The Daily Signal - #467: The Surrogacy Risks the Media Won't Cover

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

Surrogacy is touted by some celebrities, including Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West, who have had two children via surrogates. But is it as safe as the media coverage suggests? Jennifer Lahl of the Center for Bioethics and Culture breaks down the medical risks the procedure has, as well as some of the legal and personal consequences surrogacy and egg donation have had for some. We also cover these stories:•President Trump is done with dealing with Democrats, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests a "cover-up."•Attorney General William Barr is fed-up with courts issuing nationwide injunctions on Trump administration policies.•A investigation failed to determine whether Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam wore blackface or donned KKK garb in his yearbook photo. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, May 23rd. I'm Kate Trinko. And I'm Daniel Davis. Well, the brave new world of reproductive technology raises a host of ethical questions, some of which we haven't faced before. One of those is the issue of surrogacy. Critics say it amounts to women renting out their uterus and often out of deep financial desperation. In today's episode, we'll sit down with Jennifer Law and Melissa Farley. They've worked on the issue of surrogacy, and they'll unpack the ethical issues at stake.

By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating in iTunes and please encourage others to subscribe. That will help us grow our audience. Now, on to our top news. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came out swinging on Wednesday. We do believe that it's important to follow the facts. We believe that no one is above the law, including the President of the United States. And we believe that the President of the United States is engaged in a cover-up. Pelosi made these comments before meeting with President Trump,

along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, to discuss infrastructure. In a formal press conference also on Wednesday, after the infrastructure meeting, which didn't go well, Pelosi had more to say. For some reason, maybe it was lack of confidence on his part, that he really couldn't match the greatness of the challenge that we have. It wasn't really respectful.

of the Congress and the White House working together, he just took a pass. And it just makes me wonder why he did that. In any event, I pray for the President of the United States. And I pray for the United States of America. Well, President Trump caught wind of Pelosi's comments, suggesting a cover-up, just as he was about to sit down with her and other Democrats

for a meeting on infrastructure. The president then walked out early on those talks, saying, I don't do cover-ups. He also vowed to stop working with Democrats on infrastructure until they drop their investigation. Here's what the president said to the press right after walking out. And I said, let's have the meeting on infrastructure. We'll get that done easily. That's one of the easy ones. And instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that had just said that I was doing.

a cover-up. I don't do cover-ups. You people know that probably better than anybody. And I was just looking at a list of some of the things that we just did more than 2,500 subpoenas qualified for. And I let everybody talk. I let the White House counsel speak for 30 hours. 30 hours. I have 19 special counsel lawyers, 40 FBI. agents. I said, open it all up. Let them have whatever they want. Nearly 500 search warrants. Think of that a search warrant. Did you ever see a search warrant before? Neither did I. This was over 500 search warrants. Attorney General William Barr is fed up with the courts issuing nationwide injunctions against President Trump's policies. Speaking to the American Law Institute, Barr pointed out that there had been more

nationwide injunctions, namely 37, throughout the years of the Trump's. Trump administration than there had been during all of the 20th century. Quote, one judge can, in effect, cancel the policy with the stroke of the pen, Barr said, per the Washington examiner, no official in the United States government can exercise that kind of nationwide power with the sole exception of the president, and the Constitution subjects him to nationwide election among other constitutional checks as a prerequisite to wielding that power. Well, Nevada is on the verge of becoming the 15th state to join the national popular vote compact.

That's the effort to reject the results of the electoral college in the event that a presidential candidate wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college. The Nevada State Senate approved the measure on Tuesday by a party-line vote of 12 to 8, with all Democrats voting for it. The bill also passed the lower house back in April, meaning it now goes to the desk of Governor Steve Sissalak, a Democrat. He hasn't yet indicated whether he'll support the bill, but if he does, the compact will then carry the weight of 195 electoral votes. But it would only kick in if it reaches 270. Both chambers of the New York legislature approved a bill Wednesday that would effectively give Congress access to President Trump's tax returns, although the law in theory applies to the tax returns of all elected officials who have filed personal or business taxes in New York State. The legislation is now on the desk of Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo, who will likely sign it.

