Ep 1206 ｜ The Harsh Reality of Being an IVF Baby ｜ Jennifer Lahl
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Summary
Jennifer Law, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, joins Allie to talk about embryo adoption and her thoughts on whether or not it's ethical. She also talks about the dangers of assisted reproductive technology like IVF, surrogacy, and big fertility.
Transcript
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Is embryo adoption ethical? You might think the answer to that question is an easy yes,
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but it might be a little more layered and complex than you think. Jennifer Law is the founder of
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the Center for Bioethics and Culture. She has been on the show several times talking about the
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dangers of IVF surrogacy and big fertility. Today, we're talking about a range of subjects,
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but we will also focus on embryo adoption, and she will give her perspective on this very
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contentious issue. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to
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goodranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's goodranchers.com, code Allie.
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Jennifer, thanks so much for taking the time to join us again, this time in person for the first
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time. I'm so excited. It's not on Zoom. I know, me too. You've been on the show several times,
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but for those who maybe aren't familiar, just remind us of your background, who you are and
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what you do. Yeah, I'm Jennifer Law, and I founded an organization called the Center for Bioethics
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and Culture. And I was, in a previous life, a pediatric critical care nurse for many, many
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years, and I was sort of concerned about where medical ethics was headed. So I pursued a graduate
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degree in bioethics and founded the center to be an educational resource. I've spent a lot of my
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energy in the area of assisted reproductive technology because I have a deep passion for
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Yes. And what was it when you were a pediatric care nurse that started to make you concerned
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about medical ethics and what was going on in hospitals?
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Yeah. Well, a couple of things. One was it shifted more from a medical profession to a service
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provider model. So now we see that today. You just walk in and you tell your doctor, I was born in the
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wrong body. I'm a boy. Make me a girl. You know, okay, sure. You know, so move from an actual do no
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harm. Doctor knows best. Doctor's the expert to I'm just here to provide you, my client, for whatever
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you wanted. I also saw the shift in names. The last hospital I worked in, we were told to call our
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patients' clients and they were our customers. And I don't know about you, but if you go see your
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doctor now, the first thing you get using the email is your customer satisfaction service. You
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know, were you pleased with your visit with your doctor? Did they, you felt like they took time with
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you? So it's, it moved in that way. And because I was in pediatric critical care, we're always pushing
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the, just because we can, should we do this? Especially on little premature babies. You know,
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I worked with the doctor who did the first surgery where they took the baby out of the mommy's uterus
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and did the defect repair, put the baby back up so the baby could then grow in the womb and then be
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born healthy. Because the particular defect this baby had, if he'd been a normal delivery,
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the child probably would not have survived. So those are good things. But then there's also other things
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that were just, you know, should we, should we be doing this? And are we thinking about that?
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And because it's parents that have to consent for their children, I had this burden knowing that
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these are parents that have to make urgent life and death decisions that they have to live with for
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the rest of their life. So how can we make sure that everybody has all the information, the good
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information, the ethical, the science-based information and, and make those kinds of decisions.
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So no matter what the outcome is, at least they can go home and have some sense of we did all we
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could, or we did what was needed to be done. So it was those kinds of things into sort of the broader
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And what made you interested in the world of reproductive technology like IVF and surrogacy?
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That was totally happenstance. It was, I founded the Center for Bioethics and Culture during the
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George Bush presidency, when he was, you know, had to navigate the whole embryonic stem cell research,
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the human cloning, you know, and I live in California, the campaign was cures for California,
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we have to do this research, because we're going to save people's lives. And that took me into a deep
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dive, because at that time, the debate was over the half a million frozen human embryos. Now in the US,
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we have over a million. But I thought, how did we come to have a half a million frozen embryos? And then that
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led me down the rabbit hole of fertility medicine, what I call big fertility. And then I started
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writing and speaking about that. And women contacted me, women who sold their eggs, and said,
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let me tell you what happened to me, I lost my fertility, I lost an ovary, I had a stroke,
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you know, things like that. And that's how I kind of got into filmmaking. I never set out to do
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the whole work in reproductive technology, or to make films. But you know, God has plans.
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Yes. So I'm curious what it was for you internally, that made you realize, this is not right. What's
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going on in big fertility? Is it ethical? Because most people, I say, I don't know about especially
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in the medical profession, but I come in contact with a lot of nurses who will very passionately defend
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IVF and surrogacy. And they say, I see how much these parents want these babies, these babies are
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fought for, they are cared for. But you had a different reaction to that. You thought, okay,
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what is happening to these women, these egg sellers, these surrogates, the babies who are born of IVF,
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the frozen embryos, it's not right. So I'm curious, what kind of fueled your response to thinking like,
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this is an injustice? Yeah, well, that's what drives a lot of my work. I hate injustice. I am
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a truth seeker in the name of justice. If you look at the women who are either being surrogates,
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or they're selling their eggs, or sometimes they do both, they're not patients. You know,
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so the doctor has no business asking them to do things medically to their body that they don't have
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any medical reason to do. And oh, by the way, let's pay you money to do this. It's one thing if
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you're sick, you have cancer, and you know, you take medicines, or you and you assume medical risks,
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you're not paid to do that, you know, you have to pay mightily for those hospital bills. So I saw the
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using of healthy people who are not patients, and aren't protected through, you know, all the ways
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that patients are protected if their doctor harms them. So that was one element of just a massive gross
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injustice. Sure, the person who says, but these young egg donors want to do it, they want to help,
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they want to give their sister her eggs or their girlfriends, and what's wrong with it?
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And oh, shouldn't she be paid? No, because that's not proper medicine. Now, if you look at the
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individual woman who's infertile, I just knew it's fraught with risk. You know, IVF is fraught with
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risk. It's risky to the woman's health. It's risky to the health of the unborn child.
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Most people don't know that. I even think nurses that are saying, oh, it's great. What's wrong with
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it? They haven't really done the research. You know, you can just follow the CDC data. And for
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the last 10 plus years, overwhelmingly, all IVF cycles fail. That's why we have over a million
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frozen embryos. We have to make a lot in hopes eventually one will become a take home baby or more.
