Ep 1147 | Human Egg Farms, Switched Babies & the Dark Web of Big Fertility | Guest: Katy Faust
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 16 minutes
Words per Minute
185.85359
Summary
A woman in Georgia gave birth to the wrong baby. This is thanks to the mostly unregulated, big fertility industry. And unfortunately, Trump s recent IVF executive order might make this problem worse. Today, we are talking with Them Before Us founder, Katie Faust, about the latest that has unraveled with Elon Musk, Ashley St. Clair, and one of the other mothers of his children, about what modern day polygamy looks like and why children s rights matter.
Transcript
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A woman in Georgia gave birth to the wrong baby. This is thanks to the mostly unregulated big
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fertility industry. And unfortunately, Trump's recent IVF executive order might make this
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problem worse. Today, we are talking with Them Before Us founder, one of our favorite guests,
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Katie Faust. We will also be discussing the latest that has unraveled with Elon Musk,
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Ashley St. Clair, and one of the other mothers of his children, what modern day polygamy looks like
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and why children's rights matter. This is such a good and challenging conversation. I know you are
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going to be inspired by it. So without further ado, here is Katie Faust.
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Okay, actually, before we get into that conversation with Katie, I just want to let you
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know that if you are a Blaze TV plus subscriber, you can get access to your Share the Arrows tickets
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Okay. Now, truly, without further ado, here is Katie Faust.
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Katie, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. I think this is our first time in person
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talking on the show, right? In studio, baby. I love it. Oh, it's so perfect. It's providential.
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Okay. First, I want to get your take on this Trump executive order that euphemistically expands access
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to IVF. Really, what it would do is it would enforce or force private insurers to cover the
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cost of IVF. And it would also mean probably Medicaid expansion. So either way, we're being
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forced to pay for IVF. And, you know, the pro argument is this is great. It makes more babies.
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We love babies. Infertility is a disease, just like diabetes. Why shouldn't insurance cover it?
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Well, I have so many thoughts. I hope that the executive order is not going to amount to much.
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You know, to me, it looked like a way to say promises made, promises kept, you know, which
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so you can, you know, chart it as a win. But I didn't see a lot of teeth. You know, it was like,
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now we're going to gather comments and, you know, receive letters and suggestions from allies over
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the next 90 days. And we'll see what comes of it. Because I actually was really surprised at the
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high level of pushback that the Trump executive order received. I mean, lots of many pro-life
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organizations and figures condemned it or critiqued it. I mean, you had mainstream conservative
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organizations like the Family Research Council saying this is not the way to go. I mean,
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you had the wife of the Secretary of Transportation saying this is not aligned with what it is that
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you're trying to do, especially as it relates to make America healthy again. Yeah. And I was like,
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good for them. To me, I'm like, that actually is a pretty significant shift in the conservative mood
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over the last 12 months where, you know, in February of 2024, we saw the decision come down from the
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Alabama Supreme Court in essence saying, hey, you can't kill these babies on ice that you can
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charge the fertility clinic and a wrongful death claim. And Republicans came out in mass to say,
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oh, we have to protect IVF. There's still some voices that are doing that, but many more that
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are saying, I don't think this is everything that we think it is. So first of all, I was really
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impressed by the level of cautious, gentle, no, that I saw online. Why is this executive order a bad
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idea? Well, it's fine if you are a fertility doctor and it's fine if you're an egg seller or a sperm
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seller. And it's fine for the people who want to create these children who don't really have any
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moral guidance around that. It's not fine for babies. It's not fine for the majority of children
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who won't make it through this process alive. And, you know, one of the ways that I sort of shock
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people into that realization for those of us who consider ourselves Christians, conservatives,
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and pro-lifers is to just say the best that we can estimate the IVF industry, the big fertility world
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destroys probably four times the number of little lives every year than Planned Parenthood does.
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Why is that? Because when you go into a fertility clinic, you're talking about dozens of little
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lives that are, you know, on the chopping block possibly. Whereas if you go into an abortion clinic,
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you're usually talking about just one, you know, Paris Hilton, when she creates IVF babies,
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she's got 20 boys, but she doesn't have the girl that she wants, right? So what's going to happen to
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those 20 boys? Well, they're going to be fought and discarded, donated to research or frozen forever.
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And so that's what we're talking about here. We value, we love, we think that IVF children are worthy
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of dignity and respect and protection. We just think that the 97% that don't make it through the
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process alive should also be extended that level of protection.
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Yeah. A lot of people just don't realize that, that there are so many more embryos created than
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are ever transferred and certainly than ever survive. Now there are some people who say,
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okay, but Katie, it is possible for a Christian couple to say, I'm going to use every embryo that
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is created. We're not going to do genetic testing. That's something a lot of people don't know.
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The vast majority of people going through IVF do genetic testing. So if that embryo has Down
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syndrome, trisomy 13, 18, any kind of chromosomal abnormality, they're thawed and they are thrown
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away like trash and only the quote unquote strong survive and are possibly transferred.
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But for the Christian couple who says, well, we're not going to do that. And a lot of Christian couples
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won't do that. Is that not an ethical option for IVF? And wouldn't it be good if through this
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executive order, more couples like that have access to in vitro?
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Okay. So let's look at it from the perspective of, let's, let's say we're not going to ban IVF
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completely. Let's just ban the aspects of IVF that are very clear violations of the rights of
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children. So you mentioned one of them, genetic screening, 75% of fertility clinics offer genetic
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screening, sex selection, 73% of fertility clinics offer sex selection. And in our mind, we think,
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well, this is just about infertile couples wanting to have babies. There's boutique fertility clinics
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in Hollywood where 90% of the clientele do not suffer from infertility. They simply want to pick
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the traits of their children, not just genetic screening, not just boy or girl, but you can pick
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the eye color of the child that you want and not just any eye color, right? You can create or select
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the specific version of blue eyes that you want. There's like five different options in terms of
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what kind of blue eyed child that you want. And so all of these options are available to
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IVF customers. Um, so that's a problem because if you do want to go into this with a pro-life pro-child
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ethic with a Christian ethic, you're not going to have the support of your doctors. And I've talked to
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a lot of different, um, Christians who have gone through this, many that have surplus embryos, many that
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did succeed in implanting all of them. But the ones that said, we went into this with pro-life
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convictions, we had to argue against all of these different screenings and testings. And even then,
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a couple of them have said, you know, they grade embryos. So even if they do make it through the
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genetic screening process, even if they have, you know, only kept the sexes that they want, or,
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or they're willing to keep both sexes, um, they still have to battle their doctors in terms of
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saying, we want to implant all of them. Um, we don't want to grade them. We actually want the C
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and D grade embryos kept alive as well. And a lot of the times the doctors in the clinics will say,
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that's a bad idea. Why is that? It's because the only thing that they are required to report
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because big fertility operates virtually regulation free. There's no requirement to track or report what
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they do with these little lives. But the one thing that they do have to report is their success rates,
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their implantation rates, their live birth rates of the children, the fraction of children who are
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actually transferred to the womb, they have to report the percentage of live births. And if you
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are going to retain or implant the lower grade embryos, you are going to downgrade their live birth
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rate. And so if you want to go into this with a pro-life mentality, you're not going to have the
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assistance or the help or the support of your doctor. First sponsor for the day is masa chips.
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And I just wanted to look up that claim that you made about certain fertility clinics offering the
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option for picking eye color. And it's really easy. I just typed in fertility clinic eye color.
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The Fertility Institute, choose your baby's eye color, offers eye color screening and selection.
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So that's like you're buying a car add-on. Like, do you want chrome hubcaps? Like,
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that's basically what's going on. And then the next one, simplefertility.com. This is another
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website that connects you to different clinics. Eye color selection begins with examining
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your personal and family eye color genetics history as parents-to-be. And there's even an
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article about this in the LA Times, which you're talking about, that fertility treatments may have
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started to help high-risk families avoid deadly genetic traits. Again, that's just eugenics.
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But now it has moved into this industry, especially in very rich areas where people are picking what
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they believe is going to be the strongest, smartest, most successful, most attractive child.
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And while some people may say, well, that's not what Christian couples are doing. That's not what
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most people are doing. The fact is when we talk about IVF access, it includes that.
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It includes the eugenics, and there's really no way to exclude that from the conversation.
