protect the embryos that are put in these all different kinds of ethically and morally questionable scenarios, whether it's just being frozen, whether it's being adopted out, whether it's being you know, discarded in in some way, it is possible to be sympathetic and to be loving and compassionate towards people who are suffering with that while also saying, you know, kind of drawing a line in the sand and saying, okay, but we also have to be compassionate about the new life that is

being created and how they are being stored and handled after they're conceived, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we can be incredibly sympathetic to people that are struggling with fertility in fertility, we can be incredibly charitable and sympathetic to people who've already gone down the idea of Superhighway and have their own to, you know, assisted reproduction or who have frozen human embryos that are just, as we like to call, souls on ice. So, yeah, there's plenty of room for charity and grace and understanding. But, you know, today is a new day. Today I've learned something I didn't know yesterday. You know, I'm always learning something. You know, I'm always willing to be open and listen to, you know, a new idea and go,

ah, I can change my mind on something. You know, I didn't start out with my work in the Center for Bioethics and Culture being as critical of assisted reproduction until I started really digging into it and learning and seeing and then hearing from the countless of people that have contacted me because of the work that I do. So I didn't start out with this knowledge. It came to me. And I've grown into this view that I have now. So I hope many of your listeners won't hear what you or I are saying with any kind of spirit of condemnation. But, you know, that this is today, you know, it's a new day. And there's, you know, new mercies every day. And how would you counsel those parents who, okay, they're learning about this and they're realizing that you are correct?

and they have embryos that are on ice? I mean, say they have several. Maybe they have a dozen embryos that are on ice. And obviously, I mean, they're not going to implant all of those in their own womb. Or maybe they can't for some reason, even if they just have two. What do they do? What is the next best course of action for them? Yeah, I've written quite a bit on, you know, the quandary that we have with all these surplus human embryos.

You know, ideally, you know, the first step would be for the parents who created those embryos because they created them wanting children to sort of acknowledge that, yes, those are our children and we should attempt to bring them, you know, to birth, you know, because we are responsible for them where they're their mother and father. Secondly, they can release these embryos to an embryo adoption program. But I do think they have to realize that that child is owed their true story. And what will that mean to that child as they learn and understand how they were created and that you didn't want them or you couldn't have them?

So you gave them away. I don't think we have what's called, you know, it's a big word I learned in graduate school is called supererogatory act. You know, we are not outside of being a good person. donate my my kidney you know I'm not required to donate my kidney I can do it I don't think we're required I don't think we have a moral obligation to you know I'm postmenopausal I could technically carry an embryo to term but I don't have an obligation to do that and then I take the the view of a good colleague of mine Dr. Gilbert Milander I believe that

the merciful thing to do if they're abandoned and nobody has claimed them that we allow them to die. We take them out of the freezer. I know it's controversial. You know, the Catholic Church talks about, and I'm not Catholic, but I've read, you know, I read Mormon documents. I read Buddhists. I read all the different big major religions on this space. You know, they talk about the absurd fate of the, you know, the leftover discarded, abandoned surplus human embryo. So what qualifies as abandoned? Because obviously, you know, not talking about the embryos that are up for adoption, what would qualify as an abandoned frozen embryo, just the parents say?

They're abandoned because, you know, we cannot, we don't know where this couple has moved. You know, these embryos have been frozen for so long. You know, there's a fertility doctor, I believe it was Arizona. You know, the people aren't even paying the storage fee anymore, but he feels himself as a physician who's created them and has been storing them in his clinic, you know, to keep them alive because he can't just make that decision. So there's a lot of embryos that we just can't find the husband and wife that created them and get their permission or get them to make a decision. So they can't be given to an embryo adoption agency because the couple can't be found to give

permission to do that. So those are the ones. And that's a high percentage of them or just, or abandon. Or there's people like the woman who messaged me who said, can't give them away. Right. But I just pay the storage fee every year. Can't give them away just because you, do you think it's just because she feels like she said it. I wrote it down so I could say her words.