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And, you know, we've been at this since, you know, the late 70s, when we had the first IVF baby,
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Louise Brown was born in England. And so we're slowly getting studies. You know, in the early
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days, when you're doing it, it's just like smoking. In the early days, we didn't have the
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studies, we didn't have the data. And now we're getting the data. Now we're getting the data that
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it's risky to women's health. We're getting the data that it's risky. It makes pregnancy risky,
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you know, preterm labor, all kinds of pregnancy related complications. And any mom out there listening
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who knows that they're in a high risk pregnancy, the baby's at risk. And we know that these babies
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born of assisted reproduction are at higher risk of things like my I've told you my grandson was born
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with a heart defect. And when his care was transferred to a big university hospital in
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California, two independent pediatric cardiologists there said, is he an IVF baby? He's not. But in the
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medical literature, IVF babies have much higher rates of congenital heart defects at birth. You
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know, shouldn't that be something that at least could make us pause and think? We know that pregnancy
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is risky. We know that, you know, any child that's born healthy, praise God, because there's a lot of
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things that can go wrong to make children born with all kinds of defects. But knowingly doing it,
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Do we know what it is about IVF that makes... Let's start. Well, there are a lot of different
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layers to that. One, do we know what it is about IVF that makes pregnancy riskier for the mom and the
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baby? We don't know specifically yet because, again, it's back to the data and we haven't been
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doing this for a long period of time. And so it takes a while to get big sample sizes and try,
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you know, watch kids over time to see, oh, we now have 700 kids that were born through IVF that have
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X. So what's supposed... Some of it's supposed that IVF allows a couple who normally naturally
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wouldn't be able to conceive to conceive. So whether that's an evolutionary processing, whether that's a,
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you know, mother nature thing, whether that's a God opening and closing the womb things, it's where
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we've taken into our own hands, I don't want to say forcing, but, you know, making a couple for whatever
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reason can't produce, produce. So is it that? So this is a couple that for whatever reasons wouldn't
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naturally ever be, you know, because we've always had the barren womb. You know, we always will have
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infertile people, as tragic as that is. So that, some of it, some of it's a technique. You know, one of the
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procedures is called ICSI. That's where you see, they take the little sperm and they shoot it into
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the egg. And so we're wondering, well, that damages the wall of the egg cell, you know, when you force
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that in. And when you look at natural conception, you know, the sperm will swim around the egg
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and one makes it in, you know, and is that a programming that we're ignoring? Because we're
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just picking one arbitrarily. So there's so much of that stuff that's going on. And, you know,
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it will also vary on what's the underlying fertility problem. And that's, you know, it's why we both love
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the restorative reproductive approach, because it's actually trying to diagnose the problem and fix the
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problem, not find a workaround. I read a study the other day that said that the prevalence of autism
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is much higher in children who are born from IVF specifically because there was a fertility problem
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on the father's part. So that is because say a dad has basically immobile sperm. They're just not fast
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enough, strong enough to do what they have to do in the natural fertility reproduction process. And so
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in IVF, as you said, you take that sperm, you put it on the egg so it doesn't have to travel.
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Well, when IVF is done for that reason, because I don't know how else to say this, maybe this is
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politically incorrect, but like you got lame sperm, it's just not working. There is a reason that that
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sperm isn't working. There is an underlying issue there that will affect the baby that is born because
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those sperm weren't actually, they're not, they weren't supposed to recreate. And when you force
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them to recreate, then the baby is going to inherit a lot of problems. And so I just thought that was
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interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before, because typically when you think about IVF,
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you think about some problem that the mom has that will have no effect on the child, but, you know,
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just by sheer bad luck, she just wasn't able to bear a child and IVF helps her do that. But there are a lot
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of things, underlying issues that we are masking by forcing the egg and the sperm together.
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Exactly. I mean, it's just, you know, people like to say we're playing God. And I always say,
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well, no, because God doesn't play that way. We're playing naughty people.
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Yeah, yeah. We think about the other areas where we would not tolerate that. We want vegetables that
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aren't, you know, sprayed and pesticide. And we want, you know, chemicals outside of our food. We don't
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want cloned meat and GMO kinds of things in our environment. We don't want to drink water out
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of plastic bottles anymore, store our leftovers in plastic Tupperware. You know, all those things
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that make the case that there's a natural order to how things are supposed to work and how our bodies
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are supposed to work. And even though the human body is incredibly resilient, our fertility is very
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fragile. You know, we have a fertile window of a very small part, you know, people are living into
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their 80s and 90s today. But you know, there's a very small window of that fertility. And there's,
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you know, I don't mean to be sounding like I'm harsh to women, but there's many women that wait
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late, you know, and the reality is our bodies work a certain way. And we're not, you know, supposed to
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have babies in our 40s and 50s. Now that naturally can occur. But it's not the norm.
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Yeah, it's not the norm. So, you know, I just I want, you know, young girls are on summer vacation.
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Now they're going to be going to college in a few months. Don't sell your eggs when you see all the
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ads in your campus newspapers and flyers on on the bulletin boards at university. You know, don't or
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take oral contraception. You know, we know so many women that orally contraceptive for so long to put
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off pregnancy. And then when they finally went to get pregnant, they couldn't get pregnant. You know,
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we play with fire. Yeah, let's talk about those two things. Well, gosh, there's so many things I
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want to talk about. Okay, to close out that part of the conversation. I'm reading a lot right now
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about our fertility. And as you said, like our bodies are so intricate and resilient, but at the
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same time, very fragile, especially the fertility process for women, we're only supposed to release
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one egg per month. And our bodies internally without our mind even knowing it are very selective
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about the sperm that we allow in. The body has this whole, before conception, like this whole
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natural selection process that the sperm has to fight really hard to get through. And even that
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fertilized egg has to be strong enough to be able to get through the endometrium and to be able to
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implant. And of course, I'm not telling you anything that you don't know, but for the audience who doesn't
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know this, like God has designed our bodies in such intricate ways that are supposed to lend itself,
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you know, to the creation of life in a natural way. And when we short circuit that, there are going
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to be consequences. When technology takes us from what's natural to what's possible, Christians have
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the responsibility to ask, is that ethical? Is that right? Is that good? Is it going to produce
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But to kind of shift away from that to something else that you said, women going into college,
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they are trying, they are being recruited to sell their eggs. Yeah. Yeah. Um, when I made the first
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film was called exploitation and two of my daughters happened to be students at the University of
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California, Berkeley, and they brought home their school, their school paper, the daily Californian,
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and it had a big ad offering a hundred thousand dollars for an elite donor. I mean, who doesn't
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want to like, at least sort of maybe call in, get some more information. So, um, you know, young girls
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are being bombarded, especially if they're at Ivy league schools. This is eugenic. We don't just want
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any, any girl's eggs. We want the right girl's eggs. We want the right baby, whatever that means.