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Well, there are countries that have attempted to do it. There are some countries that, for example,
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ban sex selection. Germany is one of them. Germany also bans genetic screening because Germany knows
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what eugenics looks like and doesn't want to go back there. There's a lot of countries that will say,
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you can't just create endless numbers of embryos. We're going to limit it to the number that you
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actually have a possibility of actually implanting. And let's just be very clear when you're talking
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about, we're going to survey your heritable traits. We're going to figure out eye color,
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all of this. You're not saying, let's then create an embryo with that specific shade of blue eyes.
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You're saying, let's create 20 embryos. We will test all of them. The two that are the right sex and
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that have that right eye color, those are the ones you will keep. And we will discard and donate to
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research the other 18. And so we're not talking about creating a custom order child. We're talking
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about making an explosion of little lives and discarding and destroying the ones that don't
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match our specific outlined criteria. Yes. And an executive order like this,
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if it actually came to fruition, you said this itself doesn't have teeth, but even just talking
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about the accessibility to IVF in general, which is already a lot in the United States, uniquely a lot.
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It also includes the two men or the two women who are purposely creating the fatherless or motherless
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child or the single man or the single woman. All of this would be included in an order like this,
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right? Well, I think the executive order was written carefully to say, we want to help mothers and
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fathers welcome children. But the truth is that once you are making a baby in a Petri dish,
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it's very easy to use somebody else's sperm or somebody else's egg. So it's very hard to say,
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we are going to tailor these guidelines, these regulations in a way that only allows married
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husbands and wives to use these kinds of technologies. Once you are taking that function
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outside of the sexual act, it is just as easy. I mean, this is why we actually have a variety of
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fertility fraud cases that are taking place across the country today, because somebody thought they're
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using my husband's sperm or this specific donor. And it ended up being the fertility doctor who was using
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his own sperm. And so it's very hard to say, we are going to keep IVF and we're going to exclude
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all of these other really dangerous, really damaging possibilities. And I would say one of those is
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using a third party to create children. How often does that happen? We don't exactly know because big
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fertility won't tell us, but estimates range between a third to two thirds of the 90,000 children a year
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that are born through IVF are also the very few that do make it through the process alive.
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You know, 30 to 60,000 are going to lose their mother or father in the process.
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Sometimes they will go home to a home where there is a mother and father present. Oftentimes they're
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going to go back to a household where there is no mother or father there at all. So, I mean,
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this is an industry that absolutely is not thinking about the best interest of the child. They're thinking
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about the bottom line and unfortunately subsidizing it through insurance or through government
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tax credits or whatever is only going to increase child victimization.
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Yes. And many of those embryos go to the freezer and there are about, I think, 2 million
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frozen embryos, souls on ice right now in the United States, really with an unknown future. I saw
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a video of a woman. It's going around again. It's a young woman on TikTok. She seems, I'm sure you've
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I'm so glad you brought this up because I think I just watched it this morning.
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Yes. I'm sure a lot of people sent it to you like they sent it to me. And actually,
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when I initially did a response to her video like a year ago, she personally got very upset,
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reached out to me. She said, you know, I was an IVF baby. I was selected first. We all came from the
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same batch, conceived at the same time, made at the same time. She was first, her sister was second,
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but she still has siblings that are 30 years old on ice. And she was saying, I want to know what it
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would have been like to have a little brother because those are boys. I don't know if her,
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you know, her parents wanted girls or what, but they're boys. I want to know what a little brother
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would be like. What if when I got married and I had kids, I transferred one of my brothers to also
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be my son. And I know she's talking hypothetically and probably isn't thinking of the consequences,
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but it shows me one of the consequences and the brokenness created in IVF. What are your thoughts on
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that? What was interesting to me about the video that she just put out that I saw today. So I think
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it's more recent is she said, you know, what's so weird is that some random guy, some technician
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decided that I would be born first, even though I'm a virtual twin with my younger sister who was
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born three years later. Isn't that weird? Like that he got to decide that I would be the older sibling
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and not her as the older sibling. So I think that that kind of presents a bit of an ethical
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challenge for the Christians who say, we're going to use every embryo. Okay. So great.
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You're using every embryo, but do you understand the kind of existential questions that these kids
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are going to be asking? Why was I the one that was chosen? Why was I the one that was, you know,
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selected for implantation? Why was I the one that was given, given a chance at life? And then maybe
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if there is one or two or three that were implanted over the course of years, why is it that a random
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guy whose name I'm never going to know decided the birth order of those of us, even though genetically
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we're all the same age. I mean, like what we're doing through reproductive technologies right now
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is forcing the next generation, these kids to have to answer questions that no human has ever had to
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ask before. It is so out of step with the nature of what it means to be human from, you know, creating
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children who might have dozens or hundreds of half siblings. I mean, that actually is like outside of
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like Genghis Khan, right? We really have not seen anything like that before. Um, this questioned
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about like, I am being adopted by somebody like, cause I'm, I think embryo adoption is the only
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child honoring option. If you have exhausted all the other ways of trying to rescue these surplus
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embryos. But even then the kinds of questions that these kids are going to ask, right? When they do find
00:19:03.800
their birth parents and they realize they were raised in Beverly Hills. I was raised in a, like a little,
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you know, two bedroom, one bath condo. And I look more like my genetic parents than the three that
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they chose to keep. I mean, like the kinds of questions that these kids are going to be asking
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are things that I don't think that we're prepared for. I don't think we've thought it through.
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Right. Yeah. I saw in one of the replies to a post about the Trump IVF executive order,
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I took a screenshot of it on X and she said, I had a really good friend who had leftover embryos
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and they decided to adopt them out to a gay couple thinking that that was the most redemptive
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option. And I just think about that child who not only doesn't have the opportunity to know their
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genetic parents, but because of the luck of the draw doesn't get to grow up with a mom. Right.
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And it's, I would say that's even different than like the regular adoption of a child after
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birth. I mean, there is a lot of so many questions we are causing a child to bear at such a young age
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because of adult desire. Yeah, exactly. And I honestly, that is what these reproductive technologies
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do in almost every case. And you could even say in every case, but I'm, I'm willing to say in almost
00:20:16.200
every case, you're asking children to sacrifice so you can have something that you want. Yeah.
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Maybe in your mind, it's minimal. Maybe in your mind, it's just a relationship with a birth mother,
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even though they're coming home with me, their own genetic mother and father and no money changed
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hands. You know, the altruistic surrogacy situation. What does the child lose there?
00:20:33.600
There's no big deal here. No, you are still asking children to lose the relationship with the only
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person they know the day that they are born. So you can have something that you want. All of these
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reproductive technologies are at bottom in injustice against children. It is always asking the weak
00:20:48.780
to sacrifice for the strong. It is always asking children, the most vulnerable, the smallest of all to
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sacrifice for the grown, the strong, the capable, those of us that actually have the decision making
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power, the ability to deal with hardship. We're saying, we don't want this hardship. We're going
00:21:03.960
to have you kids deal with the hardship instead. These are systems of injustice. And these are
00:21:08.760
technologies that bankroll off of injustice. Yep. And because I get this question a lot, and I've got my
00:21:15.660
own response for it, and you do too. I want to hear yours. For those who say, well, Katie, there's
00:21:22.440
also separation and a primal wound that's caused through adoption. You could call that quote unquote
00:21:28.420
baby buying. Someone is paying to be able to adopt that child. So are you against adoption too?
00:21:35.820
Yeah, it's a really important question. And, you know, as the former assistant director of the largest
00:21:41.420
Chinese adoption agency in the world, one of the things that I was responsible for was compliance
00:21:45.820
with international, federal, and state level standards. And I'll tell you what those three
00:21:50.080
things had in common. One of the main bright red lines in adoption, whether you're talking about the
00:21:55.720
Hague inter-country adoption standards, or just what's going on in the state of Colorado, or the
00:21:59.440
state of California, or the state of Texas, is money can never go from adoptive parents to birth
00:22:06.640
parents. Okay? For example, my husband and I are adoptive parents. If any of the $25,000 that we
00:22:12.780
paid throughout the course of our adoption journey went directly to our son's birth mother, or birth
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father, or birth family, according to international standards, that would no longer be an adoption.
