← Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Ep 1206 | The Harsh Reality of Being an IVF Baby | Jennifer Lahl
01:00:36
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- [00:00]
Richard Karn
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- [00:59]
Ally Stuckey
Available@pocket hose.com terms is Embryo adoption Ethical? You might think the answer to that question is an easy yes, but it might be a little more layered and complex than you think. Jennifer Law is the founder of the center for Bioethics and Culture. She has been on the show several times talking about the dangers of ivf, surrogacy and big fertility. Today we're talking about a range of subjects, but we will also focus on.
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Callie Fell
Embryo adoption and she will give her.
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Ally Stuckey
Her perspective on this very contentious issue. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com use code Ally at checkout. That's go to ranchers.com code Ally Jennifer, thanks so much for taking the time to join us again, this time in person for the first time.
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Jennifer Law
So excited. It's not on Zoom.
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Ally Stuckey
I know, me too. You've been on the show several times, but for those who maybe aren't familiar, just remind us of your background, who you are and what you do.
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Jennifer Law
Yeah, I'm Jennifer Law and I founded an organization called the center for Bioethics and Culture. And I was in a previous life, a pediatric critical care nurse for many, many years and I was sort of concerned about where medical ethics was headed. So I pursued a graduate degree in bioethics and founded the center to be an educational resource. I've spent a lot of my energy in the area of assisted reproductive technology because I have a deep passion for mommies and their babies.
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Ally Stuckey
Yes. And what was it when you were a pediatrician, pediatric care nurse, that started to make you concerned about medical ethics and what was going on in hospitals?
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Jennifer Law
Yeah, well, a couple of things. One was it shifted more from a medical profession to a service provider model. So now we see that today you just walk in and you tell your doctor, I was born in the wrong body, I'm a boy, make me a girl, you know, okay, sure, you know. So move from an actual do no harm, doctor knows best, doctor's the expert to I'm just here to provide you, my client, for whatever you wanted. I also saw the shift in names. The last hospital I worked in, we were told to call our patients clients and they were our customers. And I don't know about you, but if you go see your doctor now, the first thing you get, usually in the email, is your customer satisfaction service. You know, were you pleased with your visit with your doctor? Did they. You felt like they took time with you, so it's moved in that way. And because I was in pediatric critical care, we're always pushing the just because we can, should we do this? Especially on little premature babies. I worked with the doctor who did the first surgery where they took the baby out of the mommy's uterus and did the defect repair, put the baby back up so the baby could then grow in the womb and then be born healthy. Because the particular defect this baby had, if he'd been a normal delivery, the child probably would not have survived. So those are good things. But then there's also other things that were just, you know, should we be doing this and are we thinking about that? And because it's parents that have to consent for their children, I had this burden knowing that these are parents that have to make urgent life and death decisions that they have to live with for the rest of their life. So how can we make sure that everybody has all the information, the good information, the ethical, the science based information, and make those kind of decisions so no matter what the outcome is, at least they can go home and have some sense of, we did all we could or we did what was needed to be done. So those kinds of things in this sort of a broader profession.
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Ally Stuckey
And what made you interested in the world of reproductive technology like IVF and.
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Jennifer Law
Surrogacy, that was totally happenstance and was I founded the center for Bioethics and Culture during the George Bush presidency when he was, you know, had to navigate the whole embryonic stem cell research, the human cloning. You know, I live in California. The campaign was Cures for California. We have to do this research because we're going to save people's lives. And that took me into a deep dive, because at that time, the debate was over the half a million frozen human embryos. Now, in the US we have over a million. But I thought, how did we come to have a half a million frozen embryos? And then that led me down the rabbit hole of fertility medicine, what I call big fertility. And then I started writing and speaking about that, and women contacted me, women who sold their eggs and said, let me tell you what happened to me. I lost my fertility, I lost an ovary, I had a stroke, you know, things like that. And that's how I kind of got into filmmaking. I never set out to do the whole work in reproductive technology or to make films, but, you know, God has plans.
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Ally Stuckey
Yes. So I'm curious what it was for you internally that made you realize this is not right. What's going on in Big Fertility isn't ethical because most people I say, I don't know about, especially in the medical profession, but I come in contact with a lot of nurses who will very passionately defend IVF and surrogacy. And they say, I see how much these parents want these babies. These babies are fought for, they are cared for. But you had a different reaction to that. You thought, okay, what is happening to these women, these egg sellers, these surrogates, the babies who are born of ivf, the frozen embryos? It's not right. So I'm curious what kind of fueled your response to thinking like, this is an injustice.