It's weird to give away our potential child. Yeah. Even though it is actually a child, it's not even a potential child. It is a child. And, you know, I'm thinking, and I don't know about the stance of that. person, but some of the people that I've talked to who are, you know, very pro-iv-Iv-F and surrogacy call themselves, you know, pro-life and anti-abortion, which they are, as I am, and the belief that we have is that life begins at conception, that just because that child is small, just because

that child is dependent on the mother, just because that child is in the earliest stages of development, that that is not any less of a human, that at the moment of conception, that is a distinct human being with distinct DNA, DNA that is distinct from her mother or father. But it's interesting that the same pro-life people, even though we have that belief when it comes to defending life against abortion, they do obviously draw a line between an embryo and a child outside of the womb when it comes to justifying IVF. I mean, we would never put a child outside of the womb. I mean, it's different a little bit, but we would never, you know, put a child outside of the womb in, you know, some kind of facility by themselves in the same way that people are doing with embryos and are justifying it, I guess, because that child is smaller in the earliest stages of development.

And so it's interesting that we don't justify abortion that way if you're a pro-lifer, but you do justify putting that child on ice. as pro-life or it just seems a little, like there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. But, I mean, I understand why people kind of want to make that defense because it's a difficult subject. Well, if I could circle back to the federal law in Germany that does not allow embryos to be frozen, you know, Germany allows IVF.

Germany just allows only three embryos to be created. And the law says all three must be. implanted. Now, that's a little bit problematic to me as a nurse because I know that even twin pregnancies are high risk and a triplet pregnancy is even higher risk because the mother's carrying three babies and it gets back to Octumum, you know, where our body's designed to carry two and three and four and five and six babies. And we know that embryos can split. That's how we get twins. So technically a woman who's implanted three embryos could end up with six babies if all three of those embryos split into twins. But I do think that's a more palisible.

as a matter of a public policy approach to me is the German federal law. You know, thou shall not create more than three embryos and thou shalt not put any of them in the freezer because then you don't have the problem of a million frozen embryos in the United States and you don't have the problem of, you know, creating a bunch of embryos that are just discarded. Yeah. And embryo, putting your frozen embryos up for adoption is not kind of like this it's not without its own issues. As we already talked about several times, you know, I talked about the potential of that child's,

your child being adopted by parents that aren't great parents, that don't have the same, you know, religious values as you do. But there's no guarantee also that if a woman adopts that embryo, that you don't even know if that woman's going to carry the baby to term. you don't know if that woman is going to get an abortion. Like you don't even know what's going to happen in the pregnancy. And so again, there are so many questions. I think we like to think that, okay, well, as long as the embryo is put up for adoption,

that everything is, you know, well and good. But again, you are, unfortunately, I hate to put it this harshly, but you are kind of abdicating your own responsibility to the child that you created. You know, it's one thing when, say, a woman, she got pregnant, she's surprised by her pregnancy or she's surprised by her circumstance. She's in some dire circumstance. She knows she's unable to take care of this child. So she puts the child up for adoption. That's one thing.

But when we create these embryos through IVF, you are doing that purposely. Like you went through a lot of time and money and care and deliberateness to bring that child to life and then just to say, well, I'm not going to take care of that child. I don't know. I just have a little bit of a hard time with that, and I don't want to come across as condemning. But, I mean, that's just something that I think that we really need to wrestle with

before saying this is an open and shut thing. Yeah, and this gets me back to, you know, my grief, grievances with medical professionals. And I've talked with people that work in the snowflake embryo adoption agency program space. And, you know, in my mind, I want to tell if there's anybody listening, here that's, you know, involved in embryo adoption agency work, they should be leading the

