← Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Ep 1147 | Human Egg Farms, Switched Babies & the Dark Web of Big Fertility | Guest: Katy Faust
01:17:20
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- [00:01]
Ali Stuckey
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- [00:03]
Katie Foust
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- [00:31]
Ali Stuckey
A woman in Georgia gave birth to the wrong baby. This is thanks to the mostly unregulated big fertility industry and unfortunately, Trump's recent IVF executive order might make this problem worse. Today we are talking with them before us founder one of our favorite guests, Katie Foust. We will also be discussing the latest that has unraveled with Elon Musk, Ashley Sinclair and one of the other mothers of his children, what modern day polygamy looks like and why children's rights matter. This is such a good and challenging conversation. I know you are going to be inspired by it. So without further ado, here is Katie Foust. Okay, actually, before we get into that conversation with Katie, I just want to let you know that if you are a Blaze TV plus subscriber, you can get access to your Share the Arrows tickets right now. Also if you are a Blaze Unlimited subscriber. If you are already a subscriber, you should have gotten that email in your inbox. Make sure to check your spam and all that good stuff. But if you want to subscribe to Blaze tv, get access to Blaze TV and also get access to those early bird Share the Arrows tickets right now. You can subscribe. You can go to sharethe Arrows. Com. You'll see where you can subscribe and then you will get an email about your Share the Arrows tickets just a few minutes after you subscribe to Blaze tv. For everyone else, you're not a subscriber. You don't want to be a subscriber, that is fine. The early bird tickets will be available to you this Friday. So set your alarms. Friday morning you can go to share the arrows.com share the arrows.com Friday morning get those early bird tickets that'll get you the steep discount and we've got a limited number of those tickets. And y'all, I'm so excited. All of the speakers are lining up. We'll be doing a speaker drop soon. I would not wait for the speaker drop, however, because I want you to get that discount and I promise Promise, promise you will not be disappointed by who we are bringing to share The Arrows on October 11th in Dallas, Texas, this year. All right, that's all the information I got for you. Look out for that on Friday morning. Okay? Now, truly, without further ado, here is Katie Foust. Katie, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. I think this is our first time in person talking on the show, right in studio.
- [03:11]
Katie Foust
Baby, I love it.
- [03:12]
Ali Stuckey
Oh, it's so perfect. It's providential.
- [03:15]
Katie Foust
Yeah.
- [03:15]
Ali Stuckey
Okay. First, I want to get your take on this Trump executive order that euphemistically expands access to ivf. Really what it would do is it would enforce or force private insurers to cover the cost of ivf. And it would also mean probably Medicaid expansion. So either way, we're being forced to pay for ivf. And, you know, the pro argument is, this is great. It makes more babies. We love babies. Infertility is a disease, just like diabetes. Why shouldn't insurance cover it? Your thoughts?
- [03:49]
Katie Foust
Well, I have so many thoughts.
- [03:50]
Ali Stuckey
Yes.
- [03:51]
Katie Foust
I hope that the executive order is not going to amount to much. You know, to me, it looked like a way to say promises made, promises kept, you know, which, so you can, you know, chart it as a win. But I didn't see a lot of teeth. You know, it was like, now we're going to gather comments and, you know, receive letters and suggestions from allies over the next 90 days and we'll see what comes of it. Because I actually was really surprised at the high level of pushback that the Trump executive order received. I mean, lots of many pro life organizations and figures condemned it or critiqued it. I mean, you had mainstream conservative organizations like the Family Research Council saying this is not the way to go. I mean, you had the wife of the secretary of Transportation saying, this is not aligned with what it is that you're trying to do, especially as it relates to make America healthy again. Yeah. And I was like, good for them. To me, I'm like, that actually is a pretty significant shift in the conservative mood over the last 12 months where, you know, in February of 2024, we saw the decision come down from the Alabama Supreme Court, in essence saying, hey, you can't kill these babies on ice, that you can charge the fertility clinic and a wrongful death claim. And Republicans came out en masse to say, oh, we have to protect ivf. There's still some voices that are doing that, but many more that are saying, I don't think this is everything that we think it is. So first of all, I was really impressed by the level of cautious, gentle no that I saw online. Why is this executive order a bad idea? Well, it's fine if you are a fertility doctor, and it's fine if you're an egg seller or a sperm seller. And it's fine for the people who want to create these children who don't really have any moral guidance around that. It's not fine for babies. It's not fine for the majority of children who won't make it through this process alive. And, you know, one of the ways that I sort of shock people into that realization, for those of us who consider ourselves Christians, conservatives, and pro lifers, is to just say the best that we can estimate, the IVF industry, the. The big fertility world destroys probably four times the number of little lives every year than Planned Parenthood does. Why is that? Because when you go into a fertility clinic, you're talking about dozens of little lives that are, you know, on the chopping block, possibly. Whereas if you go into an abortion clinic, you're usually talking about just one. You know, Paris Hilton, when she creates IVF babies, she's got 20 boys, but she doesn't have the girl that she wants. Right. So what's going to happen to those 20 boys? Well, they're going to be thawed and discarded, donated to research or frozen forever. And so that's what we're talking about here. We value, we love. We think that IVF children are worthy of dignity and respect and protection. We just think that the 97% that don't make it through the process alive should also be extended that level of protection.
- [06:52]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah. A lot of people just don't realize that. That there are so many more embryos created than are ever transferred.
- [06:58]
Katie Foust
Right.
- [06:58]
Ali Stuckey
And certainly than ever survive. Now, there are some people who say, okay, but Katie, it is possible for a Christian couple to say, I'm going to use every embryo that is created. We're not going to do genetic test, something a lot of people don't know. The vast majority of people going through IVF do genetic testing. So if that embryo has down syndrome, trisomy 13, 18, any kind of chromosomal abnormality, they're thawed and they are thrown away like trash, and only the quote, unquote strong survive and are possibly transferred. But for the Christian couple who says, well, we're not going to do that, and a lot of Christian couples won't do that, is that not an ethical option for ivf? And wouldn't it be good if through this executive order More couples like that have access to in vitro.
- [07:44]
Katie Foust
Okay, so let's look at it from the perspective of, let's, let's say we're not going to ban IVF completely. Let's just ban the aspects of IVF that are very clear violations of the rights of children. So you mentioned one of them, genetic screening. 75% of fertility clinics offer genetic screening, sex selection. 73% of fertility clinics offer sex selection. And in our mind, we think, well, this is just about infertile couples wanting to have babies. There's boutique fertility clinics in Hollywood where 90% of the clientele do not suffer from infertility. They simply want to pick the traits of their children. Not just genetic screening, not just boy or girl, but you can pick the eye color of the child that you want. And not just any eye color. Right. You can create or select the specific version of blue eyes that you want. There's like five different options in terms of what kind of blue eyed child that you want. And so all of these options are available to IVF customers. So that's a problem. Because if you do want to go into this with a pro life, pro child ethic, with a Christian ethic, you're not going to have the support of your doctors. And I've talked to a lot of different Christians who have gone through this. Many that have surplus embryos, many that did succeed in implanting all of them. But the ones that said we went into this with pro life convictions, we had to argue against all of these different screenings and testings. And even then a couple of them have said, you know, they grade embryos. So even if they do make it through the genetic screening process, even if they have, you know, only kept the sexes that they want, or they're willing to keep both sexes, they still have to battle their doctors in terms of saying, we want to implant all of them. We don't want to grade them. We actually want the C and D grade embryos kept alive as well. And a lot of the times the doctors in the clinics will say that's a bad idea. Why is that? It's because the only thing that they are required to report. Because Big Fertility operates virtually regulation free, there's no requirement to track or report what they do with these little lives. But the one thing that they do have to report is their success rates, their implantation rates, their live birth rates of the children, the fraction of children who are actually transferred to the womb. They have to report the percentage of live births. And if you are going to retain or implant the lower grade embryos, you are going to downgrade their live birth rate. And so if you want to go into this with a pro life mentality, you're not going to have the assistance or the help or the support of your doctor.
