Ep 825 ｜ Dystopia Update： Synthetic Embryos, Frozen Brothers & Rented Wombs ｜ Guest： Libby Emmons
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Summary
Last week, scientists from the University of Cambridge and Caltech announced that they have created synthetic human embryos. What are these creatures? What are the ethical and moral implications of a creation like this? Today, Libby Emmons, editor-in-chief of The Postmillenial, will analyze the ethics behind not only a development like this, but reproductive technology in general.
Transcript
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Last week, scientists from the University of Cambridge and Caltech announced that they have
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created synthetic human embryos. What are these creatures? What are the ethical and moral
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implications of a creation like this? Today, Libby Emmons, my guest, the editor-in-chief for
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the Postmillennial, will analyze the ethics behind not only a development like this, but
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reproductive technology in general. We've got several stories that demonstrate how dystopian
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we are getting when it comes to the creation, the reproduction, the gestation of human beings.
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These are existential, fundamental questions, issues that Christians must have an answer for
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and think through thoroughly and biblically. Absolutely fascinating conversation with Libby
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that I know you guys are really going to like. This episode is brought to you by our friends at
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Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoodRanchers.com. Code Allie.
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Libby, thanks so much for joining us again. Loved having you last time. Everyone loved it. So I
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wanted to have you back to talk about all these dystopian, reproductive, crazy stories. Not just
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that. Also, if we have time, we'll get into this crazy ACLU story of them lamenting the plight of
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this rapist, murderous prisoner who apparently wasn't afforded the transition that he desperately
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needed. So if we have time, we'll get into that kind of stuff, too. But let's start with the dystopian
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reproductive stuff, which you really specialize in. I saw the story the other day. This is according to
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the Guardian Daily Mail, synthetic human embryos created using stem cells. So scientists from the
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University of Cambridge in the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, announced last week that
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they have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells in what they call groundbreaking advance
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that sidesteps the need for the need for eggs and sperm. Now, this is not happening or this is not
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probably going to lead to right now implanting these synthetic embryos into a woman's womb.
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It says when the researchers used mouse cells to develop synthetic mouse embryos, the synthetic
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embryos appeared almost identical to natural embryos. However, when they implanted the synthetic embryos,
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they did not develop into live animals. So there's still a lot of research going on there. But the fact
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that this is even happening, that we're trying to create these, I don't even know exactly what you
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would call them, synthetic human beings, that in itself is disturbing to me. What's your take on the
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story? Well, I would say that they are not human beings in the event that a creature develops without
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having been made from an egg and sperm, a human egg and sperm. That is not a human being. That is a creation
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made by human beings as human beings declaring themselves to be gods and to be able to create
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beings that, you know, perhaps resemble ourselves. So that's exactly what I would call that. I do
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wonder if we're going to get to a point where these synthetic non-human creations do develop into
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beings. That would be really quite an interesting thing as it is right now when we
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develop embryos in a lab, which certainly can be done. There's a 14-day rule. You're only allowed
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to develop them up to 14 days. And that is due to ethical concerns. I have a lot of ethical concerns,
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though, about the potential creation of non-human beings, creating our own replacements, perhaps,
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or creating a subclass of citizens. How would they be treated? What would they be used for? Would
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they be viewed as equal to us? Would they be viewed as subservient? Would they be viewed as
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greater and better than us? These are a lot of questions that human beings, as we stand right
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now on this earth, are not even remotely prepared to answer. We're not even prepared to answer these
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questions when it comes to robots, when it comes to artificial intelligence, because we've lost the
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definition of really anything, but certainly the definition of what it means to be human,
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what it means to have innate human value. Of course, that concept in itself is widely debated,
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especially when it comes to abortion and to euthanasia. And we've lost the definition of male
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and female. So it makes sense that we would also lose the definition of what it actually means to be
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human and what distinguishes a human from an animal and real intelligence from artificial intelligence.
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You kind of already see this happening. I mean, you see this in the rise of so-called sex robots.
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You see this in the rise of people developing some kind of relationships with artificial intelligence,
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people saying that we should bring on the robots, that they're going to be a part of us. So even with
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beings that don't look like us, that aren't even remotely human, that don't really have any human
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characteristics beyond just being able to regurgitate things that humans say, we're already starting to see
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a failure of distinction between us and them. I can't even imagine how complicated and muddy that's going
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to be. Say if one day, one of these synthetic embryos is implanted in a human being, and it results in a life
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birth of something that resembles a human sounds like a human has some, I don't even, I honestly,
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this is beyond my understanding, but it has some kind of emotional capacity, has the capacity for
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pain, has the capacity for communication. I mean, as someone who would know the difference between that
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synthetic being and a real being, it would be very difficult to not feel compassion for that person,
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for that baby, what looks like a baby. So I really don't know how in the world we're going to
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distinguish via law, via perspective, the difference between us and them, if this does continue to go on.
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Yeah. And I think we can also look to our science fiction and our speculative fiction to give us some
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indication of the potential pitfalls. We see that in Battlestar Galactica, for sure, we see that.
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A movie Blade Runner with, what is it, Harrison Ford, we see it in that film as well, this concept of
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beings that are not human, that were created by humans, and then live alongside us, and we don't
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know how to treat them. And they, in many cases, don't know how to treat us. Are they better than us?
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Are they subservient to us? These are huge questions. We see it in Star Trek also, when they develop
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conscious androids. And I think that we need to address these questions finally. And as a society,
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I don't know that we are united enough to actually do that, but there are a lot of concerns. And yes,
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we would look at these beings as, we would look at them with compassion because we are human beings.
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We look at everything with compassion. That is a huge component of how we go about our lives.
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It's very difficult when we abandon that compassion, and that's when we start to lose
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meaning and hope and optimism, is when we release ourselves from the consideration for our fellow
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human beings. But these would not be human beings. These would be creatures created by human beings.
