Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, recently sat down with Live Action founder and president Lila Rose to discuss assisted reproductive technology and the dangers that women and children face from egg donation, sperm donation, IVF, and surrogacy.
A pediatric critical care nurse, Lahl became “undone” by the shifts she saw in medical ethics. She went back to graduate school to study bioethics and decided not to return to nursing. Instead, she founded The Center for Bioethics and Culture as an educational resource for issues such as abortion, embryo and stem cell research, assistive reproductive technology, and human cloning.
Eggsploitation
Lahl and Rose spoke about one of Lahl’s many documentary films, “Eggsploitation,” which exposed the infertility industry’s hunt for human eggs and the money it was willing to pay young women for their eggs. Lahl also spoke about the health risks for women who go through the process of selling their eggs as “egg donors.”
“The marketing is very slick,” said Lahl. “When two of my daughters were students at the University of California Berkeley, their school paper had an ad: $100,000 for an elite donor. So it’s very eugenic, it’s very selective. It’s all flowery, ‘Make dreams come true,’ ‘Help a family.’ You’ll see young girls who have sold their eggs say, ‘Well you have so many eggs, I’m not using them anyway.’ So there’s this lure, and people go, ‘Well I like to help people and, sure, that money sounds great and I’m not using my eggs right now. Why not sell some?’ But, there’s the drugs.”
Women who sell their eggs go through a process of disclosing genetic issues in their family such as breast cancer. If a woman passes that screening, she will then be put on drugs, often Lupron, which suppresses a woman’s normal ovarian function to time when the eggs are released. Lupron is used to chemically castrate sex offenders and has a category X rating from the FDA because of the risks it carries for preborn children.
Next, the woman is put on fertility drugs to ramp up the production of eggs and then is given a trigger shot of HCG (Human chorionic gonadotrophin), a hormone produced by the placenta, to release the eggs from the follicles. A needle is used to puncture the ovaries multiple times to suck out the eggs. This can carry complications of internal bleeding and even loss of an ovary.
“At the end of the day, they’re selling their children. And two of the women in ‘Eggsploitation’ lost their ability to ever have their own children. So their fertility was permanently damaged,” said Lahl.
The number of women donating eggs is unknown because they aren’t tracked, explained Lahl. “You don’t count things if they don’t count, and these women don’t count so we don’t count them,” she said. “… The best you can do is CDC data that has an annual report on assisted reproductive technologies in America, and the best you can get is how many IVF cycles were performed, frozen embryos, fresh embryos, but it doesn’t tell you who these women are” — or how many of them there are.
Designer babies
Assisted reproductive technology has also ushered in the notion of designer babies. Parents allow children to be created in a lab and then they can weed out the ones that don’t pass certain screening processes or the boys vs. the girls.
“They [big fertility] play on our sense of urgency and desperation, ” said Lahl. “We are kind of instantly satisfied people these days. We want it now. We want it when we want it on our terms. The whole movement in sex selection idea — it’s not even ‘I want a baby.’ [It’s] ‘I want a particular baby.’ The whole genetic testing, all the add-ons that people who enter into the Big Fertility industrial complex [are offered]. There are all these add-ons.” Those include testing the babies for genetic conditions.
“We’re not satisfied with the baby who comes from the loving union of a man and his wife, a woman and her husband,” said Lahl. “Our children are now products. We just say, ‘Well doctor, take that one away’ or ‘Get rid of that one because my husband and I have two little girls and we really just wanted a boy.'”
If a child has a health issue that was missed during the embryo screening process, then the parent still have the opportunity to abort that child. This includes if the parents only wanted one or two babies but became pregnant with three or more instead. In those cases, parents are asked to ‘selectively reduce’ the pregnancy by way of aborting one or more of the babies.
“[W]hen you see this is something I can just order and get what I want. Like going to the shopping mall and looking at new sunglasses or something and I want this kind, and I take them home, I change my mind, and I return them and get a different kind. We treat children like that. The whole designer baby thinking is alive and well,” said Lahl.
Surrogacy
Surrogacy has grown in popularity in the U.S. and around the world — but it carries a higher risk to a woman than her own natural pregnancy, because it is a foreign embryo that is put into her body. Like with organ donation, a woman’s body may reject a foreign embryo due to an inflammatory response.
Surrogates also have higher rates of preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, preterm birth, postpartum depression, and chronic illness than women who are carrying their own children. Many of those risks extend to the baby and cause health issues for him or her.
In addition, when a surrogate gives birth, the baby is often taken from her immediately and given to the intended parents. “[W]e can’t ignore what we know — and we’ve known for so long — children love their mother, they want their mother. When I see these babies ‘wet from the womb’ being put on the chest of strangers — whether that be a female stranger or whether that be a gay man — that’s where the adult is doing it for them, not for the benefit of the child,” Lahl noted, adding that there is known brain trauma that occurs when a baby is separated from the mother he has known for his entire life.
Surrogacy, she explained, is very different from adoption in which the child has already suffered a trauma and adoption is attempting to help heal that child. With surrogacy, adults are creating children in order to fulfill their own desires with the full knowledge that they are going to take the child from her mother on purpose.
Rose and Lahl also discussed the dangers of sperm donation, more harm to children from assisted reproductive technologies, and a surrogate who carried a baby for two men until they demanded she have an abortion. The full interview can be seen here.