- [10:27]
Ali Stuckey
First sponsor for the day is masa chips. So I love my chips and guac, my chips and queso, my chips and salsa. I am pretty much made of that. I grew up on that. One thing I don't like about this tasty appetizer is that most of the time these tortilla chips are fried in things like canola oil which are super inflammatory. They don't make you feel good. Chips and salsa and guacamole can be a really healthy snack. But you have to make sure that the chips that you're eating are actually good for you. And that's why chief related bro and I love masa chips. We've made the switch because there are no seed oils, nothing inflammatory or toxic at all. And it's not just that they are without these ingredients. They actually have really good ingredients. Ingredients because all of their chips are made with organic corn, grass fed and finished beef tallow and redmond sea salt. That is it. Tallow is really good for your skin, for your brain health. It includes vitamins like vitamin A, D, K E, fatty acids with antibacterial properties. I use beef tallow for all kinds of things but I definitely love frying potatoes and frying chips in it. It tastes so good. They have all different kinds of flavors. You can go to their website Masa chip m a s a chips.com use my code promo use my promo code ALI B at checkout for a discount on your order. Check it out. You will not regret it. Masachips.com code Ali B and I just wanted to look up that claim that you made about certain fertility clinics offering the option for picking eye color. And it's really easy. I just typed in fertility clinic eye color. The fertility institute choose your baby's eye color offers eye color screening and selection. So that's like you're buying a car add on like do you want chrome hubcaps? Like yeah, that's basically what's going on. And then the next one. Simplefertility.com this is another website that connects you to different clinics. Eye color selection begins with examining your personal and family eye color genetics history as parents to be. And there's even an article about this in the LA Times what you're talking about that fertility treatments may have started to help high risk families avoid deadly Genetic traits. Again, that's just eugenics. But now it is moved into this industry, especially in very rich areas where people are picking what they believe is going to be the strongest, smartest, most successful, most attractive child. And while some people may say, well, that's not what Christian couples are doing, that's not what most people are doing, the fact is when we talk about IVF access, it includes that.
- [13:19]
Katie Foust
That's right.
- [13:20]
Ali Stuckey
It includes the eugenics. And there's really no way to exclude that from the conversation.
- [13:27]
Katie Foust
There are countries that have attempted to do it. There are some countries that, for example, ban sex selection. Germany is one of them. Germany also bans genetic screening because Germany knows what eugenics looks like and doesn't want to go back there. There's a lot of countries that will say you can't just create endless numbers of embryos. We're going to limit it to the number that you actually France, Italy, Canada, actually implanting. And let's just be very clear, when you're talking about we're going to, you know, survey your hair, your heritable traits, we're going to figure out eye color, all of this, you're not saying let's then create an embryo with that specific shade of blue eyes. You're saying let's create 20 embryos. We will test all of them. The two that are the right sex and that have that right eye color. Those are the ones you will keep and we will discard and donate to research the other 18. And so we're not talking about creating a custom ordered child. We're talking about making an explosion of little lives and discarding and destroying the ones that don't match our specific outlined criteria.
- [14:25]
Ali Stuckey
Yes. And an executive order like this, if it actually came to fruition, you said this itself doesn't have teeth. But even just talking about the accessibility to IVF in general, which is already a lot in the United States, uniquely a lot, it also includes the two men or the two women who are purposely creating the fatherless or motherless child, or the single man or the single woman. All of this would be included in an order like this, right?
- [14:53]
Katie Foust
Well, I think the executive order was written carefully to say we want to help mothers and fathers welcome children. But the truth is that once you are making a baby in a petri dish, it's very easy to use somebody else's sperm or somebody else's egg. So it's very hard to say. We are going to tailor these guidelines, these regulations in a way that only allows married husbands and wives to use These kinds of technologies, once you are taking that function outside of the sexual act, it is just as easy. I mean, this is why we actually have a variety of fertility fraud cases that are taking place across the country today because somebody thought they're using my husband's sperm or this specific donor, and it ended up being the fertility doctor who was using his own sperm. And so it's very hard to say we are going to keep IVF and we're going to exclude all of these other really dangerous, really damaging possibilities. And I would say one of those is using a third party to create the children. How. How often does that happen? We don't exactly know because Big Fertility won't tell us.
- [15:56]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [15:57]
Katie Foust
But estimates range between a third to two thirds of the 90,000 children a year that are born through IVF are also the very few that do make it through the process Alive. You know, 30 to 60,000 are going to lose their mother or father in the process. Sometimes they will go home to a home where there is a mother and father present. Oftentimes they're going to go back to a household where there is no mother or father there at all. So, I mean, this is an industry that absolutely is not thinking about the best interest of the child. They're thinking about the bottom line. And unfortunately, subsidizing it through insurance or through government tax credits or whatever is only going to increase child victimization.
- [16:35]
Ali Stuckey
Yes. And many of those embryos go to the freezer. And there are about, I think, 2 million frozen embryos souls on ice right now in the United States, really, with an unknown future. I saw a video of a woman. It's going around again. It's a young woman on TikTok. She seems. I'm sure you've seen this.
- [16:53]
Katie Foust
I'm so glad you brought this up, because I think I just watched it this morning.
- [16:56]
Ali Stuckey
Yes, I'm sure a lot of people sent it to you like they sent it to me. And actually, when I initially did a response to her video, like a year ago, she personally got very upset, reached out to me, she said, you know, I was an IVF baby. I was selected first. We all came from the same batch, conceived at the same time, made at the same time. She was first, her sister was second, but she still has siblings that are 30 years old on ice. And she was saying, I want to know what it would have been like to have a little brother, because those are boys. I don't know if her, you know, her parents wanted girls or what, but they're boys. I want to know what a little brother would be like. What if when I got married and I had kids, I transferred one of my brothers to also be my son? And I know she's talking hypothetically and probably isn't thinking of the consequences, but it shows me one of the consequences and the brokenness created in ivf. What are your thoughts on that?
- [17:51]
Katie Foust
What was interesting to me about the video that she just put out that I saw today, so I think it's more recent, is she said, you know what's so weird is that some random guy, some technician, decided that I would be born first, even though I'm a virtual twin with my younger sister who was born three years later. Isn't that weird? Like, that he got to decide that I would be the older sibling and not her as the older sibling. So I think that that kind of presents. That's a bit of an ethical challenge for the Christians who say, we're going to use every embryo. Okay, so great, you're using every embryo. But do you understand the kind of existential questions that these kids are going to be asking? Why was I the one that was chosen? Why was I the one that was, you know, selected for implantation? Why was I the one that was given. Given a chance at life? And then maybe if there is one or two or three that were implanted over the course of years, why is it that a random guy whose name I'm never going to know decided the birth order of those of us, even though genetically we're all the same age? I mean, like, what we're doing through reproductive technologies right now is forcing the next generation, these kids, to have to answer questions that no human has ever had to ask before. It is so out of step with the nature of what it means to be human from, you know, creating children who might have dozens or hundreds of half siblings. I mean, that actually is like, outside of like Genghis Khan. Right. We really have not seen anything like that before. This question about, like, I am being adopted by somebody, like, because I'm. I think embryo adoption is the only child honoring option if you have exhausted all the other ways of trying to rescue these surplus embryos. But even then, the kinds of questions that these kids are going to ask right. When they do find their birth parents and they realize they were raised in Beverly Hills. I was raised in like a little, you know, tube bedroom, one bath condo.