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We would essentially be their gods, right? We would replace God for these creatures who have
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absolutely no connection to God. They would not have been created by God. They would not have a
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spark of life given by God. They would have all of those things given by human beings. Are human beings
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ready to be gods to a subclass of creation that may or may not possess our innate qualities towards
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empathy and compassion and kindness? Are we prepared to make a value system for them that is cohesive?
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What would that look like? As it is in our society, we have so devalued human life. We see constant
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overdoses all over the country. No one really cares about these people. We see the destruction of youth
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with the lies about gender, and they are being coming sterilized by doctors and a medical system that
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actually claims to be doing that based on compassion. We have euthanasia, where even in Canada, you have people
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arguing that perhaps poverty is a good enough reason to seek to end your life because it's just too difficult to
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survive when you are broke. So what does this mean? If we are not valuing ourselves, will we value some creation
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that we have made? Yeah, I'm just not sure. I think that it were these creatures to evolve into grow into
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um, human looking creations, human looking beings. I don't know that we have the capacity, um, to, I don't think we have
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Well, we already see, as you just listed, all of the ways that human beings are already trying to
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be God. We've already determined, we collectively, of course, you and I disagree with this, but the
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God of self for most people has replaced the God of scripture. That is actually why people believe that
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you can be self-defining, that you can take all forms of reproduction into your own hands, that you
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can rearrange the family, you can redefine sexuality or marriage or gender to your own liking, because this
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is all about what adults want or what people want. Um, autonomy and happiness and personal fulfillment
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are more important today in our society than anything else. Certainly you can put yourself
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in your wants before you can put the needs and the well-beings or before the needs and well-beings of
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other, uh, of other people. And so I think about this and this is going to sound maybe conspiratorial,
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but knowing what we know, I mean, it would have sounded conspiratorial a few years ago to say
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that something like a synthetic embryo could ever even come into existence. But if these are,
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if these are human-like creatures that are really just objects, they really are actually this time
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clumps of clumps of cells in a way, as you said, they don't have souls. They're not made in the image
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of God. And so they're going to be used. I mean, what would, what would stop the powers that be
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from multiplying as many of these synthetic non-human creatures as possible who maybe have
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the same physical capacity, uh, as everyone else? What's stopping them from multiplying and then
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military, uh, militarizing them for any purpose. They're going to be used for all sorts of objectification.
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They could be used for sexual gratification. They could be used for, uh, profit. If you're talking
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about different kinds of trafficking, sex trafficking, but they could also be used to
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carry out whatever purpose, whatever, uh, is the will of the people in charge. And again,
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this sounds crazy. This sounds like some far off dystopian novel, but this is what technology
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is. Technology can be very good, but it cannot, it can only answer the question of, can we,
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it can never answer the question of should we, and because we have too few people who will ask
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that question who don't even understand the concept of should or shouldn't anymore. Because again,
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if you don't believe in God, if you don't believe in a transcendent moral order, what is should or
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should we really the only question you have is can or can't we. Um, so that's what, that's what I worry
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about. Technology can be great, but the people that are developing it have to have a moral compass to be
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able to answer the question of should. And so, so far, what we've seen is that they don't.
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That's correct. Yeah, we do not, we do not see them having any real ethical concerns. Even if they
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think they have ethical concerns, they're moving ahead with these experiments. They've convinced
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themselves that the benefits far outweigh the negatives. And we see that too, with something like
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neural link, um, that at its, at its, um, you know, sort of foundation, the idea is that it would
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really help disabled people and it for sure would help disabled people, but there are so many, uh,
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negatives associated with it and what could be done and mind control and all of these things.
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And you talk about how it looks like a far off dystopian novel or a dystopian society, dystopian film.
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And we have covered this as a society, we have fully covered this. We've covered the militarization
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of manufactured beings in star Wars. It's a, in the clone Wars, right? We see what they, what they,
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the imagination comes up with in those cases. We've seen what happens. Uh, Ian Forster wrote,
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the machine stops in something like 1918 that covers what happens when we turn all of our, um,
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capability over to a machine to have a machine do things for us in that, in that short novel novella,
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you can look at it and you could replace some of the terms like machine with Siri or Alexa,
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and it would make perfect sense. You could replace view screen with laptop and it still makes perfect
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sense. Um, in that story, the machine comes up with, uh, uh, romantic matches for people. You could
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just call it, I don't know, Tinder or match or what have you. It still would make perfect sense if you
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just replaced the terminology that Forrester used with what we have today. Um, but the, the real
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concern too, is as we're talking about, we are in a relativist culture. Western culture is not only
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relativist, uh, has no understanding of should or shouldn't or ought or ought not as our philosophers,
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you know, have talked about. And instead we have this perspective that if the technology exists,
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it must be used. We must see it through. And I think that for a lot of people,
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this isn't going to have a deep impact on their lives because it's tech, the technology is expensive,
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it's distant. Um, but we've seen also that the kind of tech that we've used in the reproductive
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industry, which is what we really should be calling it has disseminated down. And a lot of it is now
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commonplace. And these things that start off as very distant do bleed into our understanding of what
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it means to be a human being, what it means to live in a society with one another. And it starts to
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affect our value system. And it's so important, I think, for people to understand what their values
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are, understand the difference between right and wrong, understand how to make good decisions and
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to constantly be examining your beliefs so that you understand what you believe and why, and what that
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means to you in terms of the value of life. A lot of this stuff that we're seeing, the reproductive
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technology that's coming by, the scientific developments where we could then, uh, potentially
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experiment on these beings. Let's say they do feel pain, et cetera. We're going to be running scientific
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experiments on them. I don't know if that is ethical either, but we really need to understand what we
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believe and why express that and understand it. So that let's say we do end up with a bunch of creatures,
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we're going to need to give them a value system and we're going to need to use our values and our
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morality in order to understand how to treat them ethically, because it could become a slave race.
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Totally. And, and, and you can see how this, you can see how this all makes sense from a materialist
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perspective that we are just all, we all developed from star, but a stardust. I almost said Starbucks.