00:22:23.960
That would be trafficking. If you're buying a child, if you are paying somebody specifically to
00:22:29.300
relinquish their parental rights and hand over the baby to you, that is no longer an adoption,
00:22:34.480
right? That's trafficking. So that's a very clear line in the adoption world. Yes, you spend a lot
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of money on adoption. No, it does not go to the mother or to the birth father. It goes towards
00:22:47.080
the FBI to fingerprint you. It goes towards the home study agency to check the safety of your home. It
00:22:52.760
goes to the agency that might be making the arrangements or bringing together birth mom and
00:22:58.240
adoptive parents. It goes to all of the training and the post-placement support that you receive.
00:23:02.740
It does not go directly to the birth parent. So what is going on in big fertility? It is always
00:23:09.260
direct payments from the intended parents to the genetic parents and to the birth mother.
00:23:13.800
What is it that you are getting for your $2,000 when you buy that vial of sperm, right? Obviously,
00:23:20.320
it's the very specific genetic characteristics of 50% of your child, but it's also the guarantee that
00:23:27.340
that sperm donor never claims paternity. It is the guarantee that he will stay out of your child's
00:23:33.700
life forever. You are purchasing him saying, I give you my parental rights. So in that sense,
00:23:40.380
and it's the same thing in commercial surrogacy, you are paying a woman to preemptively sign over
00:23:46.000
her maternal rights to the child. That is what the money is going for. So if you're looking at it from
00:23:52.000
the perspective of the best practice of adoption that has been established internationally, nationally,
00:23:56.960
and at the state level over the course of decades, then big fertility is engaging in baby selling in
00:24:03.580
all of the, in every way that you can say that this is baby selling. It simply is. In terms of the loss,
00:24:09.680
the wound that children experience, yes, adopted kids often have a wound. And one of the things that
00:24:18.840
I get, I get a lot of responses when I go out and I talk about the distinction between big fertility
00:24:24.020
and adoption. As I say, both of them begin with a familial wound, right? But adoption seeks to mend
00:24:29.880
the wound. Big fertility inflicts the wound. But adoptive parents come up to me and say, thank you
00:24:35.860
for saying that. Because a lot of them statistically, adoptive mothers, adoptive fathers, statistically spend
00:24:42.700
more time with their children than the average family does, invest more money in their children than the
00:24:47.680
average family does. Adoptive mothers and fathers statistically have more stable marriages, and
00:24:52.600
they tend to be more highly educated than the general population. And yet, adopted children
00:24:59.720
disproportionately struggle in school with externalizing behaviors. Why is that? Well, it's
00:25:07.620
because we've asked them to do something that children should never have to do. And that is lose a
00:25:12.280
relationship with the only person they know the day that they're born and reattach to biological
00:25:16.220
strangers. And it looks as though that primal wound has an impact on them throughout the rest of their
00:25:21.540
life. So we have to make a distinction. There are tragic situations where children lose their mothers
00:25:27.340
or lose their parents. We mourn, and then we seek to right that wrong by placing children in adoptive
00:25:33.140
homes. But we do not use that loss as a justification to then intentionally create these legal or genetic
00:25:41.060
orphans so that we can purchase them on the open big fertility market.
00:25:44.780
Right. And it all goes back to worldview, understanding that we live in this sinful,
00:25:48.880
broken world, being able to say that a child that is adopted, they're in a situation that is a step
00:25:56.140
down from the ideal. The ideal is a loving, married mother and father. But because we live in a world that
00:26:03.780
is wrought with sin, we don't always get the ideal situation. So the next best situation is a married
00:26:09.120
mother and father that adopts that child. And adoption seeks to redeem a broken situation,
00:26:14.160
surrogacy, sperm, egg saline, IVF. It creates that broken situation as you have laid out so clearly
00:26:22.160
that you're placing the burden on the child in both situations, but one heals and one inflicts or seeks
00:26:30.000
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00:28:09.220
Another unforeseen consequence, or at least by a lot of people that you mentioned just a few minutes ago
00:28:16.480
is the accidental transferring of the wrong embryo into a mother. And there's this story,
00:28:25.660
I'm sure you've seen it going around, of a Georgia woman who is suing an IVF clinic after discovering
00:28:31.460
that the child that she gave birth to was not her biological child. It was very obvious the woman
00:28:36.540
is white, her baby is black. This mix-up led to a custody battle, which ultimately forced this woman
00:28:42.080
to give the baby to his genetic parents five months later. And we've got a little bit of her story
00:28:47.760
that is going around right now. Right now, it's not one. The actions of the fertility clinic
00:28:54.300
have come very close to destroying me, have left irreparable damage to my soul,
00:29:00.320
and ultimately left me questioning whether I should be a mom or not. I spent my entire life wanting to be
00:29:06.580
a mom. I loved, nurtured, and grew my child. And I would have done literally anything in my power
00:29:12.160
to keep him. My baby is not genetically mine. He doesn't have my blood. He doesn't have my eyes.
00:29:19.420
But he is and will always be my son. I'll never be the same woman. I will never fully heal or
00:29:24.860
completely move on. And part of me will always long for my son and wonder what kind of person he's
00:29:31.220
becoming. Your thoughts? Okay. So what's very interesting here is the narrative. And I think
00:29:38.360
that she actually said it. She said, in essence, I was a surrogate for another couple. And that's
00:29:43.860
right. But it's very interesting because when we're looking at these other sort of surrogacy
00:29:47.640
arrangements, everyone will say, well, it's no big deal. She's not the mother. She's not the genetic
00:29:51.820
mother. She's not the mother. She's the oven for somebody else's bun, right? The real mother is the
00:29:57.000
genetic mother. But look at her. Look at her. She is a mother in a very, very real sense of
00:30:03.680
the world. She bonded with the baby. She grew the baby. She loved the baby. And then she
00:30:08.580
continued that. She continued and capitalized on and only reinforced that bond through five
00:30:13.460
months of cuddling and breastfeeding and the oxytocin exchange that takes place between
00:30:19.540
mother and baby whenever there's skin-to-skin contact, which is so much more likely to happen
00:30:23.140
with mothers than fathers. So now she is rightly mourning this child that she gave up. And it's
00:30:29.380
interesting because she formed that bond, even though she was not genetically related to the
00:30:34.060
child. So I understand why she's saying, this destroyed me. Like, I'm never going to get over
00:30:38.000
this. Right. You have lost a baby in the sense of it really was hers in an incredibly real sense,
00:30:45.340
a sense that we have to diminish and ignore if we are going to continue with the fiction that
00:30:51.720
surrogacy is no big deal and that the birth mother is inconsequential to the later thriving
00:30:58.360
and development of the child. The other thing that I will point out is, you know, because I think
00:31:03.340
that this is, this is actually a very good illustration here. She had dozens of other
00:31:07.800
relationships, right? She had lots of other people in her life. I'm sure that she's got parents. I don't
00:31:11.980
think that she's married, but she had lots of friends probably connecting with her and supporting her
00:31:15.680
through this process. And yet losing that one baby pretty much destroyed her. That she only had
00:31:22.300
known for a few months. That she'd only known for a few months. And yet we think that it's no big deal
00:31:27.580
for the child to lose their relationship with a birth mother, even though they don't have dozens
00:31:32.160
of relationships. At that point during gestation, at the moment of birth, that is the only relationship
00:31:38.460
children have. And yet we have to believe that it's no big deal to sever the baby from that birth
00:31:44.420
mother relationship so we can hand them over to the commissioning adults. So I was like, I think
00:31:49.560
everybody looks at her and goes, Oh my gosh, this is so awful. Of course she bonded with the child and
00:31:54.300
like, wow, this is so harrowing, so awful and so devastating. Right. Now apply that to every other
00:32:00.400
surrogate situation and say, if she felt that kind of distress, how much more so the baby who has to
00:32:06.280
lose the only person they know. And the reasoning or the defense against what you're saying, I think
00:32:11.380
is so asinine. When I hear people say, well, the baby can't talk or you don't remember, you don't
00:32:17.480
remember being born. You don't remember being in your mother's womb and the baby will never, you know,
00:32:23.200
articulate that he misses something that just because someone does not have the verbal capacity to
00:32:29.260
explain their trauma or their brokenness or why they feel distress does not mean it's not
00:32:35.900
there. That is actually like the definition of exploitation is when people who do have power
00:32:42.180
take advantage of someone's incapability, disability, vulnerability to get what they
00:32:47.240
want. And because that person can't complain, we say they're fine. That's cruel.
