Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 876 | How LGBTQ Activists Are Redefining Infertility | Guest: Katy Faust (Part One)

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Today we're joined by a show favorite, Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us, to discuss big fertility's increasing presence in our culture. We talk about California's new bill that redefines "fertility" to include gay couples in an effort to make insurance cover surrogacy in those cases. Naturally, there are some drastic repercussions of green-lighting a bill like this. We explain how we're misidentifying the victims, who are always the children, and why even Christian, heterosexual couples cannot let their longing for children be put above a child's well-being. We also cover why adoption is different from IVF and surrogacy and why it's so important to understand that IVF is never ethical. --- Timecodes: (01:30) Why are more people talking about surrogacy/IVF (03:50) California "redefining infertility" bill (13:13) Misidentifying victims (19:30) Infertile women (24:40) Celebrity surrogacies (30:05) Primal wound (33:30) Adoption (36:55) 'Ethical' IVF issues --- Today's Sponsors: A'Del — go to adelnaturalcosmetics.com and enter promo code "ALLIE" for 25% off your first order! Jase Medical — get up to a year’s worth of many of your prescription medications delivered in advance. Go to JaseMedical.com today and use promo code “ALLIE”. Constitution Wealth — align your values with your investments through your financial management. Go to ConstitutionWealth.com/ALLIE and schedule a FREE consultation! --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 836 | Surrogacy Horror: Gay ‘Dads’ Demand Abortion | Guest: Brittney Pearson https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-836-surrogacy-horror-gay-dads-demand-abortion-guest/id1359249098?i=1000620814003 Ep 482 | Children Have the Right to a Mom and a Dad | Guest: Katy Faust https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-482-children-have-the-right-to-a-mom-and-a/id1359249098?i=1000534144056 Ep 695 | Why Children's Rights Trump Adults' Feelings | Guest: Katy Faust https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-695-why-childrens-rights-trump-adults-feelings-guest/id1359249098?i=1000583336623 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: 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. California and other blue states are trying to redefine infertility to include gay couples that cannot have a child biologically so that insurance companies would then be forced to cover things like surrogacy. for two men who want a child. What's the problem with this? What's the problem of not just redefining infertility,

but redefining parenthood, redefining marriage, redefining the family? What are the problems that exist within surrogacy and third party egg and sperm donation? Are we really thinking about the needs of the child? To answer these very complex and controversial questions, we have Katie Faust.

She is the founder and director of them before us. which is a global movement defending children's right to their mother and father. I've had her on several times before. We'll link those past episodes, which I highly recommend. This is a two-part conversation. We will be getting into all of your very pressing questions about IVF, about surrogacy, about embryo adoption, about adoption in general in part one and part two of this conversation. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com. Code Alley. Katie, thanks so much for taking the time to come on again, one of my favorite people to talk

to. Have you noticed a trend that I've noticed over the past year or so? I mean, you were one of the first people that I heard talking about, surrogacy and IVF and things like that. Jennifer Law is another one, a voice that I've just relied on both of you a lot for education. I've noticed in the past few months or the past year or so, this has become a lot more a mainstream conversation, especially among conservatives. I don't think that I saw a lot of conservative commentators waiting in to the subject of surrogacy and IVF and reproductive technology, but it's bubbled to the surface recently, don't you think? Absolutely. And I think a lot of this has to, there's two things that I would say are responsible for this. One is we have been turning

a blind eye in a lot of ways to how big fertility has been victimizing people, especially children for a long time. And especially evangelicals, kind of your run-in-the-mill Christians are kind of late to the game. Part of that is because we love babies. And we, in our mind, like all of these technologies, we're really just about people being able to have babies. But the other reason why I think that this is so much more on the radar is because this is the next front on the push for equality. And how, you know, I've written recently about how this whole like redefining infertility, right, which is. is what California is pushing right now in one of their bills.

This whole idea of like we need reproductive justice. And that means that we should be able to form families any way we want, right? That's what Nairal tweeted on the eighth anniversary of a Bergerfeld. Like we're not really going to be equal unless we can create the families however and whenever we want. And of course, in the context of gay marriage, however we want means we have to employ these third parties and cut children off from their mother or father so we can be truly equal. So I think that we've been asleep at the wheel on the right. And on the left, right,

this is just the next stop on the family redefinition train. And it was brought to us by the redefinition of marriage and the passing of gay marriage. So to me, like, it makes sense that this is now kind of popping up in everybody's newsfeed. Yeah. You know, I want to stop, take a pit stop at something that you said. You mentioned this California bill that aims to redefine same-sex couples is unable to get pregnant. as infertile. So that's the redefining infertility that you were just talking about. As we are talking right now, I believe it's still just a bill that hasn't been turned into law.