- [19:41]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [19:42]
Katie Foust
And I look more like my genetic parents than the three that they chose to keep. I mean, like, the kinds of questions that these kids are going to be asking are things that I don't think that we're prepared for. I don't think we've thought it through.
- [19:53]
Ali Stuckey
Right. Yeah. I saw in one of the replies to a post about the Trump IVF executive order, I took a screenshot of it on X and she said, I had a really good friend who had leftover embryos and they decided to adopt them out to a gay couple, thinking that that was the most redemptive option. And I just think about that child who not only doesn't have the opportunity to know their genetic parents, but because of the luck of the draw, doesn't get to grow up with a mom.
- [20:23]
Katie Foust
Right.
- [20:24]
Ali Stuckey
And it's, I would say that's even different than like the regular adoption of a child after birth. I mean, there is a lot of so many questions we are causing a child to bear at such a young age because of adult desire.
- [20:38]
Katie Foust
Yeah, exactly. And I honestly, that is what these reproductive technologies do in almost every case. And you could even say in every case, but I'm willing to say in almost every case you are asking children to sacrifice so you can have something that you want.
- [20:51]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [20:51]
Katie Foust
Maybe in your mind it's minimal. Maybe in your mind it's just a relationship with a birth mother, even though they are coming home with me, their own genetic mother and father and no money changed hands. You know, the altruistic surrogacy situation, what does the child lose there? There's no big deal here. No, you are still asking children to lose the relationship with the only person they know the day that they are born so you can have something that you want. All of these reproductive technologies are at bottom an injustice against children. It is always asking the weak to sacrifice for the strong. It is always asking children, the most vulnerable, the smallest of all, to sacrifice for the grown, the strong, the capable, those of us that actually have the decision making power, the ability to deal with hardship, we're saying we don't want this hardship, we're going to have you kids deal with the hardship instead. These are systems of injustice and these are technologies that bankroll off of injustice.
- [21:43]
Ali Stuckey
Yep. And because I get this question a lot and I've got my own response for it and you do too. I want to hear yours. For those who say, well, Katie, there's also separation and a primal wound that's caused through adoption, you could call that quote unquote, baby buying someone is paying to be able to adopt that child. So are you against adoption too?
- [22:06]
Katie Foust
Yeah. This is a really important question. And you know, as the Former assistant director of the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world. One of the things that I was responsible for was compliance with international, federal and state level standards. And I'll tell you what those three things had in common. One of the main bright red lines in adoption, whether you're talking about the Hague inter country adoption standards or just what's going on in the state of Colorado or the state of California or the state of Texas, is money can never go from adoptive parents to birth parents. Okay. For example, my husband and I are adoptive parents. If any of the $25,000 that we paid throughout the course of our adoption journey went directly to our son's birth mother or birth father or birth family, according to international standards, that would no longer be an adoption. That would be trafficking. If you're buying a child, if you are paying somebody specifically to relinquish their parental rights and hand over the baby to you, that is no longer an adoption. Right. That's trafficking. So that's a very clear line in the adoption world. Yes, you spend a lot of money on adoption. No, it does not go to the mother or to the birth father. It goes towards the FBI to fingerprint you. It goes towards the home study agency to check the safety of your home. It goes to the agency that might be making the arrangements or bringing together birth mom and adoptive parents. It goes to all of the training and the post placement support that you receive. It does not go directly to the birth parent. So what is going on in Big Fertility? It is always direct payments from the intended parents to the genetic parents and to the birth mother. What is it that you are getting for your $2,000 when you buy that vial of sperm? Right. Obviously, it's the very specific genetic characteristics of 50% of your child. But it's also the guarantee that that sperm donor never claims paternity. It is the guarantee that he will stay out of your child's life forever. You are purchasing him saying, I give you my parental rights. So in that sense, and it's the same thing in commercial surrogacy, you are paying a woman to preemptively sign over her maternal rights to the child. That is what the money is going for.
- [24:20]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [24:21]
Katie Foust
So if you're looking at it from the perspective of the best practice of adoption that has been established internationally, nationally and at the state level over the course of decades, then Big Fertility is engaging in baby selling in all of the. In every way that you can say that this is baby selling. It simply is in terms of the loss, the wound that Children experience. Yes. Adopted kids often have a wound. And one of the things that I get a lot of responses when I go out and I talk about the distinction between big fertility and adoption is I say both of them begin with a familial wound. Right. But adoption seeks to mend the wound. Big fertility inflicts the wound. But adoptive parents come up to me and say, thank you for saying that. Because a lot of them, statistically, adoptive mothers, adoptive fathers, statistically, spend more time with their children than the average family does, invest more money in their children than the average family does. Adoptive mothers and fathers statistically have more stable marriages, and they tend to be more highly educated than the general population. And yet adopted children disproportionately struggle in school with externalizing behaviors. Why is that? Well, it's because we've asked them to do something that children should never have to do, and that is lose a relationship with the only person they know the day that they're born and reattached to biological strangers. And it looks as though that primal wound has an impact on them throughout the rest of their life. So we have to make a distinction. There are tragic situations where children lose their mothers or lose their parents. We mourn, and then we seek to right that wrong by placing children in adoptive homes.
- [26:04]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [26:04]
Katie Foust
But we do not use that loss as a justification to then intentionally create these legal or genetic orphans so that we can purchase them on the open big fertility market. It.
- [26:15]
Ali Stuckey
Right. And it all goes back to worldview. Understanding that we live in this sinful, broken world, being able to say that a child that is adopted, they're in a situation that is a step down from the ideal. The ideal is a loving, married mother and father. But because we live in a world that is wrought with sin, we don't always get the ideal situation. So the next best situation is a married mother and father that adopts that child. And adoption seeks to redeem a broken situation. Surrogacy, sperm, egg, selling, ivf. It creates that broken situation, as you have laid out so clearly that you're placing the burden on the child in both situations. But one heals and one inflicts or seeks to heal and inflicts. Second sponsor is good ranchers. Y'all know how much I love good ranchers. We eat it almost every night in the Stucky home. It makes sure that we are hitting our protein goals every day. And we love supporting not only American farms and ranchers, since all of the meat is from American farms and ranches with good ranchers. But Also a Christian family owned, America loving company. We've known the owners, Corley and Ben of Good Ranchers for a long time now. They are the real deal. This is the kind of family with the kind of mission that you want to support. They started Good Ranchers just because they believe in this American industry. They want to steward their responsibility as Christians really well. And so it's a win all around to support Good Ranchers. When you subscribe, you get that box of meat to your front door every month. No more going to the grocery store trying to figure out if something is really high quality, if something is truly grass fed, if something is really from the United States, you know that you're getting high quality American meat from Good Ranchers and it's super convenient. I love the time saving aspect of Good Ranchers. Plus, when you subscribe right now, they will add a bag of meat to your box every month for the next year. Seafood, chicken, beef, anything you want. Check out the Ali Beth Stucky box too. It's my custom box. Go to goodranchers.comcodeali. you'll get 25 off good ranchers.comcodeali. another unforeseen consequence, or at least by a lot of people that you mentioned just a few minutes ago is the accidental transferring of the wrong embryo into a mother. And there's this story, I'm sure you've seen it going around, of a Georgia woman who is suing an IVF clinic after discovering that the child that she gave birth to was not her biological child. It was very obvious. The woman is white, her baby is black. This mix up led to a custody battle which ultimately forced this woman to give the baby to his genetic parents five months later. And we've got a little bit of her story that is going around right now. Right now with Set one.