00:32:52.720
You had Olivia Morrill on your show. She is one of the only surrogate born children who is publicly
00:32:59.020
speaking out right now. She was raised by incredibly wealthy parents, a mother and father,
00:33:04.000
exactly, and split time between Florida and Paris. So materially, she was totally set. But she talks
00:33:10.660
a lot about how she was always afraid to be abandoned. And it led to, she's been very public
00:33:16.680
about this, it led to being overly obsessively clingy, not just with, you know, her mother and
00:33:22.040
father, but also her friends. She was petrified that she was going to be abandoned by everybody all
00:33:26.820
through life. So tell me, she doesn't remember, right? Sure. She can't articulate it, but that
00:33:33.120
has left a wound in her that has manifested itself all throughout her life. And, you know, she talks
00:33:39.600
very openly and wonderfully about her husband and how he, he was the person that like a rock said,
00:33:45.360
I will not leave. You can, you can rage, you can, you know, in a mercurial sense, go up and down.
00:33:50.900
I'm not going anywhere. And it stabilized her, but all throughout her as an adolescence, I mean,
00:33:55.980
she had self-harming behaviors that she talked about because she just felt insecure in all of
00:34:00.860
her relationships. This is not uncommon actually for adopted children either. You know, my husband
00:34:06.920
and I have, um, our youngest is adopted, incredible kid, totally belongs with us. But, you know, when I,
00:34:13.540
we were just traveling last week and we were leaving a hotel room and I said, oh my gosh, run in and,
00:34:18.780
you know, grab this book because I need it downstairs. And he goes, don't leave without
00:34:23.080
me. Don't leave without me. I mean, he's 15. And I'm like, I'm going to be right here. I just need
00:34:28.400
you to grab the book because you were the last one and you know where it is, but I'm not leaving.
00:34:32.320
And so sure. He doesn't remember the day when he was born and lost the only woman that he knew,
00:34:39.920
but yet he still, even after being with our family for 13 years is not exactly sure that it's not going
00:34:47.780
to happen again. So again, sometimes children lose their mother or father to tragedy and the proper
00:34:54.200
response is to mourn. But that is not the reason why kids are losing their mother and father these
00:34:59.880
days. They're losing it intentionally. They're losing their mother or father commercially. They're
00:35:04.740
losing their mom and dad because we are normalizing motherless and fatherless homes. And then we're
00:35:09.560
calling it progress. Right. And even with the baby, if the baby stays with, say it's a situation where
00:35:15.100
you have two women. And so say the baby stays with the genetic mom and the mom who is actually
00:35:21.800
carrying him. Sometimes it's the same egg, same, you know, womb. Sometimes it's not, but they're
00:35:26.340
getting sperm from a sperm cellar. I talked to Ross Johnston. I know, you know, I think who Ross
00:35:32.040
Johnston is. Yeah. He's been on the show, you know, he, it was donor conceived. So, so they say that's
00:35:38.720
what they call it. But of course, part of his testimony, he was raised by a mom who had a lot of
00:35:43.740
different lesbian relationships, I think, growing up. But he loves his mom. His mom loves him. Yeah.
00:35:48.740
Cared for him. Yeah. And yet his distress growing up was, who is my dad? Where is my dad? Where is
00:35:56.000
half of my genetic makeup? And of course, part of his testimony is realizing that he is a heavenly
00:36:00.220
father that he came from and who loves him and who created him. But still, we were all created
00:36:05.940
to have a mother and a father or to know our mother and father because everyone on earth has a mom.
00:36:10.660
We all have a mom and dad. Yeah. And anyway, I don't, I don't know where you want to go with
00:36:14.820
this conversation, but, um, it's, there's so, I mean, cause like I've done a couple of interviews
00:36:20.220
recently about Elon and you know, the situation with his now four different mothers of his children.
00:36:26.420
Um, and it was at least that we know of, yeah, that's right. Um, and so much of that, well,
00:36:31.800
she's set for life. Well, that baby's never going to need anything. Well, that, that kid's going to,
00:36:35.540
you know, be able to go wherever he wants, do whatever he wants. And I'm like, that is not what
00:36:39.020
kids want. Right. Money is not going to fill that hole. Right. Even just other adults in the life of
00:36:45.240
the child. Yeah. Isn't going to satisfy that longing to be loved by their own father. And it's
00:36:51.560
not a, I'll take you on a trip this weekend, or, you know, even I'll let you come with me to the
00:36:57.160
white house. It is. They actually need to serve long for, and have a right to their father's care,
00:37:02.480
attention, protection, not just provision, but investment, personal investment every day.
00:37:08.300
They're not made to split time in a 50, 50 custody arrangement. They're not made to just know the
00:37:14.340
identity through some kind of known donor. You know, when you've purchasing sperm through somebody
00:37:19.480
who's okay, being contacted after you're 18 years old, those are crumbs. Yeah. That's crumbs of what
00:37:25.700
children want and deserve. Yeah. They want and deserve both their mother and father loving them and
00:37:30.840
loving each other every day. Yeah. And funny thing is, that's also the family structure and
00:37:35.040
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insured by the NCUA americaschristiancu.com slash alley. I do want to talk about Elon Musk. That's
00:39:25.720
actually on my list of what I want to talk about. I did an episode explaining it, but there are
00:39:30.620
some updates. So for those who don't know the background, just go back and listen to last
00:39:34.980
week's episode because we don't have time to detail everything now. Basically, Ashley St. Clair,
00:39:39.680
conservative commentator, Elon Musk, they have a child, what is probably his 14th child as far as
00:39:45.240
we know. This was not an IVF situation. I don't know if everyone knows that they actually did have
00:39:49.720
a sexual relationship, but it was the intentional creation of a father that they knew Elon Musk wasn't
00:39:56.760
going to be married to Ashley and that they were going to raise this child together in the same
00:40:00.360
household, which is why I didn't congratulate. It's not because I hate any of these people. I actually
00:40:06.040
want the very best for them. I think their child is just as worthy of love as every other child that
00:40:11.320
has ever been born. However, because I knew this was intentional and contrived, congratulations just
00:40:17.480
seemed inappropriate. And before we move on to the update, I just want to get your thoughts on that.
00:40:22.020
I wrote an article about that called The Cost of Conservative Hypocrisy at World Magazine last week
00:40:27.440
because you did have very prominent conservatives, very prominent pro-lifers congratulating Ashley
00:40:32.540
St. Clair on the birth of the baby. And I think if I'm going to sort of steel man their position,
00:40:37.960
they're saying, we just think babies are wonderful. It's good to congratulate a woman for having a child.
00:40:42.960
We want them to feel welcome and loved here. And of course, a lot of those same voices also
00:40:48.600
congratulated Dave Rubin for having two intentionally motherless surrogate born babies. And I'm like,
00:40:55.980
okay, well, if this really is just about celebrating and welcoming a child, that's fine. But none of them
00:41:01.540
celebrated Lily Phillips' very temporary announcement that she was pregnant. It ended up
00:41:08.160
being a hoax, but Lily Phillips is the OnlyFans content producer who's left with a thousand guys
00:41:15.520
in a 24-hour period or something like that. There was nobody congratulating her for that pregnancy.
00:41:21.120
And so to me, it looks more like tribal protectionism. It looks like we will congratulate
00:41:25.900
the people that align with us politically if they're having a baby, but we'll condemn people
00:41:31.120
like Pete Buttigieg if he procures two motherless children through what I think actually was a
00:41:37.640
legitimate adoption, if I'm getting that right. But he hasn't been too clear on that. And so I actually
00:41:43.740
think there's a cost to not being verbally and morally precise about this. If you're going to
00:41:50.520
congratulate, congratulate, but say, let's be clear here. There is a cost to this child. Children
00:41:58.240
don't just need to know the identity of their father. They deserve to have their father married
00:42:03.860
to their mother so they have access to their father every day. She is now seeking sole legal
00:42:09.000
custody of the baby. That's going to be devastating for the child. The baby is going to have their
00:42:16.880
development hampered because they don't have the daily presence of a father. They're going to
00:42:20.980
experience what a lot of kids do with single or double moms, which is father hunger. They're going
00:42:25.780
to hunger for male love. And that's actually going to make them pretty susceptible to people who want
00:42:31.500
to get their attention without having the same level of protectiveness and investment in the baby as
00:42:36.740
their own biological dad would. So it's a tragedy. And obviously we want to support single mothers in the
00:42:43.840
sense of recognizing that they have chosen to do the hard thing by raising the baby alone. But especially
00:42:49.480
when you have a very high platform and you ostensibly say that you are for family values and you understand
00:42:55.800
the harms that that widespread single motherlessness has brought to our country. It deserves more than just
00:43:02.380
a congratulations that certainly looks like you are celebrating not just the child, but the
00:43:06.840
circumstances. Yeah. And I, you know, like I said, I didn't congratulate. I have talked to some of the
00:43:12.560
people who did congratulate and I do not question at all that they are pro marriage and that they are
00:43:19.680
anti-surrogacy and that they are pro-life and all of that. As you said, they really did see it as I'm
00:43:26.260
just congratulating the baby. They would not congratulate someone like Dave Rubin because they
00:43:31.860
would see that as congratulating baby stealing, but they would congratulate something like this. Whereas I
00:43:37.200
would say, okay, but the arguments that I saw from a lot of conservatives were it is always right to
00:43:42.300
congratulate the baby. Right. Well, I don't know if every situation and circumstance solicits a
00:43:48.760
congratulations. There are other things to say like, wow, that baby is precious and made in the image of
00:43:53.880
God. How can I help? Yes. Sometimes congratulations simply isn't appropriate and you don't owe people a
00:44:00.440
public congratulations, especially if it is going to cause any confusion. And I still like, you know,
00:44:07.420
I've gotten a lot of pushback on that stance, but I still, I stand by it. I think that is morally the
00:44:13.320
clearest, you know, stance to take when it comes to these kinds of public controversies.