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Jennifer Law
Yeah, well, that's what drives a lot of my work. I hate injustice. I am a truth seeker in the name of justice. If you look at the women who are either being surrogates or they're selling their eggs, or sometimes they do both, they're not patients. So the doctor has no business asking them to do things medically to their body that they don't have any medical reason to do. And, oh, by the way, let's pay you money to do this. It's one thing if you're sick, you have cancer, and you take medicines and you assume medical risk. You're not paid to do that. You know, you have to pay mightily for those hospital bills. So I saw that using of healthy people who are not patients and aren't protected through, you know, all the ways that patients are protected if their doctor harms them. So that was one element of just a massive gross injustice. Sure. The person who says, but these young egg donors want to do it, they want to help, they want to give their sister her eggs or their girlfriends, and what's wrong with it? And oh, shouldn't she be paid? No, because that's not proper medicine. Now if you look at the individual woman who's infertile, I just knew it's fraught with risk. IVF is fraught with risk. It's risky to the woman's health, it's risky to the health of the unborn child. Most people don't know that. I even think nurses that are saying, oh, it's great, what's wrong with it? They haven't really done the research. You can just follow the CDC data. And for the last 10 plus years, overwhelmingly all IVF cycles fail. That's why we have over a million frozen embryos. We have to make a lot in hopes eventually one will become a take home baby or more. And, you know, we've been at this since, you know, the late 70s when we had the first IVF baby. Louise Brown was born in England. And so we're slowly getting studies, you know, in the early days when you're doing it just like smoking. In the early days, we didn't have the studies, we didn't have the data. And now we're getting the data, now we're getting the data that it's risky to women's health. We're getting the data that it's risky. It makes pregnancy risky. You know, preterm labor, all kinds of pregnancy related complications. And any mom out there listening who knows that they're in a high risk pregnancy, the baby's at risk. And we know that these babies born of assisted reproduction are at higher risk of things. Like I've told you, my grandson was born with a heart defect. And when his care was transferred to a big university hospital in California, two independent pediatric cardiologists there said, is he an IVF baby? He's not. But in the medical literature, IVF babies have much higher rates of congenital heart defects at birth. You know, shouldn't that be something that at least could make us pause and think, do we? We know that pregnancy is risky. We know that, you know, any child that's born healthy, praise God, because there's a lot of things that can go wrong to make children born with all kinds of defects. But knowingly doing it, I think is problematic.
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Callie Fell
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- [11:22]
Ally Stuckey
Do we know what it is about IVF that makes. Let's start.
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Callie Fell
Well, there are a lot of different.
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Ally Stuckey
Layers to that one. Do we know what it is about IVF that makes pregnancy riskier for the mom and the baby?
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Jennifer Law
We don't know specifically yet because again, it's back to the data and we haven't been doing this for a long period of time. And so it takes a while to get big sample sizes and try, you know, watch kids over time to see, oh, we now have 700 kids that were born through IVF that have X. So what's supposed. Some of it's supposed that IVF allows a couple who normally naturally wouldn't be able to conceive to conceive so whether that's an evolutionary process thing, whether that's a, you know, mother nature thing, whether that's a God opening and closing the womb things, it's where we've taken into our own hands. I don't want to say forcing, but, you know, making a couple for whatever reason can't produce produce. So is it, Is it that? So this is a couple that for whatever reasons would naturally ever be, you know, because we've always had the Barren womb. You know, we always will have infertile people, as tragic as that is. So that's some of it. Some of it's a technique. You know, one of the procedures is called icsi. That's where, you see, they take the little sperm and they shoot it into the egg. And so we're wondering, well, that damages the wall of the cell, of the egg cell. You know, when you force that in. And when you look at natural conception, you know, the. You know, the sperm will swim around the egg and. And one makes it in. And is that a programming that we're ignoring? Because we're just picking one arbitrarily. So there's so much of that stuff that's going on, and it will also vary on what's the underlying fertility problem. And that's why we both love the restorative reproductive approach, because it's actually trying to diagnose the problem and fix the problem, not find a workaround.