I see no reason why there would be any breaks on this. Just looking at past legislation that has been easily passed and signed into law by California. But can you tell us a little bit more about this? So this is in an effort to get insurance companies to pay for things. like surrogacy for two men who want to create a child? Yeah, and they're not the only state to have tried this. Like we battled this back in Minnesota. We worked on that, and thankfully that bill didn't go through in Minnesota.

We testified against the similar bill here in Washington State, and thankfully that died. Right now, it's in committee in California. But what they're trying to do is, in essence, say, look at all these heterosexual couples who, if they're declared infertile, which the medical, definition of infertility is unprotected heterosexual sex for 12 months that doesn't result in a pregnancy or life birth. And now what they're saying is, well, we, no matter how much unprotected sex, the same-sex couple has, they are never going to be able to produce a child. And so this is what they've always done, right, in the family redefinition game is what they want is an impossibility from a

biological standpoint. And so what biology cannot accomplish the law needs to provide. So they did this in same-sex marriage, right, where they've started to redefine parenthood. According to biology, two adults of the same sex can never be the parents of a child. And so they have redefined with the word parenthood. No longer is it just a connection by biology or going through an adoption process. Now your intent to parent makes you a parent. So if two men intend to parent a child, now the adult says, thing, your parents. So they're trying to do the same thing with infertility, right?

they will never medically be able to be diagnosed as infertile because they're not participating in the activity that would lead doctors to conclude that infertility is the problem. And yet, they want the same kind of access and they want the same insurance coverage so that they also can create a child in a laboratory, right? And so that is what these bills are aimed at doing in the name of equality because in their perspective, it's unequal, right? It's discriminatory for heterosexual couples to be able to be designated as infertile and then receive coverage from their insurance companies. And so what do we have to do? We have to redefine what infertility means. And so now the California bill and similar other bills across the country are seeking to define infertility as not a medical

status, but really a relational status, right? I'm infertile because of the relationship I'm in, or I'm fertile because I'm not in a relationship at all. Some of these bills also cover IVF coverage for single adult. 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 T-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.

Tell me about some of the consequences of this because some people may be listening and they're like, well, yeah, I mean, that kind of makes, that kind of makes sense. Why? Why should we discriminate against two men who want to have a child? Why shouldn't they be covered by insurance? Who cares if it's two men, a man and a woman? But what are some of the repercussions of greenlighting a bill like this? Well, from the pro-life perspective, one of the things that the California bill specifically said is insurance companies can't just continue services. And there was, in essence, unlimited supply of IVF transfers. And we already have a situation in this country where we've got one million frozen embryos in storage right now.

And oftentimes the only thing that keeps that in check is cost. And so right now we are talking about insurance funded IVF transfers, which means why limit the number of embryos that you're going to create? I mean, create dozens, right? You know, hundreds. How many retrievals do you want to go through? Because you're going to have unlimited opportunities to transfer those babies. And so number one, it is only going to increase the amount of children who are suffering

indefinitely in a freezer or who are going to perish in the gauntlet that children have to undergo between freezer and implantation and then ultimately birth. It is going to massively increase the number of children that are screened for sex or for potential genetic markers that don't seem as desirable to the adults. In essence, it is going to contribute to the increased commodification of children where they are fought and discarded, donated to research, or spend their life forever in a freezer. And so it further reinforces the idea that children are a commodity that exist for adults. And that is honestly a problem for married couples, heterosexual couples, people who are medically infertile as well. So really, that is where bills like this, you know,

allow equal opportunity for the damage to children's rights because heterosexual couples can do it, gay couples can do it, and now single adults can do it. But what this bill does, in essence, in the name of equality, right, for LGBT adults. It says we also are going to say that you can have access and we may pay for a third party to contribute their sperm or their egg or their womb. And what does that mean? That means the child will always be missing one biological parent in their life, at least one and one adult to whom they have a natural right.