00:44:19.540
There are two things that I crave from the people that I follow and I'm pretty selected. Well,
00:44:24.140
I follow a lot of people to see what they're saying, but there's very few people that I'll say,
00:44:27.660
I will follow you in terms of your example. But the people that I follow in terms of their example
00:44:32.520
have two things, whether they're pastors, whether they're political commentators, I want clarity
00:44:38.000
and I want courage. You don't need to give me all the jazz hands, right? You don't need to like
00:44:44.760
whip up a show that's like produced, you know, million dollar production or whatever. I want you to be
00:44:50.180
clear, especially biblically. What does the Bible say? How does it apply to today? Tell me what justice
00:44:56.940
looks like. And I want courage. I want you to say it regardless of the personal cost or the professional
00:45:03.180
cost. And I will tell you that we're seeing a next generation. We're seeing Gen Z absolutely desperate
00:45:10.100
for that kind of leadership. Yeah. Right. In the influencer space, in the political space, even in the
00:45:16.520
religious space, we are seeing Gen Z swing hard away from progressivism and towards conservatism, whether
00:45:22.940
it's conservative religiously, conservative politically. And I would argue that a lot of
00:45:28.360
that is because they have seen progressivism offer such vacuous options in terms of the moral options
00:45:35.080
for our life. They have tasted and seen the horrible fruits of family breakdown. They've tried all the
00:45:41.900
different sexual identities and seen that none of this is going to satisfy them. So they are returning to
00:45:46.580
church. I mean, I know this because I'm looking at the studies and, you know, there was just a report
00:45:51.320
that came out from the Times of London where they surveyed a thousand young people, Gen Zers,
00:45:55.160
and found that compared to their millennial counterparts, they were overwhelmingly rejecting
00:45:59.380
porn, rejecting anonymous hookups, and valuing marriage by twice as many points as millennials do.
00:46:05.640
But I'd also note because I sit in the back row of church at the longest pew to fit the 10 high
00:46:13.100
school boys next to me who go to Seattle public schools, many of whom who have not been raised in
00:46:18.320
Christian homes who come every day, not just to the service, but to come early for the Sunday school
00:46:24.320
class where we talk about abortion and hookup culture and dating done well and the real definition of
00:46:29.720
marriage and the harms of divorce. I mean, like this is a generation that is ready for somebody to tell
00:46:35.880
them the truth, especially about moral issues. And I just don't want these mega conservative
00:46:40.960
platforms to throw away their credibility because they're not being morally clear when somebody in their own
00:46:46.780
tribe, you know, makes an announcement like this. Yeah. It's really not that hard to say. I love so
00:46:52.680
much of what Elon Musk is doing and yet I want him to come to Christ and I want him at the very least
00:46:57.960
to represent a kind of responsible fatherhood that we want in politics and the conservative movement,
00:47:03.540
someone who is so close to Trump. But just to give people a little update on what is going on,
00:47:09.300
you mentioned Ashley is now suing Elon Musk for full custody of their son. We have more information
00:47:16.780
about the fact that he has only met his son a few times and actually just weeks before she announced,
00:47:22.320
hey, I had Elon Musk's kid five months ago. We're trying to get in touch with Elon Musk to figure out
00:47:28.700
our agreement and he's not responding. She actually like tweeted at him trying to get him to respond,
00:47:33.720
which was just very tragic. We also found out that he had just texted her apparently a few weeks earlier
00:47:41.040
saying we have a legion of babies to make. I want to knock you up again. So part of me,
00:47:46.100
I know that Ashley went into this clear eye knowing what she was going to do, but I'm sad.
00:47:51.360
I'm sad for her. I'm sad for this child. She also has another child from another man.
00:47:58.520
And I feel that she is probably in a lot of distress. And then we saw Grimes, who is another
00:48:05.520
baby mama. I don't know how else to say it. Mother of Elon's baby, his, you know, the one that he
00:48:11.140
actually brings to the White House. I think they have a few kids together. Actually, one of their
00:48:16.040
children is in some kind of medical distress, according to Grimes. And she is trying to get
00:48:21.700
Elon's attention on X. She said this, please respond about our child's medical crisis in response to just
00:48:28.560
one of Elon's random posts. I am sorry to do this publicly, but it is no longer acceptable to ignore
00:48:33.840
the situation. This requires immediate attention. If you don't want to talk to me, can you please
00:48:38.620
designate or hire someone who can so that we can move forward on solving this? This is urgent
00:48:45.100
Elon. I'm not giving any details, but he won't respond to text, call, or emails and has skipped
00:48:51.360
every meeting. And our child will suffer lifelong impairment if he doesn't respond. So I need him
00:48:55.860
to effing respond. And if I have to apply public pressure, then I guess that's where we are at.
00:49:01.160
So this is what happens when you make it your responsibility to repopulate the earth with a lot
00:49:06.500
of women. Yeah. I call this modern day polygamy because what you're seeing in terms of the effect
00:49:10.860
of the children is the same. You know, obviously the polygamist that many of us, especially in the
00:49:16.200
Christian world, are familiar with is the Old Testament patriarchs. You know, Abraham and Jacob
00:49:21.700
both famously, you know, had children with two different women. And then obviously there are
00:49:25.800
situations with David, situations with Solomon, where they had multiple wives. Interestingly,
00:49:31.380
none of those households are characterized by equity and love. It is not a situation of,
00:49:37.360
oh, you know, Jacob has four different wives. So there's more love for all the kids to go around.
00:49:42.120
It wasn't like that. There was more jealousy. There was more infighting. There was more battling
00:49:46.120
over resources and attention from their father. And that's exactly what we're seeing today.
00:49:51.380
Very interestingly, you know, Elon, you know, purchased a $35 million compound because he kind of
00:49:57.700
wanted to house all of the many of the women there. I did not know that. Well, Emily Jashinsky
00:50:03.760
brought it up for me when I was in chatting with her last week. And I was like, well, same. I didn't
00:50:07.700
know about it either. It's supposed to be a secret, but it's not. And so it sounds like Grimes
00:50:12.240
has not, is not there. Zillis is the wife of his second, the second mother of his children.
00:50:19.260
I believe that she's got twins with him. Grimes has not moved in yet. Twins and another one.
00:50:23.640
And she actually also had a baby in 2024. So banner year last year for Elon.
00:50:28.440
Okay. So she has three kids with him. Oh, all right. I thought it was just Grimes
00:50:31.720
that had it. Maybe. Oh no, she, that was 2022. Hard to keep track of.
00:50:34.900
I know. Hard to keep track, which I'm sure it is for Elon as well.
00:50:37.980
Yeah. And I mean, I look at like when Ashley chose to reveal that she was the mother of the
00:50:44.060
13th child of Elon that we know of. It was on Valentine's Day when he was meeting with
00:50:49.060
the Indian prime minister and he was flanked by, um, Zillis and two of their children.
00:50:56.020
Oh, I didn't know that either. Yeah. I mean, so I'm like, well, you know, it looks like
00:51:00.640
a vine for attention, right. Or a jealousy, even among the women. So let's just say though,
00:51:07.220
that any of these women or all of these women were willing to live at this $35 million compound.