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That'd be crazy. Well, stardust is just as crazy. It's just as wild of an assertion that, you know,
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the evolutionists claim that we all came from stardust. We are all clumps of cells, whether
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we're in the womb or out of the womb, we're just cosmic accidents. We're just balls of material
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and matter. Like we don't have any intrinsic value. We don't have souls. There's no God that created us
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that tells us who we are and gave us a purpose. And so from that perspective, you could understand
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both how someone would justify creating these synthetic human beings because they would justify
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it, how we justify all kinds of technology. Well, it can make one person happy. Think about how it
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could help infertile couples. Think about how, how great it could be if maybe these synthetic human
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beings were used as victims of crimes instead of real human beings. Again, like that, that's a,
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that's a problem. That's a problem there that doesn't actually solve the issue because if you're
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failing to distinguish between a synthetic human being and a real human being, because you don't
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actually believe that we have souls or that we have intrinsic value, that's not going to stop the
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abuse of real human beings. It's just going to justify it further because again, the lines are
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just blurred. If these people are objects, why aren't we objects too? And so it's so crazy how our
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disagreements today, it seems like, oh, our disagreements today are so much more complicated
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than they used to be. They're so much more complex than they used to be. We used to have just,
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we used to have more, you know, more simple disagreements, but really that's not true.
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Our disagreements today are much simpler and much more fundamental and much more black and white
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than they were say 20 years ago. We are disagreeing on the most fundamental existential things today
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that yes, we used to all share a common view of them. But today we're asking the basic questions
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that our parents did not feel like they had to teach us because they were so obvious. What is male?
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What is female? Do gametes matter? Does your sex actually matter? Can you self-define? And now we're
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even going even more fundamental than that, that what is a human? What is existence? Like what is a
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body? Like what does it mean to have sentience? What does it mean to have a consciousness? Why do any of
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these things matter? Which is why I'd say like to me, all these battles actually go back to Genesis one
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and why ultimately, ultimately it is a theological conversation that we're having. Who do you think
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is in charge? Is it us or is it at the very least a higher power? So it's, it's like, it's big,
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deep stuff that we are battling here. Yeah, I agree with you. It is big, deep stuff. And this is the
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stuff that not only have our theologians been asking since, you know, Genesis one, since, you know,
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the dawn of time really, but our philosophers have been asking these questions as well. And we had
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the entire philosophical deconstructionist movement that sought to unravel the building blocks of
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reality. And that has now been done on a very wide scale. We ask what a woman is, we ask what a human
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being is. These are things that philosophers would, you know, consider and then get made fun of on Monty
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Python for having done so. But we have essentially deconstructed the building blocks of our reality.
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And now we don't know how to put them back together. Sometimes I think that we spent the 20th century
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building our own Tower of Babel. We hit the, you know, late 90s, we ended up with this pinnacle of
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civilization where we seem to understand everything. We had a colorblind society, there was shockingly
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little racism. There was an incredible amount of equality between the sexes. Women could make
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choices about staying home or going to work. Both of those things were understood as valuable.
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And then we hit the 21st century and the whole thing came crashing down around us. And now we're
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running off speaking different languages. We don't know how to communicate and we don't have a shared
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value system anymore. We don't have a shared culture. When you talk to your friends about what shows
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they're watching, half the time, I don't even have the same subscription. I don't even know where to
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find those shows. I've never heard of it before. You know, and so, so who are we if we are not
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cohesive and we cannot define ourselves, our existence or our culture? These are sort of
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terrifying questions. And I think that it's good that you're asking them and really digging into it.
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But I don't know that, you know, the thing that the thing that I find the most terrifying,
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honestly, is looking at my son and his friends and seeing what they're really up against.
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They're going to have to figure all of this stuff out and try and understand their own intrinsic value.
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And to a certain extent, they're going to have to decide that they have value. They're going to have
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to decide that life has meaning. They're going to have to just make it up. Even with religion,
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you know, the kids are learning religion. My son is, but he has doubts and the kids all have doubts
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and they look around and it's very hard to just assume that life has meaning and value when you see
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how wretchedly we treat each other and how little, you know, how little faith we have in humanity itself
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to the point where we're creating things to replace us, creating creatures. What is that even,
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what could that even be? Yeah, I think that we really do need to need to consider it. I don't know
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how though, like Ali, how would you recommend that society come together and actually address
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questions in a cohesive way? I don't think that there is a conversation that can be had about ethics
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until honestly, I know that maybe it seems like I'm simplifying this too much, but I really,
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because I like explaining things in the most simple terms possible. And I like thinking about
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things in the simplest terms possible so that I can understand and then, and then, um, you know,
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really grasp them and try to teach them to someone else. So that, that brings me to always go back.
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Like sometimes I'll have a thought and I'll think, how did, why am I thinking about that? And then I'll
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have to trace it back to, oh yeah, that one thing happened or it goes back to that or whatever it is.
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And as I'm having these conversations, I'm like, okay, how did we get here? Okay. We redefined male
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and female. We redefined marriage. We redefined like what it means to be whatever it is. It all goes back
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to some kind of redefining and postmodernism. And then it brings me all the way back to the garden
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where Eve was asked, okay, but did God really say, did God really say, and immediately she exchanged
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the God that she knew for the God of self. She decided, I want to be like God. And so I'm not sure
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that any like ethical conversation that we have about what human beings are, like what defines our value
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you can be had without at least an acknowledgement that we are not the highest power
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and authority. Even if we don't agree on the canon of scripture, even if we don't agree on all the
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different theological points about creation or about scripture in general, the biblical narrative
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of redemption in Christ, which of course I think is central. But if we cannot at least agree that there
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is a transcendent power. There is a universal moral order. There is an objective reality and morality.
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Maybe we disagree on some of these things, but there is a standard and a standard bearer.
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If we cannot agree on that, then we can't agree on anything else because what is right and wrong?