- [29:21]
Katie Foust
The actions of the fertility clinic have come very close to destroying me, have left irreparable damage to my soul and ultimately left me questioning whether I should be a mom or not. I spent my entire life wanting to be a mom. I loved, nurtured and grew my child. And I would have done literally anything in my power to keep him. My baby is not genetically mine. He doesn't have my blood, he doesn't have my eyes. But he is and will always be my son. I'll never be the same woman. I will never fully heal or completely move on. And part of me will always long for my son and wonder what kind of person he's becoming.
- [30:03]
Ali Stuckey
Your thoughts?
- [30:04]
Katie Foust
Okay, so what's very interesting here is the narrative. And I think that she actually said it. She said, in essence, I was a surrogate for another couple. And that's right. But it's very interesting because when we're looking at these other sort of surrogacy arrangements, everyone will say, well, it's no big deal. She's not the mother. She's not the genetic mother. She's not the mother. She's the oven for somebody else's bun. Right? The real mother is the genetic mother. But look at her. Look at her. She is a mother in a very, very real sense of the world. She bonded with the baby, she grew the baby, she loved the baby. And then she continued that. She continued and capitalized on and only reinforced that bond through five months of cuddling and breastfeeding and the oxytocin exchange that takes place between mother and baby whenever there's skin to skin contact, which is so much more likely to happen with mothers than fathers. So now she is rightly mourning this child that she gave up. And it's interesting because she formed that bond even though she was not genetically related to the child. So I understand why she's saying this destroyed me. Like, I'm never gonna get over this. Right? You have lost a baby in the sense of it really was hers in an incredibly real sense, a sense that we have to diminish and ignore if we are going to continue with the fiction that that surrogacy is no big deal and that the birth mother is inconsequential to the later thriving and development of the child. The other thing that I will point out is, you know, because I think that this is. This is actually very good illustration here. She had dozens of other relationships, right? She had lots of other people in her life. I'm sure that she's got parents. I don't think that she's married, but she had lots of friends probably connecting with her and supporting her through this process. And yet losing that one baby pretty much destroyed her.
- [31:52]
Ali Stuckey
That she only had known for a few months.
- [31:53]
Katie Foust
That she had only known for a few months. And yet we think that it's no big deal for the child to lose their relationship with a birth mother, even though they don't have dozens of relationships at that point during gestation, at the moment of birth, that is the only relationship children have. And yet we have to believe that it's no big deal to sever the baby from that birthday birth mother relationship so we can hand them over to the commissioning adults. So I was like, I think everybody looks at her and goes, oh my gosh, this is so awful. Of course she bonded with the child and like, wow, this is so harrowing, so awful and so devastating right now. Apply that to every other surrogate situation and say if she felt that kind of distress, how much more so the baby who has to lose the only person they know.
- [32:38]
Ali Stuckey
And the reasoning or the defense against what you're saying, I think is so asinine. When I hear people say, well, the baby can't talk, or you don't remember, you don't remember being born, you don't remember being in your mother's womb. And the baby will never, you know, articulate that he misses something. That just because someone does not have the verbal capacity to explain their trauma or their brokenness or why they feel distress does not mean it's not there. That is actually like the definition of exploitation is when people who do have power take advantage of someone's incapability, disability, vulnerability to get what they want.
- [33:18]
Katie Foust
Yeah.
- [33:18]
Ali Stuckey
And because that person can't complain, we say they're fine. That's cruel.
- [33:23]
Katie Foust
You had Olivia Morrell on your show. She is one of the only surrogate born children who is publicly speaking out right now. She was raised by incredibly wealthy parents. A mother and father. Exactly. And split time between Florida and Paris. So materially she was totally set. But she talks a lot about how she was always afraid to be abandoned and it led to, she's been very public about this. It led to being overly obsessively clingy, not just with, you know, her mother and father, but also her friends. She was petrified that she was going to be abandoned by everybody all through life. So tell me, she doesn't remember, right? Sure. She can't articulate it, but that has left a wound in her that has manifested itself all throughout her life. And you know, she talks very openly and wonderfully about her husband and how he, he was the person that, like a rock, said, I will not leave. You can, you can rage, you can, you know, in a mercurial sense go up and down. I'm not going anywhere. And it stabilized her. But all throughout her as a adolescence, I mean, she had self harming behaviors that she talked about because she just felt insecure in all of her relationships. This is not uncommon actually for adopted children either. You know, my husband and I have, our youngest is adopted. Incredible kid, totally belongs with us. But you know, when I, we were just traveling last week and we were leaving a hotel room and I said, oh my gosh, run in and you know, grab this book, because I need it downstairs. And he goes, don't leave without me. Don't leave without me. I mean, he's 15, and I'm like, I'm gonna be right here. I just need you to grab the book because you were the last one, and you know where it is. But I'm not leaving. And so sure, he doesn't remember the day when he was born and lost the only woman that he knew. But yet he still, even after being with our family for 13 years, is not exactly sure that it's not gonna happen again. So, again, sometimes children lose their mother or father to tragedy, and the proper response is to mourn. But that is not the reason why kids are losing their mother and father these days. They're losing it intentionally. They're losing their mother or father commercially. They're losing their mom and dad because we are normalizing motherless and fatherless homes. And then we're calling it progress.
- [35:41]
Ali Stuckey
Right? And even with the baby, if the baby stays with. Say it's a situation where you have two women, and so say the baby stays with the genetic mom and the mom who is actually carrying him. Sometimes it's the same egg, same, you know, womb. Sometimes it's not. But they're getting sperm from a sperm seller. I talked to Ross Johnston. I know. You know, I think who Ross Johnston is. Yeah, he's been on the show. You know, he. It was donor conceived, so. So they say that's what they call it. But of course, part of his testimony, he was raised by a moment who had a lot of different lesbian relationships, I think, growing up. But he loves his mom, his mom loves him, cared for him. And yet his distress growing up was, who is my dad? Where is my dad? Where is half of my genetic makeup? And, of course, part of his testimony is realizing that he has a heavenly father that he came from and who loves him and who created him. But still, we were all created to have a mother and a father or to know our mother and father, because everyone on earth has a mom.
- [36:41]
Katie Foust
We all have a mom and dad. Yeah. And. And anyway, I don't. I don't know where you want to go with this conversation, but it's. There's so. I mean, because, like, I've done a couple interviews recently about Elon, and, you know, the situation with his now four different mothers of his children. And it was.
- [36:58]
Ali Stuckey
At least that we know of.
- [36:59]
Katie Foust
That we know of. Yeah, that's right. And so much of that, well, she's set for life. Well, that baby's Never gonna need anything. Well, that, that kid's gonna, you know, be able to go wherever he wants, do whatever he wants. And I'm like, that is not what kids want.
- [37:10]
Ali Stuckey
Right?
- [37:11]
Katie Foust
Money is not going to fill that hole. Right. Even just other adults in the life of the child isn't going to satisfy that longing to be loved by their own father. And it's not a, I'll take you on a trip this weekend or you know, even I'll let you come with me to the White House. Because they actually need to serve long for and have a right to their father's care. Attention, protection. Not just provision, but investment, personal investment every day. They're not made to split time in a 50, 50 custody arrangement. They're not made to just know the identity through some kind of known donor. You know, when you've purchasing sperm through somebody who's okay, being contacted after you're 18 years old, those are crumbs. Yeah, that's crumbs of what children want and deserve. Yeah, they want and deserve both their mother and father loving them and loving each other every day. And funny thing is that's also the family structure and household that maximizes their thriving.