Well, Republican candidate Fred Keller won his special election House race in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, easily beating Democrat Mark Friedenberg to fill the vacant seat of Tom Marino, who resigned last year. Keller won the solidly red district by a whopping 32 percentage points. President Trump had stumped for Keller on Monday, tweeting out, Fred is strong on crime, Second Amendment, military, vets, and health. care. An investigation by law firm McGuire Woods at the behest of Eastern Virginia Medical School has been unable to determine for sure who the two individuals are, one in Blackface and one in KKK Garp, on the yearbook page of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat. The firm wrote

in its report, we could not conclusively determine the identity of either individual depicted in the photograph. The governor himself has made inconsistent public statements in this regard. No individual that we interviewed has told us from personal knowledge that the governor is in the photograph, and no individual with knowledge has come forward to us to report that the governor is in the photograph. However, in a video earlier this year, as the yearbook page made the news, nor them apologized. My fellow Virginians, earlier today, I released a statement apologizing for behavior in my past that falls far short of the standard you set from me when you elected me. to be your governor. I believe you deserve to hear directly from me. That photo and the racist

and offensive attitudes it represents does not reflect that person I am today or the way that I have conducted myself as a soldier, a doctor, and a public servant. I am deeply sorry. Well, Senator Corey Booker of New Jersey is not to be outdone by fellow Democrats. He's now proposing a government office completely devoted to abortion. On Wednesday, he posted an article on Medium, saying that if elected president, he would, quote, take immediate action to protect reproductive rights, end quote. That plan includes on day one, creating a quote-unquote White House Office of Reproductive Freedom, charged with coordinating and affirmatively advancing abortion rights. He also says he would push to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer dollars from going

toward abortion, and he would support forcing employers to cover contraception in their health care plans, even if they have personal objections. Next up, we'll talk to Jennifer Loll about surrogacy and its possible dangers. Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at letters at dailysignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. Joining us today is Jennifer Loll, who is the president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture. She's also produced several documentaries on third-party reproduction, including eggs,

exploitation and breeders, a subclass of women, as well as big fertility. Jennifer, thanks for joining us today. Thank you. It's good to be with you today. So first off, let's talk about the health risks. What are the health risks to the woman when she is a surrogate for pregnancy, and what are the health risks to the baby? You know, it's funny because most people just think all pregnancies are equal, and that's not the case. So when you think of surrogacy, the woman is pregnant carrying somebody else's baby.

So if you sort of equate what's happening to organ donation, we don't just take a kidney from somebody and put it into somebody else's body because we know that body will probably reject it. And that's what's actually going on with surrogacy. So when the woman has the embryo or embryos transferred into her womb or her uterus, her body immediately, undergoes a rejection. This is foreign. This is not my baby. So in the medical literature, you'll see that a surrogate mother is going to be at higher risk for preeclampsia, maternal hypertension, gestational diabetes. And of course, if the mother is at risk and in a high risk pregnancy category, that also stresses the baby or babies that she's carrying so that they're also at risk. And this is something that, I mean, people know about rejecting, you know, kidneys

and that kind of thing, but we don't often think about this. I mean, I almost think that surrogacy is sort of not talked about. People don't really think about it, but it's increasingly common, right? Yeah, and people don't talk about it, and all they see mostly is the covers of People magazine where you'll see celebrities, Jimmy Fallon, Kim Kardashian, Elton John, you know, all these people that are having babies in this new way. And since this is a relatively new practice, we're only now starting to get data in the medical literature. And the data is showing that these are high-risk pregnancies because

the woman's not carrying her own child. And just out of curiosity, obviously, they can test for kidneys and, you know, which ones would work better or worse for you? Is there anything like that possible for embryos? I suppose they could, but you have to get back to the question, why would you again want to do this? Because you're still in the case of organ donation, even if you have a really good match, the person who's receiving that organ is going to have to take all these extra drugs, anti-rejection drugs, for the rest of their life. So why would you take a healthy woman who's not a patient, put her into a medically risky situation, and then say, but that's okay, we'll just give her more medication and managing these risks. You have to come back and say,

why would we even want to do this in the beginning? Because this is, surrogates are overwhelmingly young moms, busy at home, taking care of their own children. And why would we We want to put them in a compromised pregnancy situation that may jeopardize their ability to mother their own children. So your organization is sort of waving a red flag here saying, you know, let's actually look at as a society what this is and the risks. Have you gotten much interest from the media in covering and bringing that to the surface? You know, that's, we've actually been silenced by the media. You know, the media has sort of adopted the big fertility industry narrative. narrative, you know, that everybody wins. And, you know, these, otherwise, these wonderful couples

couldn't have children and the children are all fine and the surrogate mothers are all fine. And, you know, it's a narrative that's very strong and powerful. And the media so far has not wanted to report on the full story. You know, I lamented in my remarks at the Heritage Foundation today that we had a surrogate mother in the United States who died, carrying twins for a couple in Spain. The twins died and we could not get any media interest whatsoever in three people's losing their life. And I assume her death was connected to carrying the twins? It was definitely connected to being pregnant. She had placental abruption. And you don't get placental abruption if you're not pregnant. There's no placenta. So you just mentioned the big fertility industry.