00:51:13.160
Does it mean that the kids are going to be better off? Well, studies say no. Um, studies show
00:51:18.260
that anytime unrelated adults are sharing living spaces with children, uh, incidents of abuse and
00:51:24.380
neglect increase. Now I often talk about that in the context of, um, stepfathers or mothers live
00:51:30.960
in boyfriend, you know, because we've adopted this insane, like anti-human, um, talking point that,
00:51:38.980
you know, kids don't need a biological connection with their parents. They just need to be safe and
00:51:43.600
loved. Um, and I'm like, well, then why do we have any kind of screening for adoptive parents?
00:51:47.720
It's because social workers are not idiots and they know that it takes more than intending to
00:51:52.100
parent a child to actually ensure the child's going to be safe and loved. That's why adoptive
00:51:56.420
parents have to go through screenings and vettings and background checks and fingerprints and home
00:52:00.160
studies. Um, because there is such a risk to children when they're sharing living spaces with
00:52:04.740
unrelated men and women, obviously that risk is acute when it's an unrelated man. And I tell people,
00:52:11.480
if you don't believe me, Google the words mother's boyfriend and tell me what you find.
00:52:16.360
I just saw this awful story just to your point of these twin boys, 15 year old boys,
00:52:21.800
and I won't go into all the graphic details, but they were being horrifically tortured and abused.
00:52:28.540
Awful, awful. And I go to the, I go to the article and it doesn't say stepfather right away,
00:52:36.560
but when you see the ages of the father and mother, well, these are 15 year old boys. The
00:52:40.820
mother is about 42. Okay. That checks out. The father is only 32. Hmm. That doesn't really seem
00:52:47.100
to check out. You read more. It's a stepfather. Right. And of course that doesn't mean all step
00:52:51.080
fathers are bad. I know a lot of people out there saying your stepfather saved your life. We know
00:52:54.940
that we're just heroic step parents. Yes, absolutely. And praise God for that. That is another
00:52:59.640
example of redeeming a broken situation. But statistically, kids are at risk, whether it is
00:53:06.400
adoption, surrogacy, or whatever, statistically they're at risk when they're at a home with an
00:53:12.160
unrelated male. And, you know, sociologist Brad Wilcox, who I know you've had on the show,
00:53:17.080
will just point blank tell you the most dangerous place for a child to find themselves in America is
00:53:21.600
in the home of an unrelated man left to care for the child himself. Like it is the highest risk
00:53:27.280
when it comes to predictors for child abuse. Interestingly, having other women in the home
00:53:33.080
are not good for kids either. And there was a study done called the puzzle of monogamous marriage that
00:53:37.520
studied the risks of polygamy and polyamory, which let me just be clear. What is polygamy? What is
00:53:42.920
polyamory? It is unrelated adults sharing living spaces with kids. That's what it's always going to
00:53:47.600
be the inclusion of somebody who's not biologically related to the child. That study found that
00:53:53.020
stepmothers, unrelated women were 2.4 times more likely to kill children than the biological mom.
00:54:00.860
And then even if they aren't directly abusing, there is neglect or at minimum in attendance to
00:54:08.640
what's going on with the kid. And so accidental deaths in those homes where there's unrelated adults
00:54:13.560
increased by 15 to 77 times when there's an unrelated woman on the scene. And it's just because they don't
00:54:20.540
feel the same level of obligation to the kid, right? That's not my kid. I'm watching my kids
00:54:24.800
over here. There was three Princeton economists that studied households where the woman had both
00:54:31.280
a biological child and a stepchild. And they found that the stepmom took the stepchild to the doctor
00:54:39.360
less often, buckled their seatbelts less often, spent 5% less money on food on the unrelated child,
00:54:47.920
on the stepchild. So you could frame this as sin nature and that's probably good. But evolutionary
00:54:54.820
biologists have been studying this forever. They actually have a term for it and it's called the
00:54:59.800
Cinderella effect. It is that a child who is being raised by a step parent or the boyfriend or girlfriend
00:55:05.880
of the biological parent are going to be disadvantaged in ways where they are, to put it generously,
00:55:13.180
less connected to, less invested in, and less protective of the child.
00:55:17.300
Yes. You hear that story a lot. Gosh, that is heartbreaking. And it's just,
00:55:21.740
it's another indication that science is always catching up to God. If you would just read the
00:55:26.640
very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, we'd be golden.
00:55:29.280
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One other story in the news that I want to make sure to get your thoughts on,
00:56:48.160
and this goes under the category of unknown consequences of big fertility. Female egg farm.
00:56:57.300
Oh my gosh. Yes, that is. This was crazy. But this was so awful and so completely predictable.
00:57:03.200
Yeah. Yes. Keep going. Keep going. Well, I'll just give a summary and then I'll let you go off on it. So
00:57:07.760
the increasing demand of reproductive technology fueled by a patchwork of conflicting and non-existent
00:57:13.000
regulations has unsurprisingly led to the exploitation of women and children as they are
00:57:17.800
trafficked across the borders for product and profit. So this is according to the Daily Mail,
00:57:23.140
around 100 women have been kept as slaves on a human egg farm located in the Eastern European
00:57:28.800
country of Georgia run by a Chinese criminal organization. And so these eggs are being sold
00:57:35.420
all across the world. These women being pumped with drugs, being strapped down,
00:57:40.140
their eggs extracted, I'm sure without anesthesia. That's a very painful process.
00:57:44.460
And their eggs are being sold to willing buyers, probably at a pretty low price.
00:57:49.600
So that is literally happening. That's not a conspiracy theory. That is literally happening,
00:57:53.560
literally reported. And if this is one that we know about, I guarantee this is happening around
00:57:58.000
the world. Yeah. A hundred percent. Cause I think that the woman who escaped had to buy her freedom.
00:58:01.880
Like she had to pay a certain amount of money to get off the farm. And then she came back,
00:58:06.460
reported it. She's like prostitution. Yeah. I think that they rescued a few of the other women,
00:58:09.420
but yeah, what, what do we expect, right? When you want to make a lab made baby, you need three
00:58:15.720
things. You need sperm, you need egg, and you need womb. Sperm is very easy to get to, easy to access.
00:58:23.260
That's why it tends to be much more affordable. Eggs are much harder to get to. Women typically release
00:58:31.700
one a month. And so if you want to purchase a batch of eggs, women have to go through these medically
00:58:38.640
risky processes of injecting themselves with hormones and then hyper stimulating their ovaries
00:58:43.940
and then laparoscopically extracting them. And that is why human eggs are, you know, by weight,
00:58:51.500
one of the most expensive commodities on the planet. It's very, very hard to get to. And then the third
00:58:56.680
part is the womb. And that is actually harder to get to, right? It's harder to find women who will
00:59:02.020
then rent out their bodies for nine and a half months. And so we have seen, you know, I have a Google
00:59:06.560
alert, a surrogacy Google alert that just tells me everything that's been printed in the last 24
00:59:10.940
hours using the word surrogacy. And I'll tell you what, the number of times that surrogacy and
00:59:15.860
trafficking, surrogacy and trafficking, like populate those returns is amazing to me because
00:59:22.340
there's a high demand for wombs. Not as many people want to offer their wombs. And so you do have women
00:59:27.760
that are being captured, coerced, trafficked into being surrogates or illegal surrogacy rings being run
00:59:34.260
out of Cambodia so that they can feed what is often a huge demand in China. There's now a huge
00:59:42.060
underground market of surrogacy happening in the Philippines right now. You know, there was a great
00:59:45.780
documentary that came out on that about a couple of weeks ago. Same thing, right? There's a huge demand
00:59:51.460
for these specific female aspects of reproduction. And it stuns me because it's like everything that
00:59:57.660
women have to offer, every part of their body that is so special and distinct from men, there's a market
01:00:02.120
for that. You've got prostitution, right? Which is the marketplace for the female external reproductive
01:00:08.180
organs. You have a marketplace for eggs, right? Which is sort of that very precious, like gold
01:00:13.680
commodity that we have. And then you've got a marketplace for wombs. And, you know, I've heard
01:00:18.680
John Stone Street say, you know, whenever you put a price tag on something that is priceless, you
01:00:22.480
immediately cheapen it. Right? And that's what's going on right now. There's a huge demand. Eggs are
01:00:28.180
expensive. Wombs are expensive. So of course, we're going to try to, you know, traffic and cut
01:00:32.800
the cost wherever we can in both of those areas. Yes. I remember when the initial invasion of
01:00:39.140
Ukraine happened, and there were all these stories of poor women in Ukraine were being used as
01:00:44.020
surrogates for people in America, around the world, just because people can get it for cheaper in these
01:00:48.900
desperate, poor countries where these women are, they need money. And so they're paid $30,000 to,
01:00:54.520
you know, bear this child. And then, okay, their child was born. And wait, the parents aren't coming
01:01:00.280
to get the child. Well, it's not my child. I can't afford to keep this child. So these children were
01:01:05.540
basically in these orphanages, waiting for their parents in other parts of Europe or in America or
01:01:11.200
Canada to come get them. And while it's dangerous in Ukraine, and a lot of times those parents don't
01:01:16.180
necessarily feel a connection to that child, because they haven't even been around for their
01:01:20.120
gestation. And that's still something that's happening. These children are toddlers now,
01:01:24.360
and they haven't met their parents who paid for them to be born via surrogate.