- [38:12]
Ali Stuckey
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- [40:52]
Katie Foust
I wrote an article about that called the Cost of Conservative Hypocrisy at World magazine last week because you did have very prominent conservatives, very prominent pro lifers congratulating Ashley St Clair on the birth of the baby. And I think if I'm going to sort of steel man their position, they're saying, we just think babies are wonderful. It's good to congratulate a woman for having a child. We want them to feel welcome and loved here. And of course, a lot of those same voices also congratulated Dave Rubin for having two intentionally motherless surrogate born babies. And I'm like, okay, well, if this really is just about celebrating and welcoming a child, that's fine. But none of them celebrated Lily Phillips very temporary announcement that she was pregnant. It ended up being a hoax. But Lily Phillips is the only fam. Only fans content producer who's with a thousand guys. Yeah, you know, in a 24 hour period or something like that, there was nobody congratulating her for that pregnancy. And so to me, it looks more like tribal protectionism. It looks like we will congratulate the people that align with us politically if they're having a baby, but we'll condemn people like Pete Buttigieg if he procures two, you know, motherless children through What I think actually was a legitimate adoption, if I'm getting that right. But he hasn't been too clear on that. And so I actually think there's a cost to not being verbally and morally precise about this. If you're going to congratulate, congratulate. But say, let's be clear here, there is a cost to this child. Children don't just need to know the identity of their father. They deserve to have their father married to their mother so they have access to their father every day. She is now seeking sole legal custody of the baby. That's going to be devastating for the child. The baby is going to have their development hampered because they don't have the daily presence of a father. They're going to experience what a lot of kids do with single or double moms, which is father hunger. They're going to hunger for male love. And that's actually going to make them pretty susceptible to people who want to get their attention without having the same level of protectiveness and investment in the baby as their own biological dad would. So this is a, a, it's a tragedy.
- [43:11]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [43:11]
Katie Foust
And obviously we want to support single mothers in the sense of recognizing that they have chosen to do the hard thing by raising the baby alone. But especially when you have a very high platform and you ostensibly say that you are for family values and you understand the harms that that widespread single motherlessness has brought to our country, it deserves more than just a congratulations. That certainly looks like you are celebrating not just the child, but the circumstances.
- [43:38]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah. And I, I, you know, like I said, I didn't congratulate. I have talked to some of the people who did congratulate, and I do not question at all that they are pro marriage and that they are anti surrogacy and that they are pro life and all of that. As you said, they really did see it as I'm just congratulating the baby. They would not congratulate someone like Dave Rubin because they would see that as congratulating baby stealing, but they would congratulate you something like this. Whereas I would say, okay, but the arguments that I saw from a lot of conservatives were it is always right to congratulate the baby.
- [44:14]
Katie Foust
Right.
- [44:15]
Ali Stuckey
Well, I, I don't know if every situation and circumstance solicits a congratulations. There are other things to say like, wow, that baby is precious and made in the image of God. How can I help?
- [44:25]
Katie Foust
Yes.
- [44:26]
Ali Stuckey
Sometimes congratulation simply isn't appropriate. And you don't owe people a public congratulations, especially if it is going to cause any confusion. And I still, like, you know, I've gotten a lot of pushback on that stance, but I still, I stand by it. I think that is morally the clearest, you know, stance to take when it comes to these kind of public controversies.
- [44:50]
Katie Foust
There are two things that I crave from the people that I follow, and I'm pretty selective. Well, I follow a lot of people to see what they're saying, but there's very few people that I'll say, I will follow you in terms of your example. But the people that I follow in terms of their example have two things, whether they're pastors, whether they're political commentators. I want clarity and I want courage. You don't need to give me all the jazz hands, right? You don't need to, like, whip up a show that's, like, produced, you know, million dollar production or whatever. I want you to be clear, especially biblically, what does the Bible say? How does it apply to today? Tell me what justice looks like. And I want courage. I want you to say it regardless of the personal cost or the professional cost. And I will tell you that we're seeing a next generation. We're seeing Gen Z absolutely desperate for that kind of leadership.
- [45:43]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah, right.
- [45:44]
Katie Foust
In the influencer space, in the political space, even in the religious space, we are seeing Gen Z swing hard away from progressivism and towards conservatism, whether it's conservative, religiously conservative politically. And I would argue that a lot of that is because they have seen progressivism offer such vacuous options in terms of the moral options for our life. They have tasted and seen the horrible fruits of family breakdown. They've tried all the different sexual identities and seen that none of this is going to satisfy them. So they are returning to church. I mean, I know this because I'm looking at the studies and, you know, there was just a report that came out from the Times of London where they surveyed a thousand young people Gen zers and found that compared to their millennial counterparts, they were overwhelmingly rejecting porn, rejecting anonymous hookups, and valuing marriage by twice as many points as millennials do. But I'd also note because I, I sit in the back row of church at the longest pew to fit the 10 high school boys next to me who go to to Seattle public schools, many of whom who have not been raised in Christian homes, who come every day not just to the service, but to come early for the Sunday school class where we talk about abortion and hookup culture and dating done well and the real definition of marriage and the harms of divorce. I mean, like, this is a generation that is ready for somebody to tell them the truth, especially about moral issues. And I just don't want these mega conservative platforms to throw away their credibility because they're not being morally clear when somebody in their own tribe, you know, makes an announcement like this.
- [47:20]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah, it's really not that hard to say. I love so much of what Elon Musk is doing, and yet I want him to come to Christ. And I want him, at the very least to represent a kind of responsible fatherhood that we want in politics and the conservative movement. Someone who is so close to Trump. But just to give people a little update on what is going on, you mentioned Ashley is now suing Elon Musk for full custody of their son. We have more information now about the fact that he has only met his son a few times. And actually just weeks before she announced, hey, I had Elon Musk's kid five months ago. We're trying to get in touch with Elon Musk to figure out our agreement and he's not responding. She actually, like tweeted at him, trying to get him to respond, which was just very tragic. We also found out that he had just texted her apparently a few weeks earlier, saying, we have a legion of babies to make. I want to knock you up again. So part of me, I know that Ashley went into this clear eyed, knowing what she was going to do, but I'm sad. I. I'm sad for her. I'm sad for this child. She also has another child from another man. And I feel that she is probably in a lot of distress. And then we saw Grimes, who is another baby mama. I don't know how else to say it. Mother of Elon's baby. His. You know, the one that he actually brings.
- [48:42]
Katie Foust
Yeah.
- [48:43]
Ali Stuckey
To the White House. I think they have a few kids together. Actually, one of their children is in some kind of medical distress, according to Grimes, and she is trying to get Elon's attention on X. She said this. Please respond about our child's medical crisis in response to just one of Elon's random posts. I am sorry to do this publicly, but it is no longer acceptable to ignore the situation. This requires immediate attention. If you don't want to talk me, can you please designate or hire someone who can so that we can move forward on solving this? This is urgent, Elon. I'm not giving any details, but he won't respond to text, call or emails and has skipped every meeting. And our child will suffer lifelong impairment if he doesn't respond. So I need him to effing respond. And if I have to apply public pressure, then I guess that's where we are at. So this is what happens when you make it your responsibility to repopulate the earth with a lot of women.
- [49:37]
Katie Foust
Yeah. I call this modern day polygamy, because what you're seeing in terms of the effect of the children is. Is the same. You know, obviously, the polygamists that many of us, especially in the Christian world, are familiar with is the Old Testament patriarchs. You know, Abraham and Jacob both famously, you know, had children with two different women. And then obviously, there are situations with David, situations with Solomon where they had multiple wives. Interestingly, none of those households are characterized by equity and love. It is not a situation of, oh, you know, Jacob has four different wives, so there's more love for all the kids to go around. It wasn't like that. There was more jealousy. There was more infighting. There was more battling over resources and attention from their father, and that's exactly what we're seeing today. Very interestingly, you know, they're. Elon, you know, purchased a $35 million compound because he kind of wanted to house all of the many of the women there.
- [50:32]
Ali Stuckey
I did not know that.