Tell us a bit about it. I mean, I think a lot of Americans know it's extremely expensive. to use IVF or involve a surrogate, but is this a profitable industry? It's a huge profitable industry. And of course, the surrogate mother is the low person on the receiving end, if you will, of the economic gain. You know, we say often that the person, the buyer is the intended parents who get a take-home IVF baby through surrogacy, it's a six-figure baby. So this is clearly a very wealthy, lucrative industry.

It's a growing industry. It's in the billions and billions of dollars. It's a global industry because embryos are tiny and egg and sperm are tiny. They can be frozen and shipped all around the world. So it's definitely a big, big industry. And here in the United States, what is the regulation like? You mentioned a Spanish couple having their child here. What's the regulation like?

The United States is a peculiar country in that. We have 50 states, which means we have 50 different pieces of legislation, if you will. I mean, of course, some states, of course, have the same laws. But, you know, where right now commercial surrogacy is all illegal in New York State. My state of California, where I live, it's literally a reproductive tourist destiny, destination zone. And so people from all around the world will come to California because it's very friendly to surrogacy. The Global South has just recently, over the last several years, closed their borders, shut down commercial surrogacy. because women and children have been harmed and exploited,

which makes the market to sort of move and shift to more surrogacy friendly places like the United States. Right now we're fighting a very tough uphill battle to keep commercial surrogacy illegal in New York State, and Governor Cuomo was poised to legalize commercial surrogacy there. It would be interesting to see if we're successful or not, because that's an active piece of legislation right now. But in the last few years, because of the work I do, I've been involved in Washington, state, in Louisiana, in the District of Columbia, where we've lost, where these are states that normally in the past did not permit surrogacy and have now become surrogacy-friendly states.

So you mentioned the instance of the mom with the Spanish twins, but you also discussed at the event a woman who ended up having both a child she was carrying as a surrogate, but also her natural child. And you said she faced legal obstacles in getting the rights to her own child back. can you talk about that and also are there other stories of things like this where things have gone wrong? Yes, I remember sitting in my office the moment Jessica Allen contacted me. And she's a young woman in Southern California who literally gave birth to a Chinese baby and her own baby and did not realize that at the time. The whole time she was pregnant, she thought she was pregnant for this Chinese couple with their two Chinese babies. Most surrogates do not see the babies when they're born.

They're immediately taken away. And that was the case with Jessica. So she didn't immediately see these two babies that came out of her body. It was only within the hours and days later that she could sense that there was something amiss. When the Chinese mother came in and on her phone showed Jessica a picture of the two twins and said, what do you think about these babies? And Jessica said they don't look like their brothers and sisters, you know, they don't look the same. And Jessica Allen is a white woman who's married to an African-American man.

And in fact, what happened was through a rare occurrence called superfetation, she got pregnant about a week to 10 days after the embryo transfer. So throughout the pregnancy, they thought she was carrying Chinese twins, when in fact she was carrying one Chinese baby and then got pregnant with her own child. And so it took her two months to get her baby back because immediately her maternal rights were already severed when the children were born. And the Chinese mother and the Chinese father were the parents on the birth. certificate. And then it took her another about 10 months to get the Chinese name off of the

birth certificate of her son and to put the name they gave their son and herself and her husband listed up as the birth mother and birth father of their own child. But I could tell stories like that all day long. And in my film, Big Fertility, I sort of rattle off a couple of very provocative cases that I personally know of and I say how many. I mean, how many more of these kind of stories are the media going to not tell or not listen to or our government officials not step in and act before, you know, I mean, are we just going to keep letting women be harmed and children being harmed before good laws are passed? Well, it seems like surrogacy is closely related nowadays to, you know, gay couples, the issue

of gay couples wanting to have their, you know, biological kids. And it seems... Although, I would just point out also. more and more older straight couples as well. Yeah, fair. Yeah, fair. But it seems, at least to me, that a lot of people think, oh, well, surrogacy, that's just enabling, you know, these couples to have full equality in society, you know, enabling them to have access to what everyone else has access to. How would you speak to those who, you know, maybe support, you know, gay couples, you know,