charge to work themselves out of a job, not starting another cottage industry business of here's another way that we can help people have babies is through embryo adoption. You know, they should be leading the charge on Capitol Hill demanding legislation that stops freezing human embryos instead of, you know, just keeping us employed. And now we need to hire more workers because we're we have more frozen embryos, we need more adoption to happen. You know, as much as like in adoption policy, we need to change our policy so that that mother who finds herself in a particular instance can keep her child if she wants to, if she's not an unfit mother or an unfit father, you know, changing the policy to stop creating surplus

embryos. I mean, I can do my part on Capitol Hill to try to lobby for legislation like that. But to me, the most likely candidates would be those that are actively working in embryo adoption agencies to demand legislation to work them out of a job. Yeah. And unfortunately, that's just not how these kinds of industries, whether it's in the government or in the private sector, work. They are always working to keep their jobs. It actually reminds me of the huge welfare bureaucracy in this country that should be working to get people off of welfare. and providing for themselves through work.

And actually, they measure their success by how many people are enrolled in their programs, not how many people phase out of it, which is a whole backwards thing. That's a whole other subject. But the nature of this industry and what you're talking about just reminds me of anything that becomes lucrative, that becomes bureaucratic, where people feel like they have power and they're making a lot of money. Corruption just thrives. And I have a question about, you talked about the individual doctors and the providers,

it seems like a lot of the women who go through IVF, we talked a little bit about some of the potential risks. It doesn't seem like the doctors are telling women about the potential risks. They're just saying, this is how you get a baby if you've been struggling for a few months or a few years, not having kids. This is just what you do? It's totally safe. You'll have a baby within a year. Of course. What mom is it going to be like, oh my gosh, of course I'm going to do that.

That's been my dream. I'll do absolutely anything to have a child. It doesn't seem like the risks, the physical risks, are being articulated to women so that it's really truly informed consent. Is that right? That's absolutely right. And even if they do talk about risk, they always lump it into, well, you know, there's risk with pregnancy. So the woman in her mind, even if she's thinking that there's risk, she's thinking those are just the same as if I was carrying a pregnancy. And we know in the United States we have horrible maternal mortality and morbidity rates.

So, you know, we're well aware of the fact that women still sadly die in childbirth. So the doctor, if he even talks about the risks of assisted reproduction, they're sort of glossed over in the, you know, well, pregnancy has its risks anyway. Instead of, you know, these have inherently extra and different types of risks in addition to the risk of pregnancy. And there's so much that I'm thinking that it's a whole other episode, a whole other thing that I really need to dig into is why the United States, one of the most prosperous countries in the world, has such a high maternal and even infant mortality rate. And there's so much within our,

you know, after having two babies, I've realized, like there's just so much in our healthcare industry that I didn't realize that really isn't, especially for women. It's just not pro woman like the C-section rate is way too high. Women are pushed into C-sections for no medical reason way too often. And there's there are just a lot of questions as to why. Like I'm not asking you to answer the question about the C-section thing. It just is kind of all lumped together. But is there is there a monetary motivation for doctors to not talk about the risks of something like IVF for fertility treatments? Absolutely.

I mean, because fertility medicine is very expensive, it's very lucrative. I mean, I watched recently, I can't remember which show, Dopesick, you know, which is on the scandal of OxyContin and doctors overprescribing. And, you know, big pharma was in collusion with physicians that were prescribing, you know, just obscene amounts and getting people hooked. You know, again, Miriam Zoll's book on Crackdope. and her book cracked open, you know, talks about getting on that super highway. And the doctor will say, well, we'll just try it again.

It failed. We'll just try it again. Or we'll try this dosage or we'll try that. There's no, the doctor isn't saying, this is going to be rough on your body to keep doing this. But it's, you know, that, that lower, the next time I'll get pregnant. The next time the pregnancy will take, the next time I won't miscarry. So, you know, it's just that, that tension of that, it's, it's sort of the perfect storm between dealing with an industry that's making more money, the more times that they have, you go through this. And then that lore that the next time will be, you know, like the gambler, the next time I'll win.