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Um, you know, men, you know, campus to solicit sperm from guys and go, Oh, I can make 50 bucks
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this weekend for pizza money or whatever. Um, and then for, um, surrogacy, it's largely military
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wives, you know, so it's different demographic graphics. And then back to my point about medicine,
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what's the purpose of medicine being involved in this at all? This is not medicine. This is not
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medicine is aimed toward health. This is not the health of the young girl who's selling her eggs.
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This is not the health of a surrogate mother who's risking, you know, perhaps her life. Um,
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so yeah, beware, don't sell your eggs girls. And I tell, when I speak on university campuses,
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I'll tell people, you're not just selling your eggs, you're selling your children. You know,
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that is your child. That child's going to grow up one day and go, who do I look like? Whose nose do I
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have? You know, how come I'm the only one in the family that has curly hair and everybody has,
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house has straight hair, you know? So it's, you know, it's, it's, again, it's that we're,
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we're tearing apart what, what God has put together. We're tearing apart, which that,
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which should not be torn apart. And that is the, you know, the unitive procreative husband and wife
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come together. And that's how children are. I knit you together in your mother's womb. It's not like
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I built you in a laboratory Petri dish and we tested the ones we wanted. We froze the ones we
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weren't ready to use first. You know, it's just manufacturing. It's, it's C.S. Lewis abolition
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of man, I think is a very profound essay because, you know, Lewis basically says, you know, our final
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conquest will be the abolition of man. You know, do we want to just tear down, um, the, the, the humanity?
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Yeah. It reminds me a lot of Brave New World. They used to think that 1984 was the dystopian novel
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that everyone needs to read and they do, but Brave New World is almost more on the nose,
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especially when it comes to the creation and reproductive, uh, reproduction of humans,
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the growing these babies in pods, taking them away from their family and everything that is natural
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to condition them to think a certain way. And that was very anti-human. I mean, that is exactly
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what's going on in the world of reproductive technology, but the propaganda is so strong. The guilt
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is so strong for those who do have ethical questions about it, because we're told that
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we don't understand the pain of infertility. Well, I think that's a very thin argument because
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I've never had cancer, but I wouldn't say, ah, it's just cancer. You know, you don't have to
00:21:38.760
experience something to know if it's right or wrong. You know, it's, it's, it's intuitive to us.
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We will see things, you know, we, you know, I don't know if you want to go there, but you know,
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there's all this chatter about Glenn, Glenn, uh, Greenwald, you know, and it's like, we don't want,
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we don't want to judge. We don't want to condemn. We don't want to say this is right. This is wrong.
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We don't want to be moralists wagging our fingers, but you know, that's, what's gotten us into this
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pickle that we're in, you know, how else do we get all these over a million embryos? And a lot of
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those are probably little Christian embryos, um, you know, that are now being frozen, adopted out
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to Christian, you know, agencies. Uh, but you know, the heart is desperately wicked. Um, so yeah,
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but I, you know, I, I like the, um, the movie Gattaca. I don't know if you've ever seen that.
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I haven't. Yeah. I've heard of it, but I haven't seen it.
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Yeah. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman. It's a really great, it's a whole designer baby. You know,
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this couple comes in and they are meeting with the geneticist who says, why would you want to
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leave anything for chance? Um, you know, basically that argument, if you want to raise your kids to
00:22:48.100
get into Harvard, why wouldn't you start at the egg and sperm level with the best, you know, shot,
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do all the testing, weed out the bad genes, weed out the bad embryos. And I think about a professor
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at Stanford who I actually debated once, Hank Greeley, he's a lawyer and he wrote a book called
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the end of sex. And he basically was sort of putting out this premise that why would you
00:23:09.480
want to have babies through sex? You can have sex for fun, can have sex for intimacy, but why
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wouldn't you want to make all your babies in the laboratory? We have all this control and that's
00:23:20.080
scary to me, but that's here. Oh yeah. I mean, it's here.
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There's the company we talked about it. Maybe it was with Callie that I talked about this with
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your colleague. And it's about this company that was covered by the New York times. The founder
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of it is talking about it very proudly on X and she says sex is for fun. IVF is for reproduction,
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which is just a shock to the conscience for me. I mean, I was scandalized by her saying that,
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which is maybe the point she's trying to shock people and real people in, but she tells a story
00:23:49.400
about how her grandmother passed down this degenerative eye disease. And wow, what if she
00:23:55.300
had not been able to do that? Like what if her great grandmother and her grandmother had been able
00:23:59.380
to make choices? And I'm like, then you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be here. You're saying that
00:24:04.120
you want your grandmother to have been selected out in a lab because she had some degenerative
00:24:09.700
disease. We're talking about eugenics, are we not?
00:24:13.960
Yeah. It's really frightening. And you see that really on this full display in what I call third
00:24:19.540
party conception, which is when you're looking through catalogs to pick out your egg donor.
00:24:24.900
You know, you're looking through catalogs to pick out your sperm donor. You're, you know,
00:24:29.300
by order, by design, you're picking the child that you want and the child you don't want.
00:24:34.920
And overwhelmingly, everybody's doing genetic testing on the embryos. And back to why do so
00:24:40.560
many of these embryos fail? Well, you know, when you have a four or eight, you know, cell,
00:24:45.080
you know, embryo and you go in and take out a cell to do the testing on it. And that's a significant
00:24:51.260
part of that little embryo that you're just like, oh, it doesn't matter. We'll just take one cell
00:24:55.460
out. So we can tell you it's got Down syndrome. It's going to be a boy. It's going to be X, Y,
00:24:59.600
and Z, you know, and, you know, just the whole blatant, you know, sex selection IVF.