01:01:30.960
You know, we often talk about how surrogacy is the, in surrogacy, the rich buy and the poor sell.
01:01:37.580
And so you're going to find active surrogacy markets in any countries where it isn't outright banned,
01:01:42.880
where there's economically vulnerable women. So we're seeing, you know, the Philippines,
01:01:46.740
like I mentioned, Mexico is now a huge hotspot for surrogacy. But Ukraine has 25% of the global
01:01:54.640
surrogacy market. In fact, I believe one specific fertility clinic in Ukraine has 25%. So I'm sure
01:01:59.920
there's others in Ukraine too. Like, shouldn't that make you scratch your head? Yeah. If a war-torn
01:02:04.640
country where women are losing their husbands to the front, to maybe death because they were at war,
01:02:12.140
if that's the place where women are signing up to be surrogates, shouldn't that make you question
01:02:20.140
I mean, yet it's not. And of course it's the kids who suffer. You know, there was a situation,
01:02:25.100
baby Bridget, that was not picked up in Ukraine because she had a disability. The parents wouldn't
01:02:30.960
come and get her. So she was left there. According to the surrogacy laws, the baby didn't belong to the
01:02:37.520
surrogate. The baby couldn't be adopted because the child was stateless. So unfortunately, you know,
01:02:43.780
she has simply had to piece a life together without her biological parents, without anybody
01:02:49.360
that's even like claiming or adopting her. I mean, it's just incredibly, it's not just that it's unjust.
01:02:54.940
It is unjust. I believe that those parents went on to have two healthy surrogate babies with somebody
01:02:59.640
else so they could take home the product that they ordered, not the damaged goods that they got with
01:03:04.140
their first attempt. Yeah. That reminds me of the woman that I had on. You probably know her story.
01:03:09.840
Her name is Brittany. I think Jennifer Law originally connected me to her. She had been a surrogate in
01:03:14.900
the past. Everything went, you know, as planned. And then she was a surrogate for two gay men and she
01:03:20.320
was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of her pregnancy. And because she had to go through
01:03:24.860
chemotherapy and the doctor said, yeah, you should probably give birth early, but we can save the baby
01:03:29.120
and save you. It's totally possible, but this will be a preterm situation. The fathers said,
01:03:34.820
we don't want a preterm baby. We, you know, don't want to deal with all of the complications of that
01:03:39.300
preterm baby. Abort this child. You have to abort this child contractually because it's not yours.
01:03:44.740
It's ours. This is our choice. And so she was kind of, you know, a little blurry on what exactly
01:03:50.300
happened. It sounded like she induced labor at an early time and that they didn't save the life of a
01:03:55.380
child because she even offered, she said, I will adopt this child. Give me this child. Someone in
01:04:00.500
my life will take care of this child. I will care for this child. And because the dads so-called
01:04:06.080
had parental rights, they had the right to say, no, we don't want to adopt this child out. We want
01:04:12.700
this child to die. The mom said, do you want to come to the hospital while they're inducing labor?
01:04:17.180
Do you want the remains of the child? No, don't talk to us again. So this child was died,
01:04:22.300
you know, was killed or died, discarded like toxic waste. And the men moved on to another
01:04:29.940
surrogate to get a quote unquote healthy child with the, you know, the surrogate mom still,
01:04:36.600
I'm sure reeling from dealing with the emotional trauma that this caused. And again, that is one
01:04:43.460
story that we know. I guarantee you every anecdote that we are telling you today happens thousands and
01:04:49.820
thousands of times, both here and abroad. Well, and even when surrogacy goes well,
01:04:54.920
there's a cost to the child. So last week, Sam Altman announced that he had a baby and everyone's
01:05:01.080
like, wait, what? He's gay? What's going on? And apparently he married his boyfriend last year.
01:05:06.660
But he said, you know, something like, welcome to the world, little boy. You came early. So you're
01:05:12.240
going to spend some time in the NICU, but I've never been so in love or something like that.
01:05:15.400
And, you know, I quote tweeted him like, welcome to the world, motherless boy. You came early
01:05:20.780
because you're the product of surrogacy. And surrogacy often results in preterm birth and
01:05:25.700
preterm labor and all of the accompanying risks that go along with a baby that is not able to
01:05:30.460
fully develop. And somebody is like, wait a second, why are surrogate born kids more likely to be
01:05:36.700
preterm? And the answer is IVF is actually a risk factor for preterm birth, right? There's something
01:05:44.040
about making a baby in a laboratory, whether it's because you are selecting the sperm and injecting
01:05:49.420
the sperm into the egg or something about the process of like exposing them to light or the
01:05:54.520
freezing or the thawing or whatever it is. But IVF babies are high risk babies. They just always are.
01:05:59.160
And they're more susceptible to preterm birth. Number two, there is something Jennifer Law has spoken
01:06:05.460
about the risk of genetic dissimilarity that when the woman is carrying a baby who's not genetically hers,
01:06:11.660
there does, that does seem to trigger some kind of immunological response of, of rejection,
01:06:17.340
or at least, you know, the pregnancy is not going to go smoothly as it should. I think that there's
01:06:23.160
also some placental development challenges that go along with surrogate pregnancies. And so like,
01:06:28.500
even if, you know, the birth, the mother is happy, the surrogate is happy, the commissioning parents
01:06:33.280
are happy. And if the child is born alive, there's still risks to the child. There's still medical risks.
01:06:37.720
Preterm births is a big one. Yep. You know, I read the other day, I did not know this,
01:06:42.980
that when IVF is used specifically for male infertility, so for whatever it is, he's,
01:06:50.080
he doesn't have enough sperm, his sperm isn't mobile. And so they're literally, you know, just
01:06:54.320
as they always do. And in vitro, they're putting the sperm and the egg together to make sure they are
01:06:58.700
conceiving. There is a 66% increase in the, in the risk of a disability, a mental disability,
01:07:07.720
and especially autism, because I'm not saying that, well, you should just get over the fact that
01:07:14.480
you're infertile, man. Hopefully there are, you know, natural ways to try to increase your fertility,
01:07:19.500
but you know, like your body is telling you something. There is a reason why that sperm
01:07:24.440
cannot get to that egg that is telling you something about your genetic abilities,
01:07:29.240
your ability to reproduce. For the people who say, trust the science, they don't believe what
01:07:34.300
science has to tell them about marriage and reproduction. So I am the mother of two high
01:07:38.840
school boys. So that means that I spend half of my time looking at Instagram reels and memes
01:07:43.400
that they send me. And, you know, one of the ones is like the picture of the sperm,
01:07:48.020
like making their way through the fallopian tube and like finally seeing the egg and then the battle.