The next time I win. So how does the, if you know, like, how does the doctor, though, directly, like an OBG, well, okay, so the OBGYN, just to your same. standard OBGYN, are they the, does it have to be a specialist who offers IVF in these fertility treatments? Or does your standard OBGYN, are they able to offer these treatments to women? You're usually sent to a specialist and they're called reproductive endocrinologist. So does the OBGYN, though, that refers? Because we've talked about like how women just, they typically don't really get a good diagnosis. And I know I'm going a million different directions, but I'll just use myself as an example.

it took us both times. It took us four or so months. And the first time, you know, I wasn't told any reason why it was like, okay, you're in your, you're in your 20s. And the doctor kind of made me almost feel bad. Like, it shouldn't have taken you more than more than one month. And so if you haven't gotten pregnant after six months, okay, there's probably something wrong. And I'm just looking back at that.

It took us about, like I said, four or five months. And one thing that I did know that I. I don't know if it affected it or not is that my thyroid levels were off. And I'm glad I got that checked. No one, not my endocrin or my OBGYN, ever said, yeah, you know, that was probably why you didn't get pregnant. But after we fixed those levels and I got on some medication, I did get pregnant like a month later.

And I'm just so happy because I wouldn't have known. And, you know, obviously we wanted a child so badly. If we had waited six months, would my OBGYN have said, you know what? Let's just go ahead and send you over to this fertility specialist and get you on some kind of medication. When I didn't actually need it, I just needed to kind of explore some other things or maybe just wait. Maybe I just, maybe it just took five months. I'm not sure. I do think that these OBs seem to just be expediting women who may not even have fertility problems into the hands of a specialist. And I don't understand why. Well, that happens all the time.

One is we're impatient, right? We live in a, you know, microwave world. We want things instantaneously. You know, it's like, okay, I'm ready to get pregnant. I'm going to go off my birth control pill or whatever, and things don't happen quickly. You know, I hear this all the time with women that, you know, women, for as smart as we are, we don't understand our own bodies. And when you look at how many days in an actual month that you actually can get pregnant, it's a very small window. And I love, again, because I'm not like you, anti-technology, there's all these new fertility

apps and women becoming more in tune to their fertility and when are they fertile, when are they ovulating, whether they're using an app or whether they're using old-fashioned thermometers and checking their temperature and their mucus and all that. But we can easily, for many months, because of our busy lives, my husband and I both travel all the time with our jobs. I can imagine if we were in the heyday of our child, we were trying to get pregnant days, we could easily not get pregnant for a year because we maybe wouldn't even be in the same, under the same roof at the same time when I was fertile. So, so I think that's a lot of it.

And because we don't get pregnant after three months of trying, that seems like three years, you know, we do think, oh, what's wrong? And I need to get in and I get a doctor to diagnose me. But I'm so thankful when I hear stories like yours. It was just your thyroid. And, you know, our fertility is controlled by our brain. You know, everything that happens, you know, below our belly button is controlled by our brain, whether it be the pituitary or the thyroid, all of our hormones, our cycle is controlled by our brain,

which is why a lot of the egg donors I've met who went on these fertility drugs, two of them had strokes. It affects the brain. So, yeah, a good proper diagnosis and to know when you really are fertile and make sure that you're having, you know, intercourse during your fertile days. Yeah. And just to kind of start to close it out a little bit, going back to something that I think you might have said in this conversation, but you definitely said it in the last conversation because the pushback that you just, you know, you'll continually get is, but this was IVF, whatever, was the only way for us to have a biological child. Here's the most controversial thing that, the hardest thing I think to hear is that no one has a right. to have a child. Is that correct? That's something that you've said, right? Yeah, we don't have a right. It's like, I don't have a right to be married. I don't have a right not to have cancer. I don't have a right

to have a child. You know, get in line with all the things we don't have a right to. We want these things and it's good. It's good to want those things. It's not bad to want those things. But when those things don't come, you can't just say, well, I have a right to it, therefore I'm going to go and get it. And if your audience, which I could tell by this, the emails and messages from people, you've got a lot of Catholic women who listen to you, you've got non-Catholic women who listen to you. You know, and everything that they believe is, well, children are gifts. And if children are gifts, we don't have a right to a gift. You can't wake up on Christmas morning and go, well, I have a right to a new bicycle. You know, if I'm given a new, it's a gift, but I don't have a right to that.