00:25:05.820
Yep, absolutely. Okay. Speaking of that idea that you said that, okay, sex is just for fun.
00:25:11.180
It's not for reproduction. 60 Minutes Adjustive, a couple of weeks ago, featured someone named Dr.
00:25:18.120
Tomer Singer. He's the head of Northwell Health's fertility practice. And here's what he said to
00:25:23.800
Leslie Stahl. Here is top four. I said that sex is going to be for fun and for pleasure,
00:25:30.760
but most likely in a generation from now, when couples want to have kids, most likely they're
00:25:35.800
going to be using artificial reproductive technique. You'll have frozen eggs.
00:25:39.380
Wait, are you saying that we won't have sex to have children?
00:25:43.380
I'm sure my two-year-old will ask me, mom, dad, you had unprotected intercourse? What about
00:25:47.900
chromosomal abnormalities, miscarriages, twins? What were you doing?
00:25:53.140
That would be a really weird question to ask your parents, but okay, what is your thought
00:25:59.880
My thought is it's already happening. You know, it's here. It's like if you watch the movie
00:26:05.360
Cateco, which was made over 20 years ago and was sci-fi then, and now it's here. So that's
00:26:10.540
coming. It's going to be normalized. You know, again, you'll be walking down the street with
00:26:14.680
your child that maybe has a disability that's visible to the people passing by and they're
00:26:19.380
going to stop you and say, you mean you did that on purpose? You know, we have something
00:26:23.720
that could have prevented that, you know, and you kind of go, and you're going to seem like,
00:26:28.200
okay, you just want to burden society by producing these kinds of people. I mean, it's, what have
00:26:34.620
we become? Yeah. What have we become? What do you think is the likelihood that most people
00:26:42.640
will be reproducing their children via IVF? I have a hard time buying that. I think the
00:26:47.660
most people that will be doing it will be the elites, you know. They can pay for it. Yeah.
00:26:54.960
They can select for eye color, not just gender. They can select for all these different attributes,
00:26:58.740
these boutique fertility specialist clinics. And, you know, again, I'm trying not to, you know,
00:27:04.360
lump all the elite people in one big bucket and pile on them. But, you know, this is, you know,
00:27:10.560
there's a demographic of people that already disorders everything, you know. So, you know,
00:27:16.040
Uber Eats, you know, Uber Babies. Yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. The commercialization
00:27:21.140
of our reproductive parts of our genetic material.
00:27:25.700
And the ability to justify it. Because I don't want to produce children that are going to be a
00:27:29.900
burden on society, whatever that means. Because there's plenty of healthy people you could argue
00:27:33.880
are a burden on society. Right. Right. Yeah. It's just a wrong view of people measuring their
00:27:39.800
worth by something other than just their existence as human beings.
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00:28:58.480
You know, I've argued with a lot of pro-lifers about this. Like you were the first person I had on my
00:29:06.000
show to talk about big fertility. And I think I had talked about IVF and sperm and egg selling once
00:29:13.200
before I had you on, but I had you on and that opened that episode alone. It was so popular. It
00:29:19.700
opened so many people's eyes and really sparked such a conversation. I mean, a few years ago, I would
00:29:25.480
say most people on the right wouldn't even touch this subject, but then we, we have you, we have Katie
00:29:32.100
Faust. We have so many people speaking up about this. And then we started getting tests like Dave
00:29:37.660
Rubin announcing his surrogacy situation where people started to think, huh, how did this happen?
00:29:44.580
What's going on here? And now a lot of people are talking about it. Even SNL had a whole, you know,
00:29:51.440
parody asking a gay couple, where'd you get the baby? Did you kidnap the baby? How in the world
00:29:56.300
could you have procured this baby? But still there are so many Christians, so many pro-lifers
00:30:02.820
that refuse to think about the ethics behind this because their friend went through infertility or
00:30:08.920
they have their kids because of IVF. It's a really difficult conversation. Like how would you say is
00:30:14.860
the most persuasive method that we can employ when we're trying to get people to understand what's going
00:30:20.580
on here? Yeah. I, I will often say I don't have talking points because everybody has to talk to
00:30:27.300
their friends or their neighbors, um, in, in an area where you think it will touch them. You know,
00:30:34.340
sometimes I will have conversations with, um, couples that are thinking about pursuing IVF about the health
00:30:40.240
risks. Did you know? Cause most people don't know and their doctor's not telling them, did you know
00:30:44.780
the risk to the child that might be born of this? Um, you know, some of them who are thinking
00:30:50.340
about using third party conception, you know, that's a different point of entry into a conversation
00:30:54.840
about, you know, you're asking a young woman to perhaps lose her fertility in, and hopefully helping
00:31:01.380
you. Do you really want to put that burden? You know, can you live with yourself? I know a couple
00:31:06.280
that has a child through surrogacy and the surrogate mother died, you know, like moments after the baby
00:31:11.800
was delivered and for their whole life, they have to live with the guilt that every time they look at
00:31:16.580
their child, this child, that woman lost her life for them to have that, you know, that's a heavy
00:31:21.480
burden. You know, so I think with stories like that, you know, people can kind of, some of it's
00:31:25.960
just finances. Do you know, you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars, maybe ruin your health
00:31:30.640
and maybe never even get a baby. You know, is that really how you're supposed to be using your
00:31:35.220
financial resources? Cause we're stewards of everything, our body, our time, our money. Um, so for me,
00:31:41.460
it's really, who are you speaking with? Um, cause I, like you just said, most people just don't know.
00:31:49.080
They just think, oh, they got a baby. Isn't that great? Thank you God for this wonderful new
00:31:54.920
breakthrough in medicine to help us have babies. And most people don't think about the leftover
00:32:00.560
embryos. There was, you know, a gay couple that did this whole video talking about how, you know,
00:32:06.540
they've got two surrogates, they've got two egg sellers, and they're both trying to have their
00:32:10.920
own biological children. And they go through this whole process. Um, and they have, I think,
00:32:18.240
12 embryos. I mean, are they going to have a dozen children? No, of course they're not. They're
00:32:22.480
probably going to have two and no one asks, well, what about the other 10? What about their siblings?