being able to marry and that kind of thing, but aren't sure how to think about surrogacy? I mean, because it seems like what you're saying, is it's not just about the parents' rights. There's a lot more involved here. Yeah, and it's, you know, of course, my position is that I'm 100% against surrogacy for anybody. You know, gay couples, heterosexual couples, single people that just want to have a baby and don't want to be involved or Mr. Wright or Mrs. Wright hasn't come along. You know, it gets back to the point you don't have a right to a child, and you certainly

don't have a right to another woman's body. And in the case of gay couples, they overwhelmingly explain to women. They exploit one woman for her eggs and they exploit one woman for her uterus so that they can have the child of their dreams. Now, I'm overwhelmingly sympathetic to people who can't have children. And I don't ever want my message to be misconstrued of I don't feel sympathy or have any kind of empathy for people who really want to have children. And for some reason, all the different reasons why people can't have children can't. But I do draw a very bright line between you don't have a right to put another. woman, or in the case of an egg donor, two women in harm's way, you don't have a right to

intentionally separate children from their birth mother and their biological identities and realities. I was a pediatric nurse for, you know, almost two decades. And I say often that, you know, the only thing a newborn baby knows at the time of birth is their mother. And you don't have to teach them that. They've learned that from being nine months in the womb with this woman. They know her sounds. They know her voice. They know her smell. You know, they know her rhythm and her movements, and that's, and there's a trauma, and that's in the medical literature that's broken when that bond is severed from the moment these children. So, you know, Jessica's son, who was taken away, you know, for two months, you know, he, we, I wonder what kind of

long-term trauma there might be on that child who was placed in, in a very undesirable situation. I mean, he was with intended parents who knew this is not our baby, so they weren't attaching to this child. And Jessica being clueless that she, had given away her own child and then only to be reunited with them two months later. You have to imagine that there's some kind of trauma that was happening at that time. So you just mentioned that in cases of surrogacy that involve an egg donor, there's also health risk to the egg donor. And I was wondering if you could get into that because I think, one, it's becoming more and more popular to encourage young women to freeze their eggs. So if they,

you know, don't meet the right guy until they're older, they can have children then. But then, of course, also ads that say you'll get a lot of money if you donate your eggs right now. So why is that a concern? Yeah. Well, for one, they're getting a lot of money to sell their eggs, and it's all under the guise of donation. When you think of organ donation, organ donors are truly donors. They're not being compensated. But egg donors, we call them donors, are being heavily compensated, and especially the more beautiful and smart, and if they go to an Ivy League school, that can really be compensated heavily. You know, there's serious health risk to young women who are, you

being paid to sell their eggs. You know, they take very powerful hormones, super powerful doses, because if you're going to pay an egg donor $10,000 or $15,000, you don't want one egg. You want as many as you can get her body to produce. So these women are bombarded with very high doses of powerful fertility drugs that have never been tested on healthy women. You know, what the medical literature shows is what the drugs have as far as a negative effect on infertile women. So you can't compare those studies because you're taking a healthy woman, an egg donor, who has nothing wrong with her fertility, she's not sick. And then you're putting her on high doses. She's undergoing surgery, anesthesia. So there's all those short-term risks associated with the

procedure and the drugs. And then there's the longer-term risk. So for example, in my film exploitation, two women lost her ability to ever have their own children. So in helping somebody have a baby, these women will never be able to have their own children. One of the women went on and developed bilateral breast cancer at a very young age where breast cancer doesn't normally strike younger women. It's a much older women, kind of cancer, women of my age are more at risk. Two women had massive strokes, massive strokes. They live with permanent damage from the stroke. And you have to think, again, back to big fertility, why, for the sake of the almighty dollar and somebody else who really wants a child, would we be willing to risk the health and well-being

of otherwise healthy women, surrogate mothers or egg donors? They're not patients. They're not doing any of this because they have a medical need to assume risks of drugs and pregnancy. They're doing it because they need money. Wow. It's pretty sobering. Jennifer Lal, really appreciate your time and being on. Where can our listeners find your work? My website is www.c-Nadwork.org.

Fantastic. Thank you. You're welcome. Do you own an Amazon Echo? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily Alexa Flash briefing. It's easy to do. Just open your Amazon Alexa app, go to settings, and select Flash Briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your Flash briefing

so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. Joining us is Melissa Farley, PhD. She's a psychologist and founder of the nonprofit organization, prostitution research and education. She's also the author or co-author of 40 peer-reviewed publications on prostitution and trafficking. So you were an event at the Heritage Foundation in May where you compared surrogacy to prostitution. Can you expand on that? Sure. In both of those institutions, you see, what we see is a part of a woman's being, in the case of prostitution, the sexual part of her being, in the case of surrogacy, her womb.