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What is meaning? What is transcendence? What is innate human value? What is innate anything?
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Innate means that it was implanted in you, not just that it was passed down by evolution,
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because that's so malleable. So yeah, like if we can't agree on that fundamental thing that we were
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created, um, then honestly, I don't see how we can come together because every time I do ask an
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atheist who there are a lot of atheists that I agree with, but when I ask, but why, why do you believe
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that? Where does that come from? I have never, ever gotten a good answer. The most that I've gotten is
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because, because it is, or because it's obvious. Um, so yeah, that, that, I mean, that's my answer
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to that. It's not an easy answer, uh, because I don't know how we get there, but if you think that
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you're the highest form of authority, which we know that at least everyone at the world economic
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forum does, they sure do. Yeah. Then like, I, I don't even know how we proceed.
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Yeah. It's interesting. You mentioned atheists because I asked this question of atheists as well,
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and it's sort of like their entire, because is the Judeo-Christian worldview and they think they
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can just pull the bottom out and that it will still, it will still stand. And it, it doesn't
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actually stand without that. Okay. Um, we can talk about just this story, just the subject the
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whole time, but I want to get your reaction to this TikTok video that's going around, um, this
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girl, she's doing her makeup and I won't explain that. I'll just allow her to explain this very
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interesting situation that she's in as an IVF baby who still has siblings that are on ice.
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I am an IVF baby. And so is my sister. My sister is three years younger than me,
00:27:06.160
but technically we were from the same batch. If you will, my parents actually still have some
00:27:13.180
embryos from the exact same batch frozen because they wanted two kids. The first two times were
00:27:17.860
successful, but the doctor had extracted, I don't know how many, so I don't know how many embryos are
00:27:22.820
left, but there are some of my twins per se still sitting in a lab alive and frozen. Tell me why
00:27:30.900
it has always been my desire ever since I knew that to, you know, grow up, get married, didn't plan on
00:27:38.440
getting divorced, but get married again, maybe eventually and have my kids with my partner,
00:27:42.940
but eventually also go through the implant process myself and give birth to one of my twin embryos.
00:27:54.400
I just would want to know, especially if it was a boy, what a little boy sibling of me was like,
00:28:01.480
and to bring that baby into the world. And I'm just so curious.
00:28:10.540
She doesn't know why she was born. She was chosen by a scientist to be born. Totally random. No reason
00:28:19.840
to believe that there was any sort of higher power involved, even in her conception, perhaps in the
00:28:25.520
building blocks that she came from, the sperm and the egg, but certainly her conception was at the whim
00:28:31.300
of her parents and the scientists that created her. I think that that must be a really weird place
00:28:38.860
to be. It obviously is. She's, uh, she's concerned about the, the siblings that were never born, that will
00:28:45.140
never see life outside of a Petri dish. And, uh, I think I want, I wonder if she has a little bit of
00:28:54.100
Yeah. It's crazy to think, I mean, she acknowledges they are alive. They are alive. They are my siblings.
00:29:01.300
They are my twins, she says, and they are there, but she seems to also have no thought as to how
00:29:09.120
this would affect her brother. And, or if she, you know, if she implanted this little human being
00:29:15.980
and to say, well, I'm kind of your mom because you were implanted into me and I, who's going to
00:29:23.340
take care of that? Is she planning on taking care of her little brother? But you are also,
00:29:27.180
you're actually my sibling. Now, all of us have this intrinsic longing to know from where we come,
00:29:36.680
like, who do we get our traits from? What is our purpose? I think there is something that affects us
00:29:42.160
about how we were conceived, like how that process went down. If we were wanted, you know, were we made
00:29:49.860
in love between our mother and father? Like all of those things do actually form us and cause us to
00:29:57.080
think about ourselves in different ways. And so she's not even thinking how this works out ethically
00:30:03.720
or how this would impact her little brother who may very well want to be raised by his parents.
00:30:10.420
He might long for a mother and father. Would she have the same bond towards her sibling
00:30:16.060
that she would towards a child that she knows came from her and is actually her child? Like we think
00:30:24.600
that all of that humans are just endlessly malleable, that we're just products of nurture,
00:30:30.220
that we have no nature, we have no innate needs, that we can just be produced and gestated and birthed
00:30:39.640
and raised however adults want us to be processed and raised, and that it has no impact on us
00:30:46.200
whatsoever. That's just not true. It's crazy just how much we prioritize our own wants, even our own
00:30:53.980
curiosity. She's just curious. She just wants to know what her brother's going to look like.
00:30:58.300
Yeah. We just prioritize our own curiosities and our own fleeting wants over someone else's
00:31:03.920
long-term well-being. Yeah, that's weird. And it's also weird that she would have this desire
00:31:10.440
to further her parents' reproductive material in addition to her own. That seems kind of weird to
00:31:18.240
me. So weird. But I do think that, yeah, yeah, it's very weird. I wouldn't want that. But at the same
00:31:24.620
time, is IVF essentially manufacturing abortions? Is that what we're doing when we engage in this
00:31:32.980
practice? Because that is pretty disturbing. It is disturbing how many of these embryos are sitting
00:31:39.980
in labs. What can you do with them? You can't throw it away. You can't necessarily keep it there forever.
00:31:46.000
They're not all going to be implanted. It's a very confusing conundrum. Yeah. And I think, you know,
00:31:53.420
she's feeling that, this woman in this video, imagining her siblings all sitting on shelves and how
00:31:59.400
any of them could have been born instead of her. It was pretty random, I guess, that she was even
00:32:05.900
born at all. Who knows how many there are? And there are these from countless IVF. I mean, we all know
00:32:11.900
people who had their children through this method. I think it would be really disturbing. But we do
00:32:19.880
always want to know where we came from. And we want to know who our parents were. That would be disturbing
00:32:25.500
for a child who was born to his sister more than 30 years after he was conceived.