00:32:27.360
What's going to happen to them? Most people just honestly, they don't think about it. And if they
00:32:31.840
do, they shut their mind off because they don't want to think about it. And it's human experimentation.
00:32:37.720
I mean, all over Instagram, just like a few weeks ago was a picture of a little baby that was born
00:32:43.520
that had been frozen 20 something years. I mean, have we even stopped to think? We just did it. You
00:32:49.240
know, most of the time when things make their way to being used in the doctor's office, they've gone
00:32:53.900
through years and years of clinical trials. And all the clinical trials are focused on safety. Is it
00:32:58.840
safe? Does it work? Is it safe? Does it work? And we, there's no clinical trial. We don't know,
00:33:03.160
is it safe to freeze a human embryo for 20 plus years? Yeah. We don't know. We're just doing it.
00:33:08.560
Yeah. And the child can't consent to that. Right. You know, the child and the parents aren't
00:33:13.760
told, you know, we don't really know we're going to freeze them, but we don't really know.
00:33:18.680
Yes. Okay. I want to talk about embryo adoption because I get this question a lot and, you know,
00:33:23.420
I have a hard time with it because I remember something that you said a few years ago that,
00:33:29.180
you know, you would rather people, if they're going to adopt, to adopt the children that are
00:33:33.060
already born. Right. And am I saying that correctly? Okay. I want to kind of break that
00:33:37.840
down because I also don't think it is immoral for someone to adopt what they call like this
00:33:42.660
snowflake baby. I think a snowflake adoption where you take the frozen embryo, you implant it into
00:33:48.520
yourself and then you have this child, you raise this child. But is that the way to solve the
00:33:55.980
problem of having over a million frozen embryos or does that create a demand for more frozen
00:34:03.740
I've written a lot about this and I have very formed, solidly formed opinions, which don't
00:34:11.640
put me in good standing with some pro-life people. I think first we have no business freezing
00:34:17.120
embryos. Under Germany federal law, thou shall not freeze an embryo. We need federal laws that
00:34:23.760
said, that's it. We've got over a million. No more. This is wrong. We're going to stop
00:34:28.560
freezing embryos. Yeah. We're not, we're not going to shut down IVF. We're not going to do
00:34:32.960
like a Supreme Court Arkansas case and everybody loses their mind. But you know, we're going to
00:34:37.820
stop freezing human embryos. In Germany, the law is you can make three and you have to implant them
00:34:42.500
all. So I'm not a big fan of three because that's a risky pregnancy, but we need to stop freezing
00:34:48.900
them. Then we need to have some kind of a plan where we go back to the people. It's like, you
00:34:53.440
know, I used to have birthday parties for my kids and you know, there was always the parents that
00:34:56.740
would come like an hour late, like come get your kids. I would go back to those people and say,
00:35:01.200
these are your children. You need to make a decision about what to do with them. The burden is on you
00:35:06.900
to decide what to do with your children. You can either have more children because they're your
00:35:12.380
children. You can allow them to be embryo adopted or you can allow them to die. I think it's cruel
00:35:19.160
to keep them frozen indefinitely. So those are kind of your options. Now the argument is a lot of
00:35:25.620
those people have moved on. We don't even know where they are because there's a whole issue with
00:35:29.340
just tracking big fertility and what's going on. So, you know, when you can't find people, then I think
00:35:35.360
then we as a society have to come to terms with what to do with them if they're not going to be
00:35:39.440
embryo adopted. The problems I have with embryo adoption are twofold. One is the medical problems.
00:35:44.840
You know, you're still not getting rid of the risk of an IVF baby. So that baby that's been,
00:35:50.000
that baby that's been frozen has the complications and the risk exposure of babies that are born
00:35:55.640
through assistive reproductive technology. That's how we got the embryo. And then when you embryo adopt
00:36:00.580
into your womb, you're like a surrogate mother. And we know surrogate pregnancies are risky
00:36:04.400
because you're pregnant with a foreign object. It's not your baby. It's like when you get a
00:36:08.500
splinter and your finger gets infected, you've got something that's in there. So it's different
00:36:12.660
DNA. So it could be, yeah, so it could be a high risk pregnancy and it could be a high risk pregnancy
00:36:18.560
that's risky to the mother and also to the child. So you can't get away with those risks. And then I
00:36:24.120
think my final is, you know, in adoption and, you know, Katie Faust is so solid in this space on
00:36:31.080
adoption and I've learned much from her, but, you know, we know that we're supposed to tell children
00:36:37.300
early and often their story, you know, no secrets. I'm old enough. When I was growing up, my parents
00:36:42.280
would say, shh, they're adopted. They don't know. You know, there's no secrets now. It's not good.
00:36:48.120
But here's a child that's going to be told, your parents really wanted children.
00:36:53.580
And so they made a bunch of embryos and you didn't get picked right away. So you got put in the freezer
00:36:58.900
and then they had their children and then they decided their family was done. So they didn't want you
00:37:04.980
anymore. And then you have to tell this little child that you were really wanted, but not really
00:37:10.580
that wanted because you were not wanted enough to get the first implantation, you know, and then,
00:37:16.120
and then they decided you, you're not part of their family anymore because their family's done.
00:37:20.960
Their family's complete. And, oh, by the way, you have siblings out there that got, were lucky.
00:37:27.060
They were chosen first. So you have brothers and sisters out there. I just think that's going to be a
00:37:30.680
hard, hard thing for kids. Is that different than the story that you would tell a child who was
00:37:35.560
adopted as a newborn though? It is that because a lot of times it's not, well, I'm, I wish Katie was
00:37:43.740
here because she would have the stats, but you know, a child that's adopted, there's usually some
00:37:48.600
reason that the parents can't raise a child. You know, my sister has an adopted child.
00:37:55.780
The mother was a street mom. She was just in and out of rehab. She was a drug user.
00:38:00.780
So it wasn't that she wanted or didn't want, who knows? She wasn't even in her right mind.
00:38:05.980
So it's not the same as really wanting something that you just tuck away and freeze and then you
00:38:10.980
decide you changed your mind. Yeah. You know, adoption is there's this child that's just been
00:38:15.040
born, you know, for whatever reason, we can't put this child in that home. I mean, it could be,
00:38:20.840
it could be drugs, it could be alcohol, it could be whatever. I still think that we can help with
00:38:26.260
those problems. So more and more moms can keep their babies and we can come alongside them.