You see, that part of her split off from the rest of her and exploited for somebody else's benefit and profit. We looked for many, many years at the long-term consequences of prostitution. People had looked at the STD and HIV-related health risks of prostitution, but they never looked at the psychological harms that, occur when you use an intimate part of your body, your reproductive system, for renting that out for somebody else's baby. In the case of prostitution, people didn't look at the long-term consequences of letting a sex buyer use you for his own private masturbation fantasy, which was not, it's not the woman's idea of sexuality, it's the sex buyer's idea. And in both of these institutions,

prostitution and surrogacy, you see women who have some economic need, more or less, deciding for market reasons to sell that part of themselves and their whole businesses that have sprung up, pimp surrogacy pimps, and of course we all know pips that function in prostitution, whole businesses have been established to promote these enterprises. And is that a recent trend that these are popping up just in the last 10 to 20 years? The surrogacy businesses. Jennifer would be able to give you a better timeline on that than me. but certainly advanced reproductive technologies are a relatively recent thing pretty much since the 70s.

And the surrogacy in which an embryo of a third party can be fertilized with the sperm of a fourth party and implanted in the womb of a birth mother who's not genetically related at all to, to the fetus, that's a relatively recent thing in the last 30 years or so. So what do you think it does psychologically to women when they're surrogates? I mean, I think we see a lot of the media coverage, the surrogates say they're able to be disconnected, they're happy to do this for the parents, they recognize it's not their own child. But what are you finding? Well, the surrogacy businesses offer scripts to women.

they deliberately screen out women that seem too poor, and they screen in women who are willing to follow the script that goes, I'm doing this to help a childless couple or a single woman or a gay couple have the child of their dreams. And it makes me happy to do that. you have this stereotype of the happy breeder who's willing to have anybody's baby just to make somebody else happy. Just the way we have the stereotype of the happy hooker who's happy to have sex with anybody just because she loves having a lot of sex. Neither of these are true, of course, but they're an exploitation about a part of a woman's being. What do I think surrogacy does? I mean, the sad thing is what we have at this point in time is mostly anecdotal reports of the grief that women feel when they give up a baby that has been in their body for nine months, even if it's not genetically related to them, the complex endocrinology and biology of that fact.

Nobody understands that at this point in history. We certainly have reports of grief, but beyond that, no one has looked at the long-term psychological consequences. Certainly we know that in order to survive prostitution or surrogacy, there has to be this disconnection happen. In psychological terms, it's dissociation, where you actually. actually separate your mind from your body and remind yourself, this is not my baby, this is not my baby, as if women try and convince themselves that this is a normal thing,

while physically it feels anything but normal. So, I mean, what we are wondering is whether in surrogacy, some of the same psychological sequela, happen that also happen in prostitution. The same kind of splitting is required in prostitution, and we know that women learn to use that dissociation as a defense, and it doesn't serve them well in the rest of their lives. It's not a great thing to know how to do unless you're under extreme emotional duress. So we think there might be dissociation symptoms. We think there might be post-traumatic stress disorder that comes after the trauma of having

to hand a child over to purchasing parents. It's really not been studied and neither have the medical risks, the long-term medical risks of being flooded with very intense drugs and hormones to make sure that the fertility and the implantation happens. There's all kinds of medical complexities with that, too. Yeah, I want to ask you about that because you've spoken about how some doctors in the fertility industry aren't following all of the medical procedures. What's up with that? Yeah, there was a 2017 study. where they looked at to what extent medical professionals followed guidelines

for how many embryos can be implanted in one woman's uterus. Because there's such a high failure rate of embryo implantation, there's this tendency to implant many embryos, and one never knows how many are going to, be successful pregnancies. This is why you end up with the octum who had eight embryos come to birth. But generally, it's multiple babies are common in surrogacy arrangements. But the guidelines say you shouldn't put that many embryos in any woman under the age of 35. And most women who are functioning as surrogates are under the age of 35, and they are getting multiple embryos implanted.

In most cases, the medical guidelines put out by OBGYN specialists are not being followed in the surrogacy industry. It's a business where the main interest on the part of the medical profession is to represent the interests of keeping the baby healthy for the purchasing parents. The interests of the physical health and the mental health of the woman bearing the child, the actual birth mother, that's a much lower priority. Thank you so much for joining us today, Melissa. Thank you for having me. Well, that's going to do it for us today. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce

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