Yeah. So we have to, you know, rightly orient, you know, what are children? Are they things that we have a right to? Are they objects that we can go and purchase or get? Or are they gifts? And some people get the gifts of children and some people get the gifts of not children. And adoption, too, I think, is a very often overlooked way to have that gift. I'm not saying adoption. Oh, adoption is so easy and it's just, why doesn't everyone just adopt? I know that adoption is also a very common. complex process and it can also be very expensive, but there are not only over a million embryos, but there are also many children who have been born, who need adoption as well. And that is also something that we are called to because while we don't have a right to conceive children, we don't have a right to do that, I do believe that every child has a right to a mother and a father. Yeah, and back to the surplus human embryos, I think the children living today present, in the world that are without homes, without mothers and fathers, you know, our duties and

obligations are to them first, then to the surplus human embryo, which is why I land on the controversial position. It's not okay to keep them frozen for decades if they've been abandoned, you know, and then our duty and obligation is, you know, if you're religious, thaw them out, you know, Milander, Dr. Milander says, have a little religious service, baptize them and let them go be with Jesus. Or if you don't share that view of afterlifes, you know, that it's our duty and obligation not to just keep them in this absurd state of frozenness. Like I said, the last one that was born was frozen longer than the mother that gave it life was, you know, alive. Yeah, I have to think about, I have to think

about that I haven't really I've just kind of just thought while adopting an embryo is a wonderful thing because they need a home and of course I don't want these I don't want these children to be discarded I don't want them to be thought I mean it's such a terrible dehumanizing like thing to even think about but yeah I mean there are children who are born who also need home so we have millions of them as well and we just have there are so many things to think about and such an obligation to the vulnerable people that exist. One thing I just want to clarify, when you were talking about we don't have a right to have children, obviously we are talking about in the context of conception, parents have a right

to their children that are born. We have parental rights. We don't believe that the government gets to take those away. We don't believe that anyone supersedes. you know, parental authority and the parental care that a parent has for their child, either a natural child or adopted child. So I just wanted to clarify that. We're talking about in the context of conception. Correct. Yes. All right. Is there any, I mean, any of the last things that you want to say that we didn't bring up that you want to talk about? If not,

you can direct people where you would like to direct them. I just, one one thing, because it only came into my inbox this morning is that there's a new piece of legislation that's been introduced in the state of South Dakota. And we've been actively involved in, they're trying to legalize commercial gestational surrogacy in South Dakota. You know, the United States, we have 50 states and every state has different laws around this. So it's kind of always a patchwork of trying to find out, you know, what's happening at the legislative level. So if anybody listening is in the state of South Dakota, I would love to you to reach out to me because we'll be heavily involved in trying to stop that piece of legislation from passing in the state of South Dakota. Right now,

South Dakota has no law. So when babies are born through surrogacy, you can do surrogacy in South Dakota, but you're not protected by the law. And they're trying to enshrine legalize surrogacy there so that when babies are born, they immediately go to the intended parents and the surrogate has no rights. So, but I'm very active on Twitter at Jennifer Law, and I got a lot of Instagram followers through your podcast. So people can follow me on Instagram if they spend more time there. And then our YouTube channel, because all of our films are available there for free. The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network is our YouTube channel.

So you could find our films and watch them. But it's been great being with you again. Thank you. so much, Jennifer, for waking up early since you're on California time and taking the time to talk to us. I really appreciate it. Me too. My pleasure. Thank you. 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

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