00:38:30.920
Right. But yeah, I mean, babies who are frozen embryos and IVF, they're typically coming from
00:38:38.540
parents who have the means to go through IVF. So that's like typically parents who have a lot of
00:38:44.720
resources. So it's not like, oh, we couldn't afford this child or, you know, I was an addict or I was
00:38:50.580
in a destitute situation. It's like, no, we could afford our child. We just wanted to
00:38:54.660
stop at IVF. We're good to go. Sorry, you're going to be frozen forever. That I do think is
00:39:00.220
probably a more difficult origin story for a child to understand than the child of like,
00:39:07.860
yes, your mom did want you, but she couldn't take care of you. So she did this valiant, heroic
00:39:16.380
Yeah. I think that's, that's critical and you articulate it much better than I did. And also
00:39:22.360
the fact that in, you know, adoption laws have changed dramatically over the last many years
00:39:27.900
where adoption records are open. Um, so children have access to original birth certificates. Now
00:39:33.980
that's not the case in embryo adoption. Now you may know who the parents of the frozen embryos are,
00:39:39.200
and there's stories out there of parents who shared their embryos and now they're all one big happy
00:39:42.980
family, but I don't think that really works. Um, but you know, the, the child that's been frozen
00:39:48.800
for 20 something years, we might not ever be able to tell that child who their mother and father are.
00:39:54.140
Yeah. Would you say it was a win though? If say a million Christian moms, a million Christian women
00:40:00.680
said, okay, we are going to clear out the freezers and we are all going to adopt these frozen
00:40:06.860
embryos. Like, would you say that that is positive or would you still have, would you still have some
00:40:15.200
Yes, I would. I first, I'd say, well, let's take care of all the adopt the orphans out there.
00:40:19.440
Let's take care of all the kids in foster care right now. I know there was, I think it was a
00:40:23.220
church in Texas where the whole church just said, well, we want all the kids that are in foster care.
00:40:28.280
They are now permanently, you know, living in our homes.
00:40:30.400
We interviewed the filmmaker from that story is amazing. Yeah. So I think, you know, as a matter
00:40:35.580
of priority, I, again, I think our priorities to the children already here that are languishing in
00:40:40.700
orphanages or foster home or, you know, that don't have, you know, permanent, permanent homes to be
00:40:46.320
raised in. Um, not because we think that they have more inherent, inherent worth than the babies in
00:40:52.660
the freezer. Correct. Correct. It's just, yeah. And it, all of, all of the stuff we're talking about is
00:40:59.000
what's called a supererogatory act. We aren't required to do any of this. We're not required to
00:41:05.180
adopt. We're not required to adopt embryos. We can do it, but if we don't, we're not going to stand
00:41:10.300
before God one day and he was going to say, why didn't you adopt the orphans? You know, it's not
00:41:13.940
something that we have to do to be, um, in, in good moral standing. So, but I think I, I'm not going to
00:41:21.740
champion women taking risks with their health. I mean, most women who maybe would say, yeah, I'll be a part of
00:41:27.640
the party to adopt all the frozen embryos. They're probably young moms with their own children.
00:41:32.760
And why would you want to put that young mom in a high risk pregnancy situation that might cause all
00:41:38.460
kinds of complications to her when her are, you know, medically our, our best interest is her
00:41:45.520
health and wellbeing to be there to provide for her own children.
00:41:49.240
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00:43:02.120
When you're giving your message to young women going to college, don't sell your eggs. People
00:43:07.860
might call it egg donation, but you taught me it's not really donation. It is selling. They just say
00:43:13.260
donation so they can get around the law. But you also said don't take hormonal contraceptive.
00:43:18.380
So how does that relate to the things we're talking about?
00:43:21.340
Well, we're talking about preserving fertility. You know, we're talking about maintaining our
00:43:26.720
healthy, fertile bodies. And I think when you're putting oral contraception in your body,
00:43:31.440
we, and then that evidence is out there. I mean, if people don't know about it, it's,
00:43:35.760
you know, I always say, why did God give us Google? So you can go and ask, you know, what are the,
00:43:40.280
you know, so why would you want to take something that's very fragile,
00:43:43.800
you know, that is a short window of your time and, and play fast and loose with it?
00:43:51.880
You know, it's the same thing with, I mean, obesity. Obesity is driving for infertility
00:43:58.640
You know, and that's not healthy for you. Smoking. You know, the first things they say,
00:44:02.660
get your BMI down. If you smoke, don't smoke. If you drink alcohol, stop drinking. You know,
00:44:07.700
those kinds of things that, you know, because it's fragile and it's precious. And don't we
00:44:13.800
take care of things that are really precious to us?
00:44:16.240
Yeah. I know. I am now like retrospectively appreciating so much of what my body was able
00:44:22.180
to do in getting pregnant and in having a baby, as I am learning about how intricate the ovulation
00:44:29.260
cycle is and how, you know, you mentioned human experiments that we're doing on embryos.
00:44:33.840
We're also doing those on women, not just through surrogacy and egg selling and IVF, but also in the
00:44:41.080
suppression of the ovulatory cycle for years at a time when your ovulation and your period is really
00:44:47.720
like a fifth vital sign. Like it is something that indicates how your body is doing in other
00:44:52.860
areas. When we artificially suppress that, we, I mean, we know some of what that's doing. We don't
00:44:59.080
know everything about the damage that that's causing women. And I actually think it could be helping drive
00:45:05.360
the fertility crisis in our country. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, I, I, a call also to
00:45:12.800
young girls that are listening, learn your body. I mean, I didn't know when I was growing up,
00:45:16.980
I had no idea what was going on in, in a 30 day period. You know, I knew eventually I'd have a
00:45:22.300
period, but I didn't know what was going on before, during, after. I didn't know anything about
00:45:26.700
temperatures and, you know, all that. And it's, it's so funny in the, in the age of information,
00:45:31.880
how, um, absolutely clueless a lot of women are about how their, how their body works.