01:07:51.840
Like, which one is good? This is a video that you have been sent. Oh my gosh. There's so many
01:07:56.260
videos like this. So many videos. Right. And it is like, okay, finally the sperm, like, and it's
01:08:01.940
always set to like Rocky music. Okay. So the sperm finally like penetrates the egg, like the new life
01:08:07.460
is created. And then it's something like, just remember you were always the product of a winning
01:08:11.860
sperm or something. But the reality is there is a sort of natural selection process that is going to
01:08:17.960
allow the fittest sperm, the strongest sperm to make it through that gauntlet of biological challenges
01:08:25.200
that the, the female body will throw up to fertilization by design. You know, there's a
01:08:31.720
good reason to not have us determine which sperm is injected into the egg, but allow some level of
01:08:38.200
fitness to guide that. And like you said, sometimes, you know, I had woman, woman comment on
01:08:43.480
one of the millions of IVF posts that happened. And she said, you know, everybody, every woman that I
01:08:48.980
know, her case, this isn't the cases that I know of, but she said almost all the people that I know
01:08:54.420
who used IVF, the women were extremely overweight and fertility was a problem for them. And we do know
01:09:00.780
that things like obesity can be a hindrance to fertility, to conception. And so it just speaks to,
01:09:06.940
and I think that that has been some of the objection to the Trump executive order,
01:09:10.260
especially from the people who are on the Maha train, is they're like, why aren't we looking
01:09:15.240
at the underlying causes of infertility, right? Why is it that infertility is such a big problem
01:09:20.840
today? Why is it that sperm count has dropped 50% for men overall in the last 50 years? And the answer
01:09:27.760
is there's a lot of environmental causes, a lot of pollutants, a lot of chemicals in our diet,
01:09:32.760
in our environment that is making it harder for people to conceive naturally. And so if we're going to
01:09:38.240
do Maha, let's do Maha, but let's not circumvent. Instead of saying, okay, the infertility is a
01:09:44.020
blinking light on the dashboard of, of reproductive health saying there's something wrong here.
01:09:48.780
You're just circumventing, you're turning the light off, right? You're going to like make that
01:09:52.740
happen outside of the natural processes. Why don't we really investigate and heal the problem to begin
01:09:57.240
with instead of fueling this industry that rampantly victimizes children? Yes. And we've had women on
01:10:02.800
this show who have heard from their doctors, your only chance at getting pregnant is IVF.
01:10:06.740
And they just didn't take that for an answer and they dug deeper. And in some cases I have friends
01:10:12.660
who truly they can't get pregnant. And so they've gone the adoption route, which is just beautiful.
01:10:17.140
But then I've had others like the guest I had on my show who went the natural fertility route and it
01:10:22.280
took longer. They had to dig deeper. They had to make lifestyle choices, both her and her husband and
01:10:28.060
all kinds of digging that sometimes is expensive because unfortunately insurance doesn't cover that.
01:10:32.520
Like if we're going to expand insurance coverage, maybe let's move in the functional direction.
01:10:37.440
But they were able to conceive a child that they were told by doctors they were never able to conceive.
01:10:43.440
So I'm not saying, Hey, if you're infertile, sorry, just live with it. Now, maybe that is God's plan
01:10:49.860
for you not to have biological children, but there could be other solutions that don't pose a health,
01:10:56.360
a health risk to you because IVF also increases the chances of things like breast cancer in women.
01:11:02.880
Well, we don't know a whole lot about what IVF and egg extraction causes women because big
01:11:08.640
fertility is not studying it. Like it's actually hard for women to consent to the risks that go along
01:11:13.800
to, for example, donating eggs because we don't, they're like, well, there's no known risks because
01:11:19.620
Well, because the same people that are getting paid from extracting the eggs would also be the
01:11:23.640
people that we need to do the research. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So I, I'm glad you brought
01:11:28.300
up restorative reproductive medicine, natural procreative technologies, like look it up now
01:11:32.820
pro technologies. I mean, if you're struggling with infertility, um, put your finger on the source
01:11:38.220
of the problem. There's a variety of different reasons why somebody might not be able to conceive.
01:11:41.820
And some of them are treatable. Yeah. A lot of them are treatable. You have friends that made those
01:11:46.040
lifestyle changes, eventually got pregnant. I've got several friends who got pregnant very, very quickly
01:11:50.640
because they're like, Oh, you don't have, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to make something
01:11:55.460
up. Yeah. Right. You don't have the right level of estrogen. You know, here's a supplement you
01:11:58.940
could take. Here's something that you could do to like equalize, get yourself to the right level.
01:12:02.480
And then pregnancy was fairly easy for a couple of their kids. Um, and it is simply because there's
01:12:08.300
not a lot of incentive for fertility doctors to actually seek and resolve the underlying fertility
01:12:12.420
issues. If they were, they would lose 12 to $25,000 by you being their customer, probably a
01:12:20.440
repeat customer with IVF success rates. And so don't take their advice, go the natural route,
01:12:27.220
see a doctor that actually wants to identify, resolve and heal your underlying fertility issues
01:12:32.640
if possible. And depending on the problem, you might see success rates at double what IVF is promising
01:12:39.720
you. Yes. Especially in the case where someone is, maybe they're starting to have a child at 35.
01:12:45.800
Maybe it's not because of like feminism and girl bossing. Maybe that's just the time that God,
01:12:50.940
you know, brought you your husband, but that is not infertility. It is simply how the female
01:12:56.420
body works. But also people need to hear that your rates of success, your chance of success in IVF,
01:13:03.760
the older you are, they go closer and closer to zero. Even if you do IVF, if you're 38,
01:13:09.720
years old, you're going to have a really hard time getting pregnant. I think it's better all
01:13:14.160
around, obviously ethically and morally, but for your health and for your chances of getting pregnant
01:13:17.860
to go the natural route, it's going to be harder to get pregnant no matter what the older you are,
01:13:22.940
but at least choose something that has no moral risk and is better for your body.
01:13:26.800
It's going to make you healthier generally. Anyway, I'm a lot of people like, what are we doing
01:13:31.340
with this infertility crisis? And I'm like, yes, infertility is a problem. Obviously like male
01:13:36.160
fertility has been really well documented in terms of that struggle, but generally we don't
01:13:40.800
necessarily have a fertility problem. We have a, you are getting married too late and choosing to
01:13:44.960
have children too late problem. Women have a very small window of easy pregnancy. It is late teens
01:13:50.920
to early thirties. And unfortunately, a lot of the narratives that we are selling young women these
01:13:55.940
days is to use that prime childbearing time to advance your career, to find yourself, to go to grad
01:14:02.560
school. And, um, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do those things. I'm not saying that you shouldn't
01:14:06.380
take a trip to Italy or whatever, but if you think that you're going to put off childbearing until you
01:14:11.680
are 33, 35, 37, 39, you might be working against your own body. You know, I tell young women, you can
01:14:18.960
have it all. You can have a marriage, you can have career, but you can't have it all at once.
01:14:24.340
Yeah. And if you don't do marriage and kids first, if you can choose, a lot of women can't,
01:14:28.180
a lot of women haven't found Mr. Right. Um, a lot of women are struggling with genuine fertility
01:14:32.800
issues, but if you can choose, you've got to do marriage and kids first. You have to do that first.
01:14:39.640
I wish we had started earlier. Like we got married at 23 as soon as we could after meeting each other,
01:14:45.460
but waited a few years until we had kids. And obviously I'm so thankful for every specific
01:14:50.360
child that we have with their specific genetic makeup. But I'm like, wait, why did we wait three
01:14:55.680
years? Why did we wait those three years of like prime fertility to, and you know, but you never
01:15:02.160
hear, I mean, I feel like you don't hear that that much. I'm thankful for our early years of marriage,
01:15:06.960
but it's like, it'd be awesome to have like three more kids too. So anyway, well, Katie, thank you so
01:15:12.360
much. Are there any parting thoughts, any final words that you'd like to give? Oh my gosh, that is
01:15:16.840
quite an invitation. Yes. Well, where can people find you support? Oh yeah. No, that's great.
01:15:21.800
Then before us.com go subscribe. We have some really, really big things that are going to be
01:15:27.600
coming out. Big interviews coming out in the next couple of weeks. Um, we have a lot of projects
01:15:31.500
that we're working on for the first time. We have policy recommendations for state level lawmakers
01:15:35.780
so that we can start to, um, do what we can to keep big fertility in check state by state,
01:15:41.780
but also working to retake lost marriage ground. Like I'm tired of playing defense on all of these
01:15:47.900
different critical areas of the social fabric of marriage and parenthood and families.
01:15:52.100
I want to go on the offense on behalf of children. I want people to start speaking up and boldly
01:15:57.940
advancing the rights of kids, both in their personal lives and in the policy world. So I guess
01:16:02.700
that's what I'd say. Like come and subscribe, um, find us on all the social media. Um, I'm on Twitter
01:16:07.280
too much X too much. We should have an intervention there, but yeah, we'd love to see you over there
01:16:13.120
if you're on the socials. Okay. Thank you so much, Katie. Yeah.