- [50:33]
Katie Foust
Well, Emily Jasinsky brought it up for me when I was in chatting with her last week, and I was like, well, same. I didn't know about it either. It's supposed to be a secret, but it's not. And so it sounds like Grimes has not. Is not there. Zillis is the wife of his second. The second mother of his children. I believe that she's got twins with him. Grimes has not been twins.
- [50:53]
Ali Stuckey
And another one, she actually also had a baby in 2024. So banner year last year for Elon. Okay, so she has three kids with him.
- [51:00]
Katie Foust
Oh. Oh, right. I thought it was just Grimes that had it, maybe. Oh, no, she. That was 2022. Hard to keep track of.
- [51:05]
Ali Stuckey
I know. Hard to keep track, which I'm sure it is for Elon as well.
- [51:08]
Katie Foust
Yeah. And I mean, I look at, like, when Ashley chose to reveal that she was the mother of the 13th child of Elon that we know of. It was on Valentine's Day when he was meeting with the Indian prime minister, and he was flanked by Zillis and two of their children.
- [51:26]
Ali Stuckey
Oh, I didn't know that either.
- [51:28]
Katie Foust
Yeah. I mean, so I'm like, well, you know, it looks like. Like a vying for attention. Right. Or a jealousy even among the Women. So let's just say though that any of these women or all of these women were willing to live at this 35 million dollar compound. Does it mean that the kids are going to be better off? Well, studies say no. Studies show that anytime unrelated adults are sharing living spaces with children, incidents of abuse and neglect increase. Now, now I often talk about that in the context of stepfathers or mothers live in boyfriend, you know, because we've adopted this insane like anti human talking point that you know, kids don't need a biological connection with their parents, they just need to be safe and loved. And I'm like, well then why do we have any kind of screening for adoptive parents? It's because social workers are not idiots and they know that it takes more than intending to parent a child to actually ensure the child's going to be safe and loved. That's why adoptive parents have to go through screenings and vettings and background checks and fingerprints and home studies. Because there is such a risk to children when they're sharing living spaces with unrelated men and women. Obviously that risk is acute when it's an unrelated man. And I tell people, if you don't believe me, google the words mother's boyfriend and tell me what you find.
- [52:47]
Ali Stuckey
I just saw this awful story, just to your point, of these twin boys, 15 year old boys and I won't go into all the graphic details but they were being horrifically tortured and abused. Awful, awful. And I go to the, I go to the article and it doesn't say stepfather right away but when you see the ages of the father and mother, well these are 15 year old boys. The mother is about 42. Okay, that checks out. The father is only 32. That doesn't really seem to check out. You read more. It's a stepfather and of course that doesn't mean all stepfathers are bad. I know a lot of people out there saying your stepfather saved your life. We know that.
- [53:25]
Katie Foust
We're just heroic step parents out there.
- [53:27]
Ali Stuckey
Yes, absolutely. And praise God for that. That is another example of redeeming a broken situation. But statistically kids are at risk, whether it is adoption, surrogacy or whatever. Statistically they're at risk when they're at a home with an unrelated male.
- [53:44]
Katie Foust
And you know sociologist Brad Wilcox, who I know you've had on the show, will just point blank tell you the most dangerous place for a child to find themselves in America is in the home of an unrelated man left to care for the child himself. Like it is the highest risk when it comes to Predictors for child abuse. Interestingly, having other women in the home are not good for kids either. There was a study done called the puzzle of monogamous marriage, the. That studied the risks of polygamy and polyamory, which let me just be clear. What is polygamy? What is polyamory? It is unrelated adults sharing living spaces with kids. That's what it's always going to be, the inclusion of somebody who's not biologically related to the child. That study found that stepmothers, unrelated women were 2.4 times more likely to kill children than the biological mom. And then even if they aren't directly abusing, there is neglect or at minimum, in attendance to what's going on with the kid. And so accidental deaths in those homes where there's unrelated adults increase by 15 to 77 times when there's an unrelated woman on the scene. And it's just because they don't feel the same level of obligation to the kid. Right. That's not my kid. I'm watching my kids over here. There was three Princeton economists that studied households where the woman had both a biological child and a stepchild. And they found that the stepmom took their child, took the stepchild to the doctor, less often, buckled their seatbelts, less often, spent 5% of 5% less money on food on the unrelated child, on the stepchild. So you could frame this as sin, nature, and you. That's probably good, but evolutionary biologists have been studying this forever. They actually have a term for it, and it's called the Cinderella effect. It is that a child who is being raised by a step parent or the boyfriend or girlfriend of the biological parent are going to be disadvantaged in ways where they are, to put it generously, less connected to, less invested in and less protective of the child.
- [55:47]
Ali Stuckey
Yes, you hear that story a lot. Gosh, that is heartbreaking. And it's just. It's another indication that science is always catching up to God. If you would just read the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, we'd be golden. Last sponsor is my Patriot Supply. You don't want to be in a situation where you don't have the food that your family needs. If you go to the grocery store right now, it's pretty sparse. We can't even get the eggs that we typically get from our local grocery store. Not a great feeling. Actually feels a little apocalyptic. I don't want to get in a situation where I don't have the sustenance that my family needs to survive, especially if we're talking about a natural disaster or anything that causes the supply chain to mess up. I just want to make sure that I've got an emergency supply of food and that's why I recommend my patriot supply. Their three month emergency food kit offers really good 2,000 calorie a day meals. You'll want to get one kit for every member of your family to make sure you're all taken care of and hopefully you'll never need it. Their food supply kits last in storage for up to 25 years. But it's always better to be safe than sorry. So if you go to preparewithally.com you'll get a 100 discount. That's an awesome deal. Preparewithally.com One other story in the news that I want to make sure to get your thoughts on. And this goes under the category of unknown consequences of big fertility female egg farm.
- [57:27]
Katie Foust
Oh my gosh.
- [57:28]
Ali Stuckey
Yes, that is crazy.
- [57:30]
Katie Foust
But this was so awful and so completely predictable.
- [57:33]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah, yeah, keep going, keep going. Well, I'll just give a summary and then I'll, I'll let you go off on it. So the increasing demand of reproductive technology fueled by a patchwork of conflicting and non existent regulations, has unsurprisingly led to the exploit of women and children as they are trafficked across the borders for product and profit. So this is, according to the Daily Mail, around 100 women have been kept as slaves on a human egg farm located in the Eastern Europe, European country of Georgia, run by a Chinese criminal organization. And so these eggs are being sold all across the world. These women being pumped with drugs, being strapped down, their eggs extracted, I'm sure without anesthesia. That's very painful process. And their eggs are being sold to willing buyers, probably at a pretty low price. So that is literally happening. That's not a conspiracy theory. That is literally happening, literally reported. And if this is one that we know about, I guarantee this is happening around the world.
- [58:28]
Katie Foust
Yeah, 100%. Because I think that the woman who escaped had to buy her freedom. Like she had to pay a certain amount, amount of money to get off the farm. And then she came back, reported it.
- [58:37]
Ali Stuckey
Prostitution.