Now, that is a big deal for children for three reasons. Number one, that biological parent is the only person that grants children access to their biological identity. And we have surveys from children created through sperm and egg donation who say, that adult matters to me. That is not just some donor stranger out there. That is my biological father. Many of these children will go on protracted internet searches after they discover their donor conceived through a 23-a-me test or whatever and desperately longed to know this person that gave them life. Why? Because this is a question that every human child asks. It's very hard to answer the question, who am I? If you cannot answer the question, whose am I? So we are denying children

access to one of the two adults that can give them the answer to the question, who am I? Number two, the reason why this matters so much, is especially for people that are concerned about the well-being of children, is statistically a child's own biological mother and father are the most connected to, invested in and protective of them. And we go through this extensively in our book, Them Before Us, Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement. Unrelated adults invest less time, resources, money. Children are drastically more likely to be abused and neglected in the home of an unrelated adult. And what this is, what California's bill and similar bills are seeking to do is in essence incentivize and pay for children to be raised in a home where they're always going

to be parented by an unrelated adult. And finally, of course, we're always going to be starving these children, if it's a same-sex couple or a single, of the maternal love or the paternal love that children crave that they long for and that maximizes their development. And so when we hear about these bills, right, oh, you know, we need to, in the name of non-discrimination, in the name of equality, insurance companies need to treat same-sex couples or single. And the way that they would treat infertile heterosexual couples, the alarm bill should be ringing for you. What you're talking about is the creation of the fatherless children

that especially Christians are mandated to protect. Yeah, absolutely. It seems like the plight of children or the rights of children or what children are entitled to or deserve is constantly placed on the altar of whether it's so-called non-discrimination, so-called fight for equality, but really just the sexual revolution, really just progressivism in general, even if you're talking about like COVID policies and things like that. Even their rights and their well-being, constantly being sacrificed for the desires of adults. And, you know,

I understand kind of from a secular progressive perspective why this mentality exists, in the name of liberation, especially, just tearing down anything, any edifice that has been. constructed or institution that has been built for our protection, just kind of lay waste to all of these protections in order to build some kind of utopia in which everyone achieves, I don't know, some kind of new, fangle definition of equity. But what I'm constantly surprised by is even the Christian conservative kind of inability to push back against arguments in the name of equality, arguments in the name of love, arguments in the name of empathy that are kind pushed by the left to say, well, you know, these people, you know, two men, two women or whatever,

a couple, they want a child. So why not surrogacy? Why not IVF? Why not egg and sperm selling? If they want a child and as you said, we do love babies, then who are you to stand in the way of happiness? What really gets me is the Christian conservative seeming inability, not among everyone, of course, but among a large portion of the right, just their lack of comprehension of the issue, but also their inability to see through the arguments and respond to them. Yeah, what we really need to do is properly identify the victims. We get these questions wrong when we misidentify the victims. And, you know, we can see that very clearly in the pro-life world where people see that women with unplanned pregnancies are the

victims. And in many ways, they're seriously suffering, significantly suffering. And we never want to diminish that. However, when we get questions about whether or not a child has a right to life wrong, whether we get questions about abortion policy wrong, it is very clear that the child is the victim. And it is the same thing with questions of things like who wants to get married and who is infertile and what do we do with infertility. When we get these questions wrong, when we misidentify the victims when we say this couple that would be incredible parents, they desperately want a baby. And if they can't have a baby, then they're victims, right? No, we need to properly identify the victim. The children who lose their life through a eugenics process of IVF is the victim. The child who spends

eternity in a freezer is the victim. The child who is starved of a relationship with their mother or father because somebody used a third party is the victim. No, the child that loses a relationship with the only person they know on the day that they are born, their mother is the victim. So we have some work to do, especially on our side, to properly contextualize these arguments and center the conversation on the real victim, which, like you said, especially when it comes to sex, is always the kids, whether you're talking about premarital sex or cohabitation or just sexual liberation in general, who always pays the price in the name of adult liberation. It is always the kids.

And so I think that the pro-life world has done a very good job of properly centering the conversation around the child, the rights of the child, right? And we say no matter how you're suffering, your unplanned pregnancy, your scary diagnosis, whatever it is, we have to have this hedge of protection around the child. And it's the same thing with conversations about marriage and family or infertility. We say, I understand that you're suffering and you long for a baby. I understand that you experience same sex attraction and would be an amazing guy or an amazing mom. I understand that you're single and you desperately want to meet Mr. Wright or Mrs. Wright and your biological clock is ticking and you feel like the only way you can solve that is to have a donor. That is such a hard place to be. None of that justifies violating children's right to life or right to