00:32:32.500
Right. And what would that person be like? Would they have the capability? If you take an embryo from
00:32:37.900
at this point, I think you could probably go back 50 years, right? Could you? Maybe 30,
00:32:44.000
maybe 35 years, depending on how long this goes on. Right. But would a human being that was conceived
00:32:49.580
in the middle of the, or in the late part of the last century, have the tools to survive? Are we
00:32:56.800
evolving in ways that we are not even aware of? Would it make sense to plop a person who was conceived in
00:33:03.460
1985 into, you know, 2038 or what have you? Right. There are so many questions. And look there,
00:33:12.960
I mean, there are just questions about IVF in general, not just this particular very bizarre case,
00:33:18.700
but again, anytime technology takes us from what's natural to what's possible, we have the obligation
00:33:26.400
to ask, is this moral? Is this ethical? Sometimes it totally is. Sometimes the technology takes us from
00:33:31.980
what's natural to what's possible. We can fly. It's totally moral to fly. That's great. You know,
00:33:37.340
it can access in a variety of ways, but not always. Again, it goes from can to should. And you mentioned
00:33:45.160
like, why was this particular embryo picked? I'm sure that a lot of IVF babies sometimes ask that
00:33:50.200
question, but the fact is sometimes they're, I mean, not even sometimes, I would say very often,
00:33:55.280
I heard this with Paris Hilton recently, there's a eugenics process here. There's a TikTok that I saw
00:34:01.080
circulating of people who did IVF specifically, a couple who did IVF specifically for the purpose of
00:34:07.340
being able to analyze each embryo. They knew, I guess, about all the different characteristics
00:34:12.980
that embryos may have to determine, well, of course, whether they want a boy or a girl. That's
00:34:17.940
very common, very common for couples who use IVF to say, oh yeah, throw away the girls, throw away
00:34:24.540
the boys, or we want a boy and a girl. You can throw away all the extraneous ones. But this couple
00:34:29.840
wanted to see all the different characteristics that their embryo had according to their DNA, and they
00:34:34.960
would be choosing the embryos based on that. So of course, they're not going to pick the one that may
00:34:39.440
have Down syndrome. Of course, they're not going to pick the weaker one. Maybe they're not going to pick
00:34:43.260
the one that has brown eyes, whatever it is. There is a eugenics process that is very common, not in every
00:34:50.440
IVF case, of course. Some people implant, you know, all the embryos that they have, although that's
00:34:55.700
extremely rare. But very often there is. There was a same-sex couple, this was reported last year, a year
00:35:01.400
ago, that is still, I think they're still suing a fertilization clinic in Pasadena because they
00:35:09.080
wanted a boy. And it turns out... And they got a girl, right? Yes, the female embryo was implanted.
00:35:14.860
Well, they're so livid that they were going to have to raise a female that they are actually
00:35:19.660
suing this fertility clinic. I see this, I'm sorry, but with a lot of same-sex couples who are like,
00:35:25.940
no, we want to raise a boy or we want to raise a girl. There's so many questions that, again,
00:35:34.000
go unanswered when it comes to IVF because the only thing that we're told is important
00:35:38.080
is adults' happiness. Yeah, it's this whole thing about your desire is more important than anything
00:35:45.660
else. And we have seen this repeatedly throughout our recent past, the spate of divorces, right?
00:35:53.360
There were so many divorces in the 70s, or at least there were in my family. And I think about this
00:35:58.040
because both of my grandparents, sets of grandparents got divorced before I was born or
00:36:04.240
right around that same time in the mid-70s. And the idea was that my grandfathers, who I loved very
00:36:11.960
much, you know, but they believed that their own desire to go off and be with someone else was more
00:36:18.080
important than maintaining their families and staying with the woman that they married and who
00:36:23.640
had, you know, conceived and bore all of their children. So this is not a new thing, this idea that our
00:36:30.220
own personal desire is more important than anything else and is paramount. And it is not paramount. Our own
00:36:38.060
personal desire is not as important at all. And in fact, happiness and joy are totally different
00:36:44.080
things as well. You see, you know, people talk about how they wish they hadn't had children because it
00:36:49.660
ruins their happiness and they completely discount the joy that they get from that. And there's also
00:36:55.080
as a, as a parent, there is the joy and amazement at the unexpected in your child, at having expectations
00:37:03.480
for your child that are about the content of their character and not their career achievements or any of
00:37:10.340
the other things. I know when I look at my son and some of the things that he comes out with, and I
00:37:15.980
am absolutely amazed. I could not conceive of the damage that I would do as a parent, deciding that
00:37:23.200
I know what's going to be best for this individual, or even knowing, you know, deciding that I know what's
00:37:30.460
best to bring into the world at a certain time. We don't know that, right? I mean, I really like the idea
00:37:37.400
and I, I love the idea that God gives us the children that are for us, that God gives us the parents that
00:37:43.960
are for us. My son, when he was, you know, three years old or something like that, told me that he picked
00:37:49.500
me and his dad before he was born. And I was like, okay, well, I appreciate it very much. You know, thank you
00:37:55.860
for doing that. But parents don't know, they, they don't know what they need. They don't know what the world
00:38:02.140
needs. They don't know what their children need before they are born. You have to accept your child and
00:38:08.700
grow with them and guide them into adulthood. I think that's really important, giving them the tools that
00:38:15.020
they need, and not assuming that your expectations are what's paramount for them. Right. It's really
00:38:21.380
disturbing, I think, that whole concept. You know, I, we think about this, even going back to, you know, I'm sure we
00:38:28.380
all thought about China's one child policy and the abortions that have resulted from that. It's really
00:38:33.400
devastating to think that as a parent, you know best the genetic makeup of your child, not just what
00:38:40.760
they should have for dinner and what they should study in school, which makes sense, but their genetic
00:38:45.600
makeup, I really think we should leave that to, you know, to a, to a higher power, to God, to decide.