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Ally Stuckey
I read a study the other day that said that the prevalence of autism is much higher in children who are born from ivf, specifically because there was a fertility problem on the father's part. So that is because, say, a dad has basically immobile sperm. They're just not fast enough, strong enough to do what they have to do in the natural fertility reproduction process. And so in ivf, as you said, you take that sperm, you put it on the egg so it doesn't have to travel. Well when IVF is done for that reason, because I don't know how else to say this, maybe this is politically incorrect, but, like, you got lame sperm. It's just not working. There is a reason that that sperm isn't working. There's an underlying issue there that will affect the baby that is born because those sperm weren't actually. They're not. They weren't supposed to recreate. And when you force them to recreate, then the baby is going to inherit a lot of problems. And so I just thought that was interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before because typically when you think about ivf, you think about some problem that the mom has that will have no effect on the child. But, you know, just by sheer bad luck, she just wasn't able to bear a child, and IVF helps her do that. But there are a lot of things, underlying issues that we are masking by forcing the egg and the sperm together.
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Jennifer Law
Exactly. I mean, it's just, you know, people like to say we're playing God. And I always say, well, no, because God doesn't play that way, we're playing naughty people.
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Ally Stuckey
Yeah, that's a good point.
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Jennifer Law
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we think about the other areas where we would not tolerate that. We want vegetables that aren't, you know, sprayed and pesticide and we want, you know, chemicals outside of our food. We don't like cloned meat and GMO kinds of things in our environment. We don't want to drink water out of plastic bottles anymore or store our leftovers in plastic Tupperware. You know, all those things that make the case that there's a natural order to how things are supposed to work and how our bodies are supposed to work. And even though the human body is incredibly resilient, our fertility is very fragile. You know, we have a fertile window of a very small part. You know, people are living into their 80s and 90s today, but, you know, there's a very small window of that fertility. And there's. You know, I don't mean to be sounding like I'm harsh to women, but there's many women that wait late, you know, and the reality is our bodies work a certain way, and we're not supposed to have babies in our 40s and 50s now that naturally can occur, but it's not the.
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Ally Stuckey
It's not the norm.
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Jennifer Law
Yeah, it's not the norm. So, you know, I just. I want, you know, young girls are on summer vacation now. They're going to be going to college in a few months. Don't sell your eggs. When you see all the ads in your campus newspapers and flyers on the bulletin boards at, you know, don't. Or take oral contraception. You know, we know so many women that orally contraceptive for so long to put off pregnancy, and then when they finally went to get pregnant, they couldn't get pregnant. You know, there's. We play with fire.
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Ally Stuckey
Yeah, let's talk about those two things. Well, gosh, there's so many things I want to talk about. Okay, to close out that part of the conversation, I'm reading a lot right now about our fertility. And as you said, like, our bodies are so intricate and resilient, but at the same time very fragile, especially the fertility process for women. We're only supposed to release one egg per month, and our bodies internally, without our mind even knowing it, are very selective about the sperm that we allow in. The body has this hole before conception, like this whole natural selection process that the sperm has to fight really hard to get through. And even that fertilized egg has to be strong enough to be able to get through the endometrium and to be able to implant. And of course I'm not telling you anything that you don't know. But for the audience who doesn't know this, like God has designed our bodies in such intricate ways that are supposed to lend itself, you know, to the creation of life in a natural way. And when we short circuit that there are going to be consequences when technology takes us from what natural to what's possible, Christians have the responsibility to ask, is that ethical? Is that right? Is that good? Is it going to produce something good?
- [17:57]
Callie Fell
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- [17:58]
Ally Stuckey
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- [18:00]
Callie Fell
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- [18:58]
Ally Stuckey
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- [18:59]
Callie Fell
I'll just tell you the speakers have a discount code. You could use Abby 15 or Elisa 15 and you'll get 15 off your ticket. That's the first time I'm talking about it on the show. If you so make sure that you get your tickets, you can get that discounted rate. Doesn't apply to the VIP tickets though. Go to ShareTheAeros.com that's ShareThe Arrows.com.
- [19:23]
Ally Stuckey
But to kind of shift away from that to something else that you said, women going into college, they are trying. They are being recruited to sell their eggs.