their mother and father. And you will victimize children, right? If you choose to move forward in a way where you use a third party, right, or you're creating disposable babies. And so that is where I think the children's rights perspective offers incredible clarity. And also, it's a bit of a seamless garment. We are going to put kids first, regardless of how adults are longing, suffering, yearning. No, we are going to empathize with you, especially on a friendship level. But in matters of policy, it is justice for children that is going to dictate our actions and behavior. I want to kind of get into specifically what I get the most push back on and just ask some questions that I receive a lot. When it comes to my Christian conservative audience, those pro-life people who

love babies and they want to have children, they want their friends to have children. And so their kind of mentality so far has been pretty much any means possible. So they might agree with us, agree with you when you say children deserve a mother and father. Yes, they are against two men or two women using a third party, all of that. They're on board with you when it comes to that. But what I receive a lot is, but, and you kind of just answered this, but I want you more specifically to talk about it, but what if I want a child? And don't talk about this is what I hear unless you've walked through infertility. This is nuanced. This is gray. It's not so binary. It's not so black and white. It's not right or wrong. You know, I even got this message saying,

you know, God deals with us all relationally and individually. You can't say. You can't say. You know, that God hasn't called someone to be a surrogate or use a surrogate or use IVF or I get, well, my children were born from IVF. And so you're, you know, basically telling me I'm a bad mom. And so to me, it's a conflation of desire in God's will. But like how, how do you respond to that? I'm talking about the heterosexual Christian couple who feels that they were called by God to use some of these technologies. And they say, because I desire this so strongly, God must have given me this desire and he gave me the scientific means by which I can have a child. How dare you, how dare you even question that? What's your response? I don't want to question you and I don't

want to wreck the relationship. Do you understand, though, that protecting children is an absolute imperative for every Christian? We don't get to decide whether or not we crusade on their behalf. It is literally a mandate. And we are all in serious, serious jeopardy if we cause a little one to stumble. And I don't, I can't understand people that are going through infertility. My friends who experience it would say, Katie, it's kind of like having the worst breakup you've ever experienced. But that just happens month after month after month. And some of those friends have a very hard time focusing on anything else because they're longing to be a mom is so strong. And it's so good. it's so good to long to be a mom.

The challenge for people dealing with infertility or any of these other legitimate challenges that adults experience is what you cannot do is allow your longing and your loss to be transferred onto the shoulders of a child. That is the no-go zone for Christians. So talk about the couple that says, well, you know, I want to use IVF. And the truth is that there are ways to use IVF that don't violate the rights of children. and I have met people that have done it, but they have fought against the industry and their own doctor at every step of the way. If they are never going to discard any embryo, if they're going to implant every single one, if they're not going to freeze any or have surplus or excess or whatever it is, that's a much more expensive process.

And many doctors won't do it because it's going to damage their success rates and their implantation rates. So you can try to use these technologies in a way that don't violate any child's right to life or any child's right their mother and father, and you will be traveling that road alone. The reality is that fertility companies are banking on you creating multiple embryos, storing, freezing, discarding, selecting. And we know that by the numbers, only about 7% of children created through IVF are going to be born alive, right? In our mind, we think, well, IVF is just about babies, but it's not. It's about on-demand designer babies that you can discard if you need to. And that's how the industry sees it.

And for those of you guys who are pro-lifers who suddenly went, wait a second, what are you talking about? Are you serious? Yes. Right after Dobbs passed, what did we have? We had fertility clinics in red states absolutely panicking over the fact that that state might define life as beginning at conception because it would wreck their business model. They spend quite a lot of time grading and selecting and discarding and freezing embryos after they have developed for a couple days, you know, up to a week. And if they are not allowed to dispose of that embryonic life, they can't do business in a red state. So by the numbers, the baby making industry, the fertility industry, takes more embryonic life per year than the baby taking industry, the abortion industry.

So first of all, we need to understand that if you're participating, if you're choosing to go the IVF route, you will be the vast minority of people who are seeking to do it without violating the rights of children. So let's talk a little bit about, well, what about surrogacy? Like, maybe God has called me to be a surrogate or maybe God has said we can use a surrogate. So it's very interesting to me. We've had a couple celebrities in the last few weeks that have talked about their surrogate pregnancy. One of them is Chloe Kardashian. And she, you know, honestly good for her because what she said is, I'm having a really hard time bonding with my surrogate-born son. Like I just don't feel close to him.