00:38:58.380
Yeah, absolutely. There's, gosh, there's so many questions. There's so many questions that come
00:39:11.240
with this. And I always get this, I always get this question and I just want to, I just want to
00:39:15.640
distinguish it. People ask me, well, what's the difference between using, you know, a surrogate
00:39:20.720
in which you buy the eggs from one woman, typically, unless you're using your own eggs, you buy the eggs
00:39:25.040
from one woman, you rent the womb of another woman, you're using two women's bodies too, and then IVF.
00:39:30.980
And so you're typically choosing the embryos and then you're creating this child. What's the
00:39:35.120
difference in that? What's the difference in IVF and adoption? And I say, well, adoption, of course,
00:39:42.660
the ideal, the ideal is like, especially for looking at scripture is for a child to live with their
00:39:49.060
biological mother and father who are married. But we understand we don't live in an ideal world.
00:39:54.460
We live in a broken world. We live in an imperfect world. And so sometimes that doesn't happen.
00:39:59.100
Sometimes the dad leaves. Sometimes the parents are just incapable. They're mentally, physically,
00:40:04.280
financially, completely incapable of raising a child. Sometimes the parents die. And so sometimes
00:40:09.920
that child is already created and a broken situation happens in which we need redemption. We need
00:40:16.760
healing. And so the next best thing is for that child to be adopted. Adoption redeems in all
00:40:23.840
ready, created child, an already broken situation and heals it and makes it better through adoption.
00:40:32.740
Whereas creating a child to purposely take them away, especially if you're talking about two moms or
00:40:38.720
two dads trying to create a child artificially, you are creating a broken situation. You're creating
00:40:46.000
fatherlessness. You're creating motherlessness. You're creating, in some cases, a eugenic situation.
00:40:52.240
It's not a situation that already existed and then you redeemed it. You created the brokenness
00:40:57.220
because you wanted to. Yes. Because it was your desire. It was your happiness that was paramount.
00:41:02.040
And that's all that really mattered. That is the difference.
00:41:06.320
Yeah, that's a huge difference. I totally agree with you.
00:41:09.440
I saw this other story from the Daily Mail on Twitter that said like the number of single mothers who
00:41:14.960
are using a sperm donor and I hate that term sperm donor egg donor because they're selling it. Sperm
00:41:20.700
seller. They're using a sperm seller or maybe sometimes they're using a friend. Who knows?
00:41:25.660
And they're creating these embryos and they're freezing them and then they're implanting them
00:41:30.840
with the expectation of being a single mom. Again, because who knows why? Maybe they didn't find the
00:41:37.040
person that they wanted to marry or maybe they just put off having kids, you know, for their career.
00:41:41.920
And then they're expecting to be able to raise these fatherless kids. Again, I think that's entirely
00:41:48.940
selfish. Don't just because you have the desire to be a mom doesn't mean that that's the best case
00:41:54.860
scenario for this helpless, vulnerable human being that you're created, who I believe actually needs
00:42:00.540
a mother and a father. Yeah, this is an interesting question, too. This is something that I explored when
00:42:07.100
I was writing plays and making theater. I was commissioned to do a play at the Williamstown
00:42:12.900
Theater Festival. This was I don't know. I don't even know when it was. It was a good while ago.
00:42:18.400
Yeah. But I was working with a director, a woman who was older than me, was not married, was not in a
00:42:24.260
relationship, wanted to be a mother and was sort of tormented with this idea. Should she engage,
00:42:31.300
you know, purchase sperm and undergo that process or should she adopt or should she do nothing? And
00:42:39.080
this was really weighing heavily on her mind. So the play we discussed and decided to make was about
00:42:44.620
this idea of single motherhood by choice. And so we started exploring it. I started digging into it
00:42:51.000
and I discovered that there were cases where one sperm donor or sperm seller, as you call it,
00:42:58.140
had, you know, essentially sired dozens and dozens and dozens of children and that some of these kids
00:43:08.300
had found themselves, found each other on ancestry sites and come together and realized that they were
00:43:13.800
all from the same sperm donor. And for me, this play and these questions started raising real issues
00:43:21.320
about what does it mean to be a parent? This is before I had a child. What does what is the meaning
00:43:26.900
of life? What is humanity? Do we have responsibility for our own reproductive material? And I came to the
00:43:32.960
conclusion that, yes, yes, we have responsibility for our own reproductive material. That is important.
00:43:38.500
That is an important part of being a human being. And when we got into the first reading for this play,
00:43:43.420
the producer at Williamstown, Roger Rees, the the actor who has since passed. But he he said,
00:43:51.800
why are you writing about the meaning of life? We don't want that. We want something fun.
00:43:55.900
Why are you doing this? I was like, well, if you can engage the wrong writer. Right, right, right.
00:44:02.400
But it's interesting how that led you that led you down an interesting path, though, to think about
00:44:07.600
things you hadn't before. Yeah, it sure it sure did. And I wonder about the
00:44:13.000
you know, the men who put out their sperm all over the place. Are they, you know, happy about it? I
00:44:18.960
actually a friend of mine, I was talking to recently, had sold his sperm at a sperm bag. And he met a few
00:44:26.740
of the children that were fathered from that. And he was, he was happy. So for your weird man,
00:44:34.780
I mean, it's child, it's child abandonment. It is because I mean, it's not the same as just releasing
00:44:41.580
your sperm when you're releasing the sperm to with the purpose of creating a human being that you have
00:44:48.080
no intention of raising yourself. And it's the same way selling eggs. It's also so crazy to think about
00:44:55.080
like, okay, so you basically have to go through these very invasive fertility treatments. If you're
00:45:00.240
a woman who's selling your eggs, because they can't just take your eggs out, you have to, you know,
00:45:04.800
take all these hormones and things like that, which are very risky. A guy looks at a magazine and does
00:45:10.560
his thing. And I mean, like that. Yeah. And so I could see why there is an incentive to get paid,
00:45:18.060
you know, by, you know, a guy abandoning his children. It's it is crazy that we're creating
00:45:24.200
this epidemic of motherlessness and mother abandonment. Yeah. And I think that's weird as
00:45:32.280
a woman, I would find that very bizarre to imagine that there were children created with my genetic
00:45:37.760
material that I had absolutely no awareness of. There was a surrogate mom in the UK, I believe,
00:45:45.640
I believe it was the UK, who had gone through IVF. She didn't know who the purchaser or body renter or
00:45:55.580
what have you the client was. She didn't know who that person was, which was part of it was she wasn't
00:46:00.600
supposed to know. It turned out that I think three of the embryos took in her womb and began to gestate.