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Jennifer Law
Yeah, yeah. When I made the first film was called Eggsploitation and two of my daughters happened to be students at the University of California ber and they brought home their school paper, the Daily Californian and it had a big ad offering $100,000 for an elite donor. I mean, who doesn't want to like at least sort of maybe call and get some more information? So, you know, young girls are being bombarded, especially if they're at Ivy League schools. This is eugenic. We don't just want any girl's eggs. We want the right girl's eggs. We want the right baby, whatever that means. You know, men can't campus two, solicit sperm from guys. They'll go, oh, I can make 50 bucks this weekend for pizza money or whatever. And then for surrogacy, it's largely military wives, so it's different demographics. And then back to my point about medicine, what's the purpose of medicine being involved in this at all? This is not medicine. Medicine is aimed toward health. This is not the health of the young girl who's selling her eggs. This is not the health of a surrogate mother who's risking perhaps her life. So, yeah, beware, don't sell your eggs, girls. And I tell, when I speak on university campuses, I'll tell people, you're not just selling your eggs, you're selling your children. You know, that is your child. That child's going to grow up one day and go, who do I look like? Whose nose do I have? You know, how come I'm the only one in the family that has curly hair and everybody else has straight hair? You know, so it's, you know, it's again, it's that we're, we're tearing apart what God has put together. We're tearing apart which, that which should not be torn apart. And that is the, you know, the unitive, procreative, husband and wife come together. And that's how children are. I knit you together in your mother's womb, not like I built you in a laboratory petri dish. And we tested the ones we wanted. We froze the ones we weren't ready to use first. You know, it's just manufacturing. It's, it's CS Lewis. Abolition of Man, I think is a very profound essay because, you know, Lewis basically says, you know, our final conquest will be the abolition of man. You know, do we want to just tear down the, the, the humanity.
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Ally Stuckey
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of Brave New World. They used to think that 1984 was the dystopian novel that everyone needs to read, and they do. But Brave New World is almost more on the nose, especially when it comes to the creation and reproductive reproduction of humans. The growing these babies in pods, taking them away from their family and everything that is n. To condition them to think a certain way. That was very anti human. I mean, that is exactly what's going on in the world of reproductive technology. But the propaganda is so strong, the guilt is so Strong for those who do have ethical questions about it, because we're told that we don't understand the pain of infertility.
- [22:30]
Jennifer Law
Well, I think that's a very thin argument because I've never had cancer, but I wouldn't say, ah, just cancer. You know, you don't have to experience something to know if it's right or wrong. You know, it's, It's. It's intuitive to us. We will see things. You know, we. You know, I don't know if you want to go there, but, you know, there's all this chatter about Glenn. Glenn Greenwald.
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Ally Stuckey
Yeah.
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Jennifer Law
You know, and it's like we don't want. We don't want to judge. We don't want to condemn. We don't want to say, this is right, this is wrong. We don't want to be moralistic, wagging our fingers. But, you know, that's what's gotten us into this pickle that we're in. You know, how else do we get all these. Over a million embryos? And a lot of those are probably little Christian embryos, you know, that are now being frozen, adopted out to Christian, you know, agencies. But, you know, the heart is desperately wicked. So. Yeah, but, you know, I like the. The movie Gattaca. I don't know if you've ever seen that.
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Ally Stuckey
I haven't. Yeah, I've heard of, but I haven't seen it yet.
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Jennifer Law
Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman. It's a really great. It's a whole designer baby. You know, this couple comes in and they are meeting with the geneticist who says, why would you want to leave anything for chance? You know, basically that argument, if you want to raise your kids to get into Harvard, why wouldn't you start at the egg and sperm level with the best, you know, shot? Do all the testing, weed out the bad genes, weed out the bad embryos. And I think about a professor at Stanford who I actually debated once, Hank Greely. He's a lawyer, and he wrote a book called the End. And he basically was sort of putting out this premise that why would you want to have babies through sex? You can have sex for fun, you can have sex for intimacy, but why wouldn't you want to make all your babies in the laboratory? We have all this control, and that's scary to me. But that's here.
- [24:22]
Ally Stuckey
Oh, yeah.
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Jennifer Law
I mean, it's here.
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Ally Stuckey
There's the company. We talked about it. Maybe it was with Callie that I talked about this with your colleague. And it's about this company that was Covered by the New York Times. The founder of it is talking about it very proudly on acts. And she says sex is for fun. IVF is for reproduction, which is just a shock to the conscience for me. I mean, I was scandalized by her saying that, which is maybe the point. She's trying to shock people and reel people in. But she tells a story about how her grandmother passed down this degenerative eye disease. And wow, what if she had not been able to do that? Like, what if her great grandmother and her grandmother had been able to make choices? And I'm like, then you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be here. You're saying that you want your grandmother to have been selected out in a lab because she had some degenerative disease. We're talking about eugenics, are we not?