I feel guilty that I took him away from his birth mother, right at the minute that he was born. And I am struggling to connect to him. And I think that people looked at that and said, well, that makes sense. You know, that makes sense. Like the baby was not growing inside of you. and we can empathize and understand where Chloe Kardashian is coming from. I would now like people to look at things from the child's perspective. Chloe has dozens of other relationships,

dozens of other close relationships, people that she's connected to, that love her, and she was struggling to connect with this one person. So now think of it from the child's perspective. They have one relationship. The only, not just person, the only thing that they know is their birth mother, the woman within whose womb they are growing inside. And do you think that you can then take the child away from that only person,

the one relationship they have and the child won't mourn, right? And then we saw it again with Chrissy Teigen, Tegan, forgive me, like I don't know. I've read it, haven't heard it a whole lot. But, you know, she talked about how she just welcomed another child through surrogacy. And because why she had, and she was afraid to, right? because she had just experienced a really devastating pregnancy loss. And it affected her so much that she wasn't sure if she could even try to get pregnant again. Why did it affect her?

Why was she so devastated over a baby that she only gestated for, I think, like, 24 weeks? Because she was already attached to that child because she already loved that child, because she already had a relationship with that child, even though she had dozens of other relationships with other adults. do you think the child was attached to her? Yes. Yes. It was the child's only relationship.

So when we think about surrogacy, what we're really talking about is we are talking about intentionally severing the relationship that the baby has with the only person they know on the planet and handing it over to people that from the child's perspective are complete strangers. It is the surrogate's body. It's her voice. It's her smell that statistically, by the data, lowers the baby's stress levels, lowers their cortisol levels. We don't put infants on the chest of random adults so they can form a bond. We put babies on their mother's chest because they have an existing bond. And that is the world that sues the child. So it's just all of these situations are really,

adults insisting that adults sacrifice something so that they can have what they want, even if it's a noble want, even if it's a God-given, ingrained want. We are not allowed, as Christians especially, to insist that kids sacrifice for us. It is an absolute inversion of our entire worldview that said, the greatest among us became the least on our behalf, right? The strong always sacrifice for the weak in the Christian world. the other way around. I remember when my oldest was born and it was a C-section and they, you know, they put her on the little cart where they weigh, but they also measure their oxygen. And they said, oh, her oxygen is not great. It's not 100%. I hadn't even had the chance to see her or

hold her or anything. And they said, we're going to have to take her to the NICU. And so someone comes in with a separate car to take her to the NICU and I was just begging. I was like, please just let me hold her. Just let me hold her for a second. So I got to hold her and they put her on my chest with her little hat on. And they said, okay, we got to let's, you know, we got to layer back down. They laid her back down. Her oxygen was 100%. And so I'm not saying that that's always what happens.

But in that case, like she needed her mom. She just needed her mom. Who knows? I don't know everything that was going on physiologically in that moment. But of course, my guess is that there was some stress there. She had just been, you know, taken out surgically and laid on this table. and she didn't have the only thing that she had ever known. And then when she got that, everything was fine and praise God,

and she never had to go to the NICU or anything like that. But I just think about the separation that happens there, that there may be, not always, but there may be physical consequences to that, but certainly there are emotional consequences. And it seems like people justify it by saying, well, they'll be fine. Or they're never able to articulate that pain.

They can't talk about that maybe primal wound that occurred there. And of course, they love their parents. They love the people who raised them. And so they're not going to say, you know, who are you? Why are you raising me? My birth experience was bad. But as you said, just because a child can't speak up for themselves or doesn't have the ability to articulate the pain that was caused there doesn't justify it. It doesn't mean the wound didn't happen. And it doesn't mean that we have an excuse to create that wound. So you use the word primal wound. And that is not, I use the word too. It's not a Katie original.

It's actually the term that adoptees have used to describe the pain that took place at birth when they had to be separated from their mother at birth, the only person that they knew. Many of these kids were adopted by loving heterosexual couples that statistically are more highly educated, spend more money, and spend more time with them than even intact biological families because adoptive parents go through extreme screening and vetting, they tend to be even better positioned to invest in their children. And yet, adoptees disproportionately disproportionately, they have higher rates of depression and anxiety, externalizing disorders. And many of them would say, it is because I lost a relationship with my mother the day that I was

born, because I had to start from scratch when all the other babies had a nine and a half months, head start on me. I had to start at ground zero on the day that I was born. And not just that, but I mourned. The only way that a baby can process the loss of the mother is to process it as a death. And so there is a book called The Primal Wound, and it is called the Adoptives Bible, because so many adoptives have said, this explained so much of what I've struggled with in life. So of course, your listeners will rightly say, wait a second. Are you against? adoption, right? And I can tell you, indeed, I am not against adoption. I used to be the assistant director at the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world. I have walked orphanage floors where kids