00:46:09.560
The customer did not want them all. He only wanted one and encouraged abortion, which she would not go
00:46:18.100
along with. I believe that is entirely unethical. I'm not sure if it's legal or not to make a surrogate
00:46:24.540
undergo abortion, but she would not do it. After the children were born, she figured out she found out
00:46:31.280
who the customer was, was a single man who lived with his parents. Why is a single man who lives with
00:46:38.540
his parents getting access to this kind of thing, being allowed to purchase children? And she had
00:46:46.160
absolutely no say in it. The woman who carried the children and had to let them all go. She was
00:46:53.040
tormented by this. Yes. I mean, absolutely no idea. I've heard Jennifer Law, she's talked about this,
00:46:59.360
how this is a stipulation in many surrogate contracts that says if we want you to terminate for whatever
00:47:07.940
reason, we change our mind, we separate, we get a divorce. Oh, it's a girl. We didn't want a girl.
00:47:14.040
Oh, it's twins. We didn't want twins. That in some of these cases, these surrogates are contractually
00:47:20.660
obligated. I do think it is legal, at least in some states. They're contractually obligated to go
00:47:26.480
through with the abortion, which is interesting because the same people who say my body, my choice
00:47:33.740
are typically like the biggest surrogacy advocates. So it's no longer your body,
00:47:39.440
your choice. If you sign a dotted line and are gestating, you know, a couple's baby, then because
00:47:46.620
you signed a contract, your bodily autonomy doesn't, doesn't matter. You have to abort this
00:47:52.520
child, go through with the abortion yourself. I mean, I think that there's, this probably happened
00:47:57.400
a lot more than we realize. Yeah, I think that you're right. It's interesting to, to me that while
00:48:05.300
the Supreme Court was weighing the Dobbs decision, you had so many progressive women activists going
00:48:11.960
out to the court wearing the, you know, handmaid's costume from the, the handmaid's tale that was
00:48:19.940
created from the Margaret Atwood novel. And they were, you know, they talk about laws against abortion
00:48:25.520
as forced pregnancy laws. Meanwhile, it is primarily the progressive left that are pushing
00:48:31.520
women into surrogacy that are pushing for the legalization of commercial surrogacy, you know,
00:48:38.280
in the country that are okay with the global sales and trafficking of pregnant women and babies.
00:48:48.300
And I think that that's really disturbing. The, the progressive left are not the ones who should
00:48:53.340
be wearing the handmaid's costume. It instead should be, you know, um, lower middle-class women
00:49:00.120
across the U S who are, who are wearing these handmaid's costumes because they're the ones who
00:49:05.560
are carrying the children for the Kardashians and the Hiltons and whoever else decides that,
00:49:10.800
uh, their body is just too good to carry children.
00:49:14.420
Let's look at this. Uh, let's look at this. I think it's a Tik TOK. It's a video that I saw
00:49:31.880
circulating. I've seen multiple videos like this. It's a maternity, uh, surrogate photo shoot. So
00:49:39.520
these are for those listening, this is, these are so disturbing. These are two men who have again,
00:49:45.740
bought eggs from one woman, rented the womb of another woman. And gosh, they're just so loving
00:49:51.420
and amazing that they allow, that they allowed the gestator of their child to be included
00:49:56.300
in the maternity shoot. So if this is not the handmaid's tale, I don't know what is. Here's that
00:50:02.260
video. Disgusting and disturbing in so many ways. What are your thoughts?
00:50:18.100
There's no one there for that woman. She's pregnant. She's alone. These men are far more
00:50:22.960
interested in each other than they are in her or the child that she's carrying. And I think as they
00:50:28.500
make this shoot, so we'll go their family. So we'll go their relationship with this child who is
00:50:34.720
clearly secondary, clearly an afterthought, clearly just part of the photo shoot, but not really
00:50:41.500
involved with them. They don't look at her. They touch her stomach. They don't have her involved.
00:50:47.200
She's always on the outside. And I think that that's just so devastating. How would that,
00:50:52.160
I would feel terrible in that situation. And also these men are manufacturing a motherless child.
00:50:58.500
Yeah. And the child will never know who their mother is, whether, and probably it's not this
00:51:04.700
woman either. It's some other woman. There was an episode of Radiolab. I don't know if you know this
00:51:09.960
show. It's an NPR show that was around far before podcasts, but they had an episode years ago that I
00:51:17.600
think was called Cheap White Eggs. And it was about the global trade in reproductive material that is then
00:51:26.620
used to fulfill the desires of adults who want to create children. And there was a case, there was a
00:51:36.060
couple from Israel, a gay couple from Israel where surrogacy is not illegal, not legal rather. They had
00:51:42.220
purchased eggs from Estonia, which is the home of Cheap White Eggs because there are white women there
00:51:50.220
selling their eggs for cheap. So that was part of it. They purchased the eggs from Estonia. They use
00:51:56.240
their own sperm. They hired, I believe, an Indian woman who then went to a surrogacy clinic in Nepal
00:52:06.160
because it's not legal for Indian women in India to be surrogates. And in Nepal, women aren't allowed to
00:52:12.680
be surrogates, but surrogacy is legal. So immigrant women were going to Nepal. I think I'm getting this
00:52:18.780
right. It's an old, but immigrant women were going from India to Nepal to be in surrogacy clinics and
00:52:25.120
carry the concoctions of gay couples from all over the world. Uh, in Nepal, there was at the time of
00:52:33.420
the birth, there was an earthquake. Everything went to ruins. The records were trashed. These men showed
00:52:40.080
up in Nepal to collect their children and no one could figure out whose children they were. There was
00:52:45.880
a situation. I think it was in, it was in the Midwest U S it was a French couple had come to the U S
00:52:52.280
in France. Surrogacy, not legal. French couple had come to the U S to buy the child. And the woman who
00:52:58.840
was the surrogate had to sign over the child legally to the French couple. And this process totally
00:53:07.220
triggered her and made her really freaked out that she was giving away her baby that she had carried.