- [25:14]
Jennifer Law
Yeah, it's really frightening. And you see that really on this full display in what I call third party conception, which is when you're looking through catalogs to pick out your egg donor. You know, you're looking through catalogs to pick out your sperm donor. Your, you know, by order, by design, you're picking the child that you want and the child you don't want. And overwhelmingly, everybody's doing genetic testing on the embryos. And back to why do so many of these embryos fail? Well, you know, when you have a four or eight, you know, cell embryo and you go in and take out a cell to do the testing on it and that, that's a significant part of that little embryo that you're just like, oh, it doesn't matter. We'll just take one cell out so we can tell you it's got down syndrome. It's going to be a boy, it's going to be X, Y and Z, you know, and, you know, just the whole blatant, you know, sex selection. Ivf.
- [26:06]
Ally Stuckey
Yep, Absolutely. Okay. Speaking of that idea that you said that, okay, sex is just for fun, it's not for reproduction. 60 Minutes just a couple weeks ago featured someone named Dr. Tomer Singer. He's the head of Northwell Health's fertility practice. And here's what he said to Leslie Singh. Leslie Stahl here is Top four.
- [26:27]
Tomer Singer
I said that sex is going to be for fun and for pleasure. But most likely a generation from now when couples want to have kids, most likely they're going to be using artificial reproductive technique. You'll have frozen eggs.
- [26:40]
Jennifer Law
Wait, are you saying that we won't have sex to have children?
- [26:44]
Tomer Singer
I'm sure my 2 year old will ask me, mom, dad, you had unprotected intercourse. What about chromosomal abnormalities, Miscarriages, Twins? What were you doing?
- [26:54]
Ally Stuckey
That would be a really weird question to ask your parents, but okay, what is your thought about that?
- [27:01]
Jennifer Law
My thought is it's already happening. You know, it's here. It's like if you watch the movie Gattaca, which was made over 20 years ago. It was sci fi then and now it's here. So that's coming. It's going to be normalized, you know, again, you'll be walking down the street with your child that maybe has a disability that's visible to the people passing by, and they're going to stop you and say, you mean you did that on purpose? You know, we have something that could have prevented that, you know, and you kind of go. And you're going to seem like, okay, you just want to burden society by producing these kinds of people. I mean, what have we become? Yeah, what have we become?
- [27:39]
Ally Stuckey
What do you think is the likelihood that most people will be reproducing their children via ivf? I have a hard time buying that.
- [27:48]
Jennifer Law
I think the most people that will be doing it will be the elites. You know, they can pay for it. Yeah.
- [27:55]
Ally Stuckey
They can select for eye color, not just gender. They can select for all these different attributes, these boutique fertility specialist clinics.
- [28:03]
Jennifer Law
And, you know, again, I'm trying not to, you know, lump all the elite people in one big bucket and pile on them, but, you know, this is, you know, there's a demographic of people that already disorders everything, you know, so, you know, uber eats, you know, uber babies.
- [28:19]
Ally Stuckey
Yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. The commercialization of our reproductive parts of our genetic material and the ability to.
- [28:27]
Jennifer Law
Justify it, because I don't want to produce children that are going to be a burden on society, whatever that means, because there's plenty of healthy people you could argue are a burden on society.
- [28:36]
Ally Stuckey
Right, Right. Yeah. It's just a wrong view of people measuring their worth by something other than just their existence as human beings.
- [28:49]
Callie Fell
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- [29:59]
Ally Stuckey
You know, I've argued with a lot of pro lifers about this. Like you were the first person I had on my show to talk about big fertility. And I think I had talked about IVF and sperm and egg selling once before. I had you on, but I had you on. And that opened that episode alone. It was so popular, it opened so many people's eyes and really sparked such a conversation. I mean, a few years ago I would say most people on the right wouldn't even touch this subject. But then we, we have you, we have Katie Faust. We have so many people speaking up about this. And then we started getting tests like Dave Rubin announcing his surrogacy situation where people started to think, huh, how did this happen? What's going on here? And now a lot of people are talking about it. Even SNL had a whole, you know, parody asking the gay couple, where'd you get the baby? Did you kidnap the baby? How in the world could you have procured this baby? But still, still there are so many Christians, so many pro lifers that refuse to think about the ethics behind this because their friend went through infertility or they have their kids because of ivf. It's a really difficult conversation. Like, how would you say is the most persuasive method that we can employ when we're trying to get people to understand what's going on here.
- [31:22]
Jennifer Law
Yeah, I, I will often say I don't have talking points because everybody has to talk to their friends or their neighbors in an area where you think it will touch them. You know, sometimes I will have conversations with couples that are thinking about pursuing ivf, about the health risks. Did you know? Because most people don't know and their doctor's not telling them. Did you know the risk to the child that might be born of this? You know, some of them who are thinking about using third party conception