are crammed two to three per crib. I have seen the children who were left behind, who have fingertips in the shape of light bulbs with blue at the end because they have holes in their heart. and they don't have enough circulation and nobody came to get them. And I can tell you that adoption is an institution centered around the well-being of children. It is a just society's response to children who, for whatever reason, have lost their parents. And we can acknowledge that adoption is redemptive without minimizing or papering over the kind of loss the child had to experience to find their forever family. So the best way to understand not just the surrogacy adoption contrast, but really every issue that has to do with sex, marriage, family, parenthood, reproductive technologies is to ask the question, who's doing the hard thing? Are the adults doing the hard thing or are the children doing the hard thing?

In surrogacy and sperm donation and egg donation and most IVF, the children are doing the hard thing. They are losing their life. They're losing their mother. They are losing their father. They are losing a relationship with their birth mother so that adults can have what they want. In adoption, the adults are doing the hard thing. They are reordering their life, going through the screening, vetting, background checks, training, home studies, post-placement reports to bring in a child who has experienced a wound, right?

In adoption, the adults are seeking to mend the wound. In reproductive technologies, especially third-party reproduction, the adults are inflicting the wound. So that is the that is sort of the metric that we use and all them before us work. Them the children need to come before us adults. That means we the adults have to do the hard thing

so that kids don't have to. Yeah. Adoption, because people ask me that a lot, what's the difference between, if there's a wound there, the separation exists both in adoption and in surrogacy, I mean, what's the difference, as you said, are you

against adoption too? And how I have kind of said it is, well, adoption redeems an already existing broken situation. Surrogacy brings a broken situation into existence. You're creating a child to then detach them sometimes from the third party biological mother, who is the person who is selling her eggs and the woman who gestated, if you're talking about two men using this process. These are two different women, or even if it's the egg in the sperm of the biological parents being implanted into the surrogate,

you're creating a broken situation there. Whereas an adoption, the baby has already been created. And so you are, you're redeeming a situation that is broken, and that's really the difference. Now, speaking of that, bringing those two things together, Well, gosh, there's so much that I want to say. Number one. Okay, let me go back to something that she said that I almost, I almost said something about

then, so people are just going to have to remember when you were talking about IVF and the potentially ethical ways that you can do IVF, that is a lot more difficult, a lot harder to find, basically only implanting the number of, you know, the embryo that you actually want to develop and raise and all of that, not putting them on ice. There even in that, I still think that any time you take conception outside of sex, there's going to be a potential consequence. I was reading the other day, one of live actions posts a statistic that they cited is that 75% of babies created via IVF do not make it to implantation or birth. There's a very high attrition rate when it comes to creating children outside of conception. So even that, even with the most ethical method possible for creating a child via IVF,

you still are asking a child to take a risk. Of course, there's a risk of miscarriage all of the time, you know, even in natural conception, but you are asking a child to take a heightened risk with their own life by conceiving that child via IVF. And I know that's really hard for people to hear. And I don't, you know, I don't mean to offend, but still. Again, this is just another example, that our desire should not be conflated necessarily with God's will or our ability to do something shouldn't be conflated with should. Right.

And for the children that do make it through that gauntlet of risks, we do have emerging data on health impacts for children created through IVF. If you go to our website, Then Before Us.com and search IVF harms, right? We have compiled probably five pages of all the different studies that we have and data that we have on children who were created in a laboratory. And what we know, which isn't everything, but it's something about the cognitive challenges they have, some of the disabilities, physical and developmental that they are more at risk for. We have a lot more learning that we need to do. But yes, you're right. Even if you don't violate any child's right to life, even if you don't violate the child's right to their.

mother and father, genetic mother and father, even if you don't separate them from their birth mother. It looks like having a technician direct the conception of the child instead of the loving embrace of a mother and father works against kids even if they are able to be born alive and raised by their mom and dad. All right. That was part one of our two-part conversation. Next time we will be talking about what policy should look like. What about it'll be Julius, Georgia Maloney, who is making it a lot harder for two men or two women to claim to be the parents of children. What did pro-family policies look like? Also, things like embryo adoption, what really should be the Christian stance and the Christian's role in this madness that has been

created by reproductive technology? We will get into all of that. Trying our best to speak the truth and love to something that I know is a very, very sensitive, understandably. sensitive topic. We'll get into all of that tomorrow. Thanks for joining. We'll see you soon. 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.