Paris Hilton is not alone. According to The New York Times, the wealthy elite appear to be using IVF to have children simply because they feel they are too busy to try to conceive naturally and they have “reproductive goals” they want to achieve. Those “goals” are unfortunately often eugenic.
In 2021, socialite Paris Hilton said she was ready to start a family and was going straight to IVF to get the exact babies she wanted. “Well, we have been doing the IVF so I can pick twins if I like,” she told The Trend Reporter. She said most women should freeze their eggs and pick what they want – boys or girls. And she boasted about having 20 male embryos frozen while she tried for girls. She now has two born children — one boy and one girl, both born via surrogacy. Her statements exemplify the commodification that is an inescapable component of IVF.
Favoring IVF over sex
While only about two percent of infants born in the U.S. each year are conceived using IVF, the adults who are choosing to create their children in a lab “tend to be wealthy,” said the Times. The average cost of a single round of IVF is about $23,000. Dr. Alan Copperman, the chief executive of RMA of New York, a fertility clinic, says he is seeing more couples skip sex in favor of IVF.
Copperman told the Times that the couples he sees may not “have the time to try naturally.” Dr. Denis Vaughan, a reproductive endocrinologist at Boston I.V.F., said that logistics play a part as well. “I’ve had a lot of patients who are working in consulting or have a business, and they travel a lot for work. They might tell me they’ve been trying for six months, but they’ve really only been together at the right time for two or three months of that time.”
With no time to have sex, they decide to delegate their babymaking to fertility businesses.
Eugenic plans
Copperman also told the Times that some couples choose IVF over sex because they “want to use technology to achieve their reproductive goals.” Those goals include using IVF to screen their children for genetic mutations and weed out the ones who may carry any ‘genetic imperfections.’ Others use IVF so they can have control over whether they have a boy or a girl. Both reasons are based on eugenic principles and signify a growing trend towards a Gattaca-like world.
Faith Hartley and her husband Neil Robertson had a baby girl naturally and then decided to use IVF to guarantee that their next baby was also a girl. “We really wanted a second girl,” Hartley told the Times. They paid out of pocket for the IVF process and Hartley said it was difficult on her physically. The injections were “brutal” and there were days she couldn’t get out of bed. She said the hormones she had to take had a negative effect on her mental health, but she felt it was all worth it to get another girl.
“To get the sister thing for my girls, I would have done anything,” she said. She noted that it is “not unusual” in her social circle for people to use IVF to choose a boy over a girl or vice versa. “I have multiple friends who have done it and are looking into doing it,” she said.
Serious risks of IVF
However, there are serious risks associated with IVF that are being ignored so that the elite can get what they want in a child. The Mayo Clinic lists a host of risks for women that include complications such as bleeding, infection, and damage to the bowel, bladder, or blood vessels from the egg retrieval process. There’s also ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome which causes swollen and painful ovaries and risks to a woman’s mental health.
In addition, there are numerous health risks for the children conceived through IVF. These risks include low birth weight, premature birth, hospital admission, perinatal mortality, cerebral palsy, and “significantly” increased risk of birth defects compared to children conceived naturally. They are also at risk for high blood pressure, and girls conceived through IVF can have advanced bone age and hormonal imbalances during puberty. Children are also at an increased risk of childhood illnesses including cardiovascular problems, early-onset acute lymphoblastic leukemia, an increased risk of cancer in general, epigenetic disorders, cognitive impairment, and possible infertility of their own.
Beyond the physical risks, IVF can put an emotional toll on children as well, including a higher risk of depression. According to Oxford University, there is a “potential increase in the prevalence of early adulthood clinical depression and binge drinking in the offspring of IVF…” Some children conceived using artificial reproductive technology face high expectations that their parents may have for the child they spent so much money on creating — a child they chose over other embryos. What happens, for example, if Hartley’s girls don’t have the close ‘sisterly bond’ she envisions and expects?
Claire, who was conceived through IVF, explained that she always knew her parents loved her and wanted her, but that learning about her conception caused her emotional pain. She said:
Somehow, somewhere, my parents developed the idea that they deserved to have a baby, and it didn’t matter how much it cost, how many times it took, or how many died in the process. They deserved a child. And with an attitude like that, by the time I was born they thought they deserved to have the perfect child… as Dad defined a perfect child. And since they deserved a child, I was their property to be controlled, not a person or a gift to be treasured.
No rules, big bucks
The fertility industry “has never really been regulated in terms of who can use it and for what reasons,” Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, admitted to the Times. This means there are no rules surrounding gender-selective IVF or what plans the person has for the baby.
There are also no background checks to see if a person is fit to be a parent or is creating a child with malicious intent as Mark Newton and Peter Truong did when they hired a surrogate to have a baby boy whom they sexually abused and pimped out to men. More recently, a Chicago veterinarian arrested on child porn charges admitted he planned to sexually abuse a child soon to arrive by surrogate.
In an article for The Federalist, Catie VanDamme wrote that after seeking the advice of doctors regarding her own “reproductive health,” she was “thrown onto a fertility conveyor belt” of IVF. She called IVF the “cash cow” of the fertility industry and said it does not truly protect women or their babies. Fertility businesses financially profit off of people using IVF when they may not have to but have become convinced they must — including wealthy couples trying to build idealist families.
IVF is not a quick fix for fertility issues and it should not be used to create a child who fits an image the parents have conjured up in their minds. Children are not accessories or props for Instagram posts. They are unique human beings with rights of their own.