00:45:38.740
Yes. And maybe we would all appreciate, and young girls would appreciate more being a woman,
00:45:43.560
being female, if they knew how amazing their bodies were, which brings me into my next set
00:45:50.200
of questions, which is about the, you know, transgender trend that is really lucrative
00:45:56.400
for big fertility and for our medical industrial complex. You said on my show that those who go
00:46:04.300
through so-called gender transition, they get on the puberty blockers, the cross-sex hormones,
00:46:09.200
all of this stuff, which can be effectively sterilizing. They are becoming lifelong slaves
00:46:14.520
to the medical industrial complex. So you've done even more work on this since we last talked. So
00:46:21.080
can you break that down for us? What's going on there? Well, yeah. And I wasn't even planning to
00:46:27.160
get involved in the gender debate work at all. Um, but you know, Callie Fell, who you mentioned
00:46:32.280
earlier, and I were both nurses. She's a labor and delivery perinatal nurse. I was pediatric.
00:46:36.700
And when we found out that they were blocking puberty, and then they were offering fertility
00:46:41.160
preservation, which is the intersection of big fertility into the trans space, we thought
00:46:46.440
that is it. So yeah, when you are, before you block puberty, you offer ovarian tissue or
00:46:52.760
testicular tissue preservation, because there's no gamete chip, there's no egg or sperm that are
00:46:58.340
mature that can be frozen, because the child hasn't gone through puberty. So you take the tissue
00:47:02.780
of the testicles and the ovaries in hopes of freezing that and implanting it later on when
00:47:08.220
the child wants, wants to have a child and hoping it takes. And then if they've already
00:47:13.340
been through puberty, you offer them fertility preservation to freeze and bank their egg or
00:47:17.240
their sperm. I think that is just pure evil. You are knowingly damaging healthy fertility with
00:47:24.460
a treatment, treatment in quotes, that is not needed. This is not a needed treatment. It's not
00:47:29.120
like, you know, we damage children's fertility if they have cancer, and they have to take chemo.
00:47:34.420
And so that's when we got in that space. And two colleagues of mine just published a paper a few
00:47:40.200
months ago, and I happened to be providentially in DC in a meeting with Educational Secretary Linda
00:47:46.820
McMahon and the Senior Policy Advisor for RFK. And his name is Andrew Guernsey. And Andrew mentioned
00:47:53.620
that Trump had passed the HHS to do a report. And so my little radar went off because our published
00:48:00.720
paper was just about ready to come out. And we were able to send it to Andrew and get that paper
00:48:05.500
cited. But we actually looked at fertility preservation from, it started with endangered
00:48:10.520
species. You know, we want to protect, you know, some beloved whale from going extinct. Then it went to
00:48:17.300
cancer patients, adults, and it went to pediatric cancer patients, and then it moved into this
00:48:21.420
gender category. It's a train wreck. I mean, and you're, it's almost, in my mind, it's criminal
00:48:28.460
that you do something that you would knowingly damage, and then you offer fertility preservation.
00:48:34.280
And if you're in your doctor's office, and your doctor's offering you something, you go, oh, he's
00:48:38.840
offering it because it works. You know, you just assume, and you should be able to assume that.
00:48:43.260
And so that's the, and so these children who've had their fertility damaged, well, then if they
00:48:49.320
want to have children, they will need all kinds of assisted reproductive technologies, depending
00:48:55.360
on, you know, what parts of their body were, you know, if you're a woman and you had your
00:48:59.980
uterus removed as part of your gender surgery, you'll need a surrogate.
00:49:03.520
Right. Well, and it's not, even if you do choose to preserve those parts of your DNA,
00:49:11.880
I mean, your body and your reproductive organs, even if you don't get a hysterectomy, they
00:49:16.340
atrophy so much because of the testosterone. It is, I mean, it's not guaranteed that you will
00:49:27.380
And a lot of these people will say, well, I don't want kids. I mean, you're 17 years old.
00:49:31.480
You think that you know what you'll want in 10 years and you're so sure of yourself. All
00:49:35.480
of us thought that at 17, by the way, whether or not we were confused about our gender, but
00:49:39.960
you know, I've had Daisy Strong in on my show who tried to transition to being a boy and she
00:49:45.840
cut her breasts off and it's just such a horrible situation. She was able, thankfully to, you
00:49:50.980
know, after she detransitioned to have kids, but she wasn't able to breastfeed. And she posted
00:49:57.140
about that and how difficult that was for her, that she is still living with the
00:50:01.300
struggle and the guilt of not being able to breastfeed her children. It's one thing to
00:50:06.120
choose not to. It's another thing to not have that choice, to have that choice ripped from
00:50:11.080
you. And there doesn't seem to be any guilt or any sadness or any hesitance by a lot of
00:50:18.360
people in the medical field about those real cases of regret and trauma that exist among
00:50:24.660
Well, they actually just discount these people that have detransitioned. You know, when I look,
00:50:29.740
you know, being a pediatric nurse and I look at the American Academy of Pediatricians and
00:50:33.480
I go, how far have you lost your way? I mean, it's just, it's mind boggling that they are
00:50:40.480
knowingly harming. I mean, these are people that are trained in biology and medicine. It's,
00:50:45.920
you know, it's just, it's, you know, it breaks, it breaks my heart, Allie.
00:50:50.000
But we did see how the medical industry is so willing to suppress real science in favor of
00:50:56.680
political ideology. I mean, a lot of them did the same thing during COVID.
00:51:00.280
When, and I've just realized how much now that, you know, I have been a mom for a little while,
00:51:06.020
just how much medical intuition you gain as a mom. It doesn't mean that I have all of the
00:51:12.900
expertise in the world. But I just remember when the American Academy of Pediatrics said that
00:51:18.740
if a child is around adults who are wearing masks all the time, it will have no detriment whatsoever
00:51:25.420
to their development. And they had to take down a PDF that they had previously put up years earlier
00:51:32.020
that said, it's so important for your child to be able to see the movement of your mouth when you're
00:51:38.780
articulating words to see you smile. It's so important for their emotional development,
00:51:44.320
their cognitive development, their speech development. And then because they wanted to
00:51:49.020
be anti-Trump or something, they denied that. And so it seems like a lot of people in these
00:51:55.220
scientific institutions, they are willing to suppress the truth because it's politically expedient.