- [58:38]
Katie Foust
Yeah, I think that they rescued a few of the other women, but yeah, what, what do we expect? Right? When you want to make a lab made baby, you need three things. You need sperm, you need egg and you need womb. Sperm is very easy to get to, easy to access. That's why it tends to be much more affordable. Eggs are much harder to get to. Women typically release one a month. And so if you want to purchase a batch of eggs, women have to go through these, these medically risky processes of injecting themselves with hormones and then hyper stimulating their ovaries and then laparoscopically extracting them. And that is why human eggs are, you know, by weight, one of the most expensive commodities on the planet. It's very, very hard to get to. And then the third part is the womb, and that is actually harder to get to. Right. It's harder to find women who will then rent out their bodies for nine and a half months. And so we have seen. You know, I have a Google alert, a surrogacy Google alert that just tells me everything that's been PR in the last 24 hours using the word surrogacy. And I'll tell you what, the number of times that surrogacy and trafficking, surrogacy and trafficking, like populate those returns is amazing to me because there's a high demand for wombs. Not as many people want to offer their wombs. And so you do have women that are being captured, coerced, trafficked into being surrogates, or illegal surrogacy rings being run out of Cambodia so that they can feed what is often a huge demand in China. There's now a huge underground market of surrogacy happening in the Philippines right now. You know, there was a great documentary that came out on that about a couple weeks ago. Same thing, right? There's a huge demand for these specific female aspects of reproduction. And it stuns me because it's like every, everything that women have to offer, every part of their body that is so special and distinct from men. There's a market for that, that you've got prostitution, right, which is the marketplace for the female external reproductive organs. You have a marketplace for eggs, right, which is sort of that very precious gold commodity that we have. And then you've got a marketplace for wombs. And I've heard John Stonestreet say, whenever you put a price tag on something that is priceless, you immediately cheapen it. And that's what's going on right now. That's really good. There's a huge demand. Eggs are expensive, wombs are expensive. So of course we're going to try to, you know, traffic and cut the cost wherever we can in both of those areas.
- [61:05]
Ali Stuckey
Yes. I remember when the initial invasion of Ukraine happened and there were all these stories of poor women in Ukraine were being used as surrogates for people in America, around the world, just because people can get it for cheaper in these desperate poor countries where these women are, they need money and so they're paid $30,000 to, you know, bear this child. And then, okay, their child was born and wait, the parents aren't coming to get the child? Well, it's not my. I can't afford to keep this child. So these children were basically in these orphanages waiting for their parents in other parts of Europe or in America or Canada to come get them. And while it's dangerous in Ukraine, and a lot of times those parents don't necessarily feel a connection to that child because they haven't even been around for their gestation. And that's still something that's happening. These children are toddlers now and they haven't met their parents who paid for them to be born via surrogate.
- [62:01]
Katie Foust
You know, we often talk about how surrogacy is the. In surrogacy, the rich buy and the poor sell. And so you're going to find active surrogacy markets in any countries where it isn't outright banned, where there's economically vulnerable women. So we are seeing, you know, the Philippines, like I mentioned, Mexico is now a huge hotspot for surrogacy, But Ukraine has 25% of the global surrogacy market. In fact, I believe one specific fertility clinic in Ukraine has 25. So I'm sure there's others in Ukraine too. Like, shouldn't that make you scratch your head?
- [62:34]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [62:34]
Katie Foust
If a war torn country where women are losing their husbands to the front to maybe death because they were at war, if that's the place where women are signing up to be surrogates, shouldn't that make you question whether or not we should be doing this?
- [62:50]
Ali Stuckey
Right?
- [62:50]
Katie Foust
I mean, yet it's not. And of course, it's the kids, kids who suffer. You know, there was a situation, baby Bridget, that was not picked up in Ukraine because she had a disability. The parents wouldn't come and get her, so she was left there according to the surrogacy laws. The baby didn't belong to the surrogate. The baby couldn't be adopted because the child was stateless. So unfortunately, you know, she has simply had to piece a life together without her biological parents, without anybody that's even like claiming or adopting her. I mean, it's just incredibly. Actually, it's not just that it's unjust. It is unjust. I believe that those parents went on to have two healthy surrogate babies with somebody else so they could take home the product that they ordered, not the damaged goods that they Got with their first attempt.
- [63:36]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah, that reminds me of the woman that I had on. I. You probably know her story. Her name is Brittany. I think Jennifer Law originally connected me to her. She had been a surrogate in the past. Everything went, you know, as planned. And then she was a surrogate for two gay men. And she was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of her pregnancy. And because she had to go through chemotherapy, and the doctor said, yeah, you should probably give birth early, but we can save the baby and save you. It's totally possible, but this will be a preterm situation. The fathers said, we don't want a preterm baby. We, you know, don't want to deal with all of the complications of that preterm baby. Abort this child. You have to abort this child contractually, because it's not yours, it's ours. This is our choice. And so she was kind of, you know, a little blurry on what exactly happened. It sounded like she induced labor at an early time and that they didn't save the life of a child because she even offered. She said, I will adopt this child. Give me this child. Someone in my life will take care of this child. I will care for this child. And because the dads, so called, had parental rights, they had the right to say, no, we don't want to adopt this child out. We want this child to die. The mom said, do you want to come to the hospital? Hospital. While they're inducing labor? Do you want the remains of the child? No, don't talk to us again. So this child was die, you know, was killed or died, discarded like toxic waste. And the men moved on to another surrogate to get a quote, unquote healthy child with the, you know, the surrogate mom. Still, I'm sure reeling from dealing with the emotional trauma that this caused. And again, that is one story that we know. I guarantee you every anecdote that we are telling you today happens thousands and thousands of times, both here and abroad.
- [65:22]
Katie Foust
Well, and even when surrogacy goes well, there's a cost to the child. So last week, Sam Altman announced that he had a baby. And everyone's like, wait, what? He's gay? What's going on? And apparently he married his boyfriend last year, but he said, you know, something like, welcome to the world, little boy. You came early, so you're gonna spend some time in the nicu. But I've never been so in love or something like that. That. And, you know, I quote, tweeted him like, welcome to the world, motherless. Boy, you came early because you're the product of surrogacy. And surrogacy often results in preterm birth and preterm labor and all of the accompanying risks that go along with a baby that is not able to fully develop. And somebody's like, wait a second, why are surrogate born kids more likely to be preterm? And the answer is IVF is actually a risk factor for preterm birth. Right. There's something about making a baby in a laboratory, whether it's because you are selecting the sperm and injecting the sperm into the egg or something about the process of like exposing them to light or the freezing or the thawing or whatever it is. But IVF babies are high risk babies. They just always are. And they're more susceptible to preterm birth. Number two. There is something, Jennifer Law has spoken about the risk of genetic dissimilarity, that when the woman is carrying a baby who's not genetically hers, there does that does seem to trigger some kind of immunological response of rejection or at least the pregnancy is not going to go smoothly as it should. I think that there's also some placental development challenges that go along with surrogate pregnancies. And so even if the birth, the mother is happy, the surrogate is happy, the commissioning parents are happy, and if the child is born alive, there's still risks to the child, there's still medical risks. Risks. Preterm births is a big one.
- [67:10]
Ali Stuckey
Yep. You know, I read the other day, I did not know this, that when IVF is used specifically for male infertility, so for whatever it is, he's, he doesn't have enough sperm. His sperm isn't mobile. And so they're literally, you know, just as they always do in in vitro, they're putting the sperm and the egg together to make sure they are conceiving. There is a 66% increase in the, in the risk of a disability, a mental disability, and especially autism. Because I'm not saying that while you should just get over the fact that you're infertile, man, hopefully they're, you know, natural ways to try to increase your fertility. But, you know, like your body is telling you something, there is a reason why that sperm cannot get to that egg that is telling you something about your genetic abilities, your ability to reproduce. For the people who say trust the science, they don't believe what science has to tell them about marriage and reproduction.
- [68:07]
Katie Foust
So I am the mother of two high school boys, so that means that I Spend half of my time looking at Instagram reels and memes that they send me. And, you know, one of the ones is, like, the picture of the sperm, like, making their way through the Fallopian tube and, like, finally seeing the egg, and then the battle to see, like, which one is going to.
- [68:23]
Ali Stuckey
This is a video that you have been sent.