00:53:13.260
Um, yeah, I think that it's, I think it's really disturbing. Yes. And we saw this with Ukraine
00:53:19.660
and reproductive material. Yes. We saw this with Ukraine that all these babies that these surrogates
00:53:24.100
birthed because they had been their rented or their wombs had been rented by typically like American and
00:53:30.100
other European couples, because again, surrogacy is not legal in a lot of places. It's, and that's
00:53:38.560
why also the surrogates in these very poor countries who are desperate, they're cheaper than
00:53:43.380
surrogates here. I mean, this is human trafficking. It's human trafficking. Just like prostitution is
00:53:48.140
technically consensual. Typically the women who are caught up in prostitution, they're desperate,
00:53:54.120
they're exploited, they're being coerced in some way. Um, so we saw that there. And also just like
00:54:00.960
with the whole argument, cause this is what I hear. Well, it's consensual. These women are choosing
00:54:04.760
to do it. It's empowering for them. First of all, I reject the idea of consent only based morality
00:54:11.740
that consent is only determinant of something being right or wrong. Look, if sure, if Cardi B consents
00:54:19.500
to objectifying herself on stage, she is choosing to do that. It's still, I believe it's still wrong
00:54:26.680
to objectify yourself, whether it's self-objectification or someone else objectifying
00:54:31.440
you, it's still wrong. We can have standards of morality that go beyond again, what someone
00:54:36.220
wants to do. Again, it goes back to the God of self versus a higher power versus the God of scripture.
00:54:44.060
Um, but I wanted to go back really quickly cause we do have to wrap it up. We're not going to have
00:54:47.380
time to talk about the transgender prisoner, at least not today, our so-called transgender, but,
00:54:52.420
um, uh, something that you said about the couple that we saw on the photo shoot is that they're
00:54:57.820
purposely creating a motherless child. I think about this all the time. People I know who were
00:55:03.220
like, Oh, yay. This couple is, you know, they're, they're creating these two children. I'm like,
00:55:09.380
but they don't like as a mom, myself, you're a mom. I know how irreplaceable I am in my kid's life,
00:55:15.680
not just because of my specific personality or specific skills, but simply because I'm a mom,
00:55:21.700
my kids go to their dad and their mom for different things. And I saw this quote by Lance Bass the
00:55:26.760
other day, you know, he's, he's gay, the guy from NSYNC. And he said, so he confessed something
00:55:31.880
that I thought was so tragic. He said, you know, I was so sad for the first year of their life because
00:55:36.640
they wouldn't cuddle with me. He said, and, uh, he said that they, they didn't want to snuggle.
00:55:42.160
They didn't want to be loving, but he said, when my mom would come over, they would immediately
00:55:47.200
just lay on, lay on her chest and just wanted to be cuddled by her. I'm like, yes, because they want
00:55:54.140
their mom. They want a mom. And you tore these kids, not just away from their own mom, but any
00:56:00.720
opportunity for a mom. Kids need their mom for healthy development. And again, just because
00:56:07.420
adults say, well, it doesn't matter. I want it. And it's homophobic to say otherwise. You know,
00:56:13.340
we're, we are taking away in a lot of cases, the healthy development of kids for the sake on the altar
00:56:20.940
of human desire, adult desire, fulfillment, which is really not as important, which is something
00:56:28.960
that you don't necessarily realize until you do become a parent is that what you want, what your
00:56:35.240
personal desires are, you know, are really not, they're really, they don't just pale in comparison
00:56:41.820
to the needs of your child, but they are practically irrelevant. They don't matter even nearly half as much
00:56:48.460
as what you're, what your kids need. You're responsible for these people and you're responsible
00:56:53.620
to the world to raise children who are kind and considerate and understand that life matters. And if
00:57:01.920
you don't do that, then we have a world full of crazy people. And that's the problem with
00:57:06.200
manufacturing orphans as they're doing with these synthetic embryos or manufacturing orphans as they
00:57:13.300
would do if they started breaking that 14 day rule or manufacturing orphans through birthing pods
00:57:20.260
or things like this or surrogates. Uh, it's cruel to women. It's cruel to children. It's, it's, um,
00:57:28.020
you know, anathema to what I think is essential and good about humanity. Um, but without any moral
00:57:36.220
cohesion, as we were talking about before, yeah, people are just going to do these crazy things and we're
00:57:42.640
going to really suffer the result of this fall. It's going to be far greater than being kicked out
00:57:48.360
of Eden. Um, I think. Yeah. Wow. Gosh, there's so, there's so much we'll have to have you back on
00:57:55.220
soon. Cause there's so many other topics like this, but as always, I found this to be a very
00:57:59.600
fascinating conversation. I hope the audience does too. Um, remind people where they can find you
00:58:04.380
cause you're writing about this stuff and talking about this stuff all over the place. So if they want
00:58:08.440
to read that, listen to that, where should they go? You can find more about these topics at the
00:58:13.900
postmillennial.com. We also are running a lot of stories at humanevents.com about issues like this
00:58:20.800
and from moms who really care. You could also subscribe to the postmillennial on Twitter at
00:58:26.040
T postmillennial and see more of what we're cooking up over there. And you can find me at Libby
00:58:32.140
Emmons on Twitter. Thank you so much, Libby. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on.