00:52:00.760
And the rest of us who don't have medical degrees, we're left to just, I don't know,
00:52:04.900
search in the dark. Yeah. And I always encourage moms, well, because moms are often most the ones
00:52:10.460
taking their children to see the doctor, you know, be that mama bear. Say no. Say, no, I'm not leaving
00:52:17.500
the room, doctor. No, I'm not signing that. No, I'm not letting you do that test or give that shot or
00:52:23.220
whatever. Because mothers really do have that mother's intuition. You know, you know when your child's
00:52:29.420
sick and you know when your child's really sick. And that's, and that's something you just know in
00:52:35.000
your gut. This, this little guy needs to see the doctor today or know this little guy will be fine.
00:52:40.500
He just needs a couple of days and some Tylenol and some, you know, fluids, Pedialyte. But, you know,
00:52:45.460
trust your gut. And if you don't like your doctor, find a new one.
00:52:49.860
And I did that during COVID because my doctor was such a bully in so many ways that I noticed that he was
00:52:56.200
really a bully when I came to appointments without my husband. When my husband was there,
00:53:01.460
he was really nice. When I was there, he made me feel really small and really stupid.
00:53:05.960
And so we moved pediatricians and, of course, haven't looked back since then. But you don't
00:53:12.080
even realize as a mom, like how much on a daily basis you are memorizing every single tiny thing
00:53:18.580
about your child and how you anticipate, you just anticipate, you know how they're going to react to
00:53:23.980
something, you know what they're going to say, you know, the questions that they're about to ask.
00:53:28.020
And we can forget about that intuition when we're confronted with someone,
00:53:32.380
you know, by someone in a white coat. It's easy to do.
00:53:35.680
And be intimidated by that. And so it does take, you know, digging deep and bringing out your mama
00:53:40.160
bear. And I know that a lot of, you know, people in America don't have the luxury, the options to
00:53:45.880
shop doctors around. They're in a, you know, a system where there's only certain doctors that will
00:53:49.960
take their, their types of insurance, but still as much as you can, you have got to first always
00:53:56.180
advocate for your child. And, and part of advocating for your child is advocating for your family.
00:54:01.120
I'm sorry, our family doesn't do that. You know, so it's not just, I want this for my child. I do
00:54:06.960
want this for my child. But the reason I want it because our family, these are what are priorities
00:54:11.400
for us. These are our values. This is what we believe to be true.
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What can the average mom, the average person who is listening to this do when it comes to the
00:55:58.220
injustice of frozen embryos, the eugenics that's going on, the exploitation in egg and sperm selling
00:56:05.200
and surrogacy? It just feels overwhelming sometimes.
00:56:09.760
Well, education is our best tool, I think. And the more people hear your show, and I know I was on it
00:56:17.500
a few times and I was so encouraged by how many people woke up and said, I never knew. So now people
00:56:26.180
listening today will go, I never knew. Maybe I can learn a little bit more. One of the reasons why we
00:56:30.860
make films is people like to watch movies. All of our films are free on our YouTube channel.
00:56:35.620
You know, all of our films are under an hour. We're not going to ask for a big chunk of your time.
00:56:41.560
Well, I think the YouTube channel is the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network.
00:56:46.100
Yeah. So they can find all those films. You know, I tell women, if you have like women's groups,
00:56:53.720
show a movie and talk about it. You know, watch exploitation before you send your daughters
00:56:57.880
off to university. You know, watch one of our, we have two surrogacy movies. Watch one of the
00:57:02.420
surrogacy movies. If you know somebody in your church, thinking about hiring a surrogate. You know,
00:57:08.080
is there some way to just invite people to have a conversation? Not that we're going to lecture,
00:57:12.740
we don't want to lecture, we don't want to wag our finger at people, but just get more information.
00:57:16.920
We don't have to be afraid of more information. You know, more information helps us make better choices.
00:57:22.820
I think pastors and churches have a place to give guidance on their websites and their mission
00:57:29.700
statements, or at least in their belief statements, even from the pulpit or in their women's groups,
00:57:35.400
or maybe it's kind of like, you know, a mini series that's done on Wednesday nights or whatever,
00:57:41.680
just about what should Christians believe about life? Not just when it comes to abortion,
00:57:46.800
because you'll get conservative pastors who will talk about that,
00:57:50.000
but few conservative pastors will talk about IVF and reproductive technology. But if we believe
00:57:56.980
what we say we do, that those human beings are made in the image of God from the moment of
00:58:02.460
conception, then it's not just abortion that matters. It's how we create and treat and preserve
00:58:08.720
those babies. That matters too. And I do think we will be accountable to God for those things,
00:58:15.260
especially pastors, because they're held to an even higher account. And so I would say pastors,
00:58:19.780
get really clear on this. A great place to start is these videos. And then there's lots and lots of
00:58:24.200
research about this too. Listen to all the conversations I've had with Jennifer, with Katie
00:58:28.420
Faust, with Callie Fell. And there are some others too, that we've talked to women who went through IVF,
00:58:33.800
regret it, who did natural fertility methods, were able to get pregnant. We have looked at this from
00:58:39.480
every angle. There's a lot of information out there. At this point, if you're ignorant, you're choosing
00:58:45.020
that. That's just the truth. There's a lot of information out there to get educated.
00:58:49.440
And, you know, my, you know, call to action for pastors is, I'll often say, for heaven's sakes,
00:58:56.000
infertility is in the first chapter of the Bible. And so we have permission to talk about it. Because
00:59:00.380
a lot of times people didn't want to talk about cloning during the cloning debate. Because it's like,
00:59:03.300
well, cloning isn't in the Bible. I'm like, okay, well, we can talk about things that aren't in the Bible.
00:59:07.240
But I will say, but infertility, the barren womb is in the Bible in several, several cases and
00:59:12.420
several stories. So we have permission to talk about it. And what we don't talk about is how we
00:59:16.760
treat and address infertility. Absolutely. Well, Jennifer, thank you for being a champion on this.
00:59:23.160
And thank you for continuing to educate and inspire me and so many others. I really appreciate you.
00:59:28.980
Oh, it's been my joy and my delight to be here. Thank you. Thank you.