- [68:25]
Katie Foust
Oh, my gosh, there's so many videos like this. So many videos, right? And it is like, okay, finally the sperm, like, and it's always set to, like, rocky music. Okay, so the sperm finally, like, penetrates the egg. Like, the new life is created. And then it's something like, just remember, you were always the product of a winning sperm or something. But the reality is there is a sort of natural selection process that is going to allow the fittest sperm, the strongest sperm, to make it through that gauntlet of biological challenges that the female body will throw up to fertilization by design. You know, there's a good reason to not have us determine which sperm is injected into the egg, but allow some level of fitness to guide that. And like you said, sometimes, you know, I had Woman, Woman comment on one of the millions of IVF posts that happened, and she said, you know, everybody, every woman that I know, her case, this isn't the cases that I know of, but she said, almost all the people that I know who used ivf, the women were extremely overweight and fertility was a problem for them. And we do know that things like obesity can be a hindrance to fertility, to conception. And so it just speaks to. And I think that that has been some of the objection to the Trump executive order, especially from the people who are on the MAHA train, right? Is they're like, why aren't we looking at the underlying causes of infertility? Right? Why is it that infertility is such a big problem today? Why is it that sperm count has dropped 50% for men overall in the last 50 years? And the answer is, there's a lot of environmental causes, a lot of pollutants, a lot of chemicals in our diet, in our environment that is making it harder for people to conceive naturally. And so if we're going to do maha, let's do maha, but let's not circumvent. Instead of saying, okay, the infertility is a blinking light on the dashboard of reproductive health, saying, there's something wrong here. You're just circumventing. You're turning the light off, off, right? You're going to, like, make that happen outside of the natural processes why don't we really investigate and heal the problem to begin with instead of fueling this industry that rampantly victimizes children.
- [70:31]
Ali Stuckey
Yes. And we've had women on this show who have heard from their doctors, your only chance at getting pregnant is ivf. And they just didn't take that for an answer. And they dug deeper. And in some cases, I have friends who truly, they can't get pregnant. And so they've gone the adoption route, which is just beautiful. But then I've had others, like the guest I had on my show who went the natural fertility route, and it took longer. They had to dig deeper. They had to make lifestyle choices, both her and her husband, and all kinds of digging that sometimes is expensive because unfortunately, insurance doesn't cover that. Like, if we're going to expand insurance coverage, maybe let's move in the functional direction. But they were able to conceive a child that they were told by doctors they were never able to conceive. So I'm not saying, hey, if you're infertile, sorry, just live with it. Now, maybe that is God's plan for you not to have biological children. But there could be other solutions that don't pose a health, a health risk to you because IVF also increases the chances of things like breast cancer in women.
- [71:33]
Katie Foust
Well, we don't know a whole lot about what IVF and egg extraction causes women because Big Fertility is not studying it. It's actually hard for women to consent to the risks that go along to, for example, donating eggs, because we don't. They're like, well, there's no known risks because you have not looked.
- [71:50]
Ali Stuckey
Well, because the same people that are getting paid from extracting the eggs would also be the people studying that would.
- [71:55]
Katie Foust
Need to do the research. Yeah, right. Absolutely. Yeah. So I, I'm glad you brought up restorative reproductive medicine, natural procreative technologies, like, look it up, naprotechnologies. I mean, if you're struggling with infertility, put your finger on the source of the problem. There's a variety of different reasons why somebody might not be able to conceive. And some of them are treatable. A lot of them are treatable. You have friends that, that made those lifestyle changes, eventually got pregnant. I've got several friends who got pregnant very, very quickly because they're like, oh, you don't have, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to make something up. Yeah, right. You don't have the right level of estrogen. You know, here's a supplement. You could take. Here's something that you could do to, like, equalize. Get yourself to the right level. And then pregnancy was fairly easy for a couple of their kids. And it is simply because there's not a lot of incentive for fertility doctors to actually seek and resolve the underlying fertility issues. If they were, they would lose 12,000 to $25,000 by you being their customer, probably a repeat customer with IVF success rates. And so don't take their advice. Go the natural route. See a doctor that actually wants to identify, resolve and heal your underlying fertility issues if possible. And depending on the problem, you might see success rates at double what IVF is promising you.
- [73:10]
Ali Stuckey
Yes, especially in the case where someone is, maybe they're starting to have a child at 30. Maybe it's not because of, like, feminism and girl bossing. Maybe that's just the time that God, you know, brought you your husband. But that is not infertility. It is simply how the female body works. But also, people need to hear that your rates of success, your chance of success in ivf, the older you are, they go closer and closer to zero. Even if you do IVF, if you're 38 years old, you're going to have a really hard time getting pregnant. I think it's better all around, obviously, ethically and morally, but for your health and for your chances of getting pregnant to go the natural route, it's gonna be harder to get pregnant no matter what the older you are, but at least choose something that has no moral risk and is better for your body.
- [73:57]
Katie Foust
It's gonna make you healthier generally. Anyway, I'm. A lot of people are like, what are we doing with this infertility crisis? And I'm like, yes, infertility is a problem. Obviously, like, male fertility has been really well documented in terms of that struggle. But generally, we don't necessarily have a fertility problem. We have a you are getting married too late and ch to have children too late problem. Yeah, women have a very small window of easy pregnancy. It is late teens to early 30s. And unfortunately, a lot of the narratives that we are selling young women these days is to use that prime childbearing time to advance your career, to find yourself, to go to grad school. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't do those things. I'm not saying that you shouldn't take a trip to Italy or whatever. But if you think that you are going to put off childbearing until you are 33, 35, 37, 39, you might be working against your own body you know, I tell young women, you can have it all. You can have a marriage, you can have career, but you can't have it all at once.
- [74:54]
Ali Stuckey
Yeah.
- [74:55]
Katie Foust
And if you don't do marriage and kids first, if you can choose, a lot of women can't. A lot of women haven't found. Mr. Right. A lot of women are struggling with genuine fertility issues. But if you can choose, you've got to do marriage and kids first. You have to do that first.
- [75:10]
Ali Stuckey
I wish we had started earlier. Like, we got married at 23 as soon as we could after meeting each other, but waited a few years until we had kids. And obviously I'm so thankful for every specific child that we have with their specific genetic makeup. But I'm like, wait, why did we wait three years? Why did we wait those three years of like prime fertility to. And you know, but you never hear. I mean, I feel like you don't hear that that much. I'm thankful for our early years of marriage, but it's like, it'd be awesome to have like three more kids too.
- [75:40]
Katie Foust
Yeah.
- [75:41]
Ali Stuckey
So anyway, well, Katie, thank you so much. Are there any parting thoughts? Any final words that like to give.
- [75:46]
Katie Foust
Oh my gosh, that is quite an invitation.
- [75:48]
Ali Stuckey
Yes. Well, where can people find you support?
- [75:50]
Katie Foust
Oh, yeah, that's great. Then before us.com go subscribe, we have some really, really big things that are going to be coming out. Big interviews coming out in the next couple weeks. We have a lot of projects that we're working on for the first time. We have policy recommendations for state level lawmakers so that we can start to do what we can to keep big fertility in check state by state, but also working to retake lost marriage ground. Like, I'm tired of playing defense on all of these different critical areas of the social fabric of marriage and parenthood and families. I want to go on the offense on behalf of children. I want people to start speaking up and boldly advancing the rights of kids both in their personal lives and in the policy world. So I guess that's what I'd say. Like, come and subscribe. Find us on all the social media. I'm on Twitter. Too many much X Too much. Probably should have an intervention there, but yeah, we'd love to see you over there if you're on the socials.
- [76:44]
Ali Stuckey
Okay. Thank you so much, Katie.
- [76:46]
Katie Foust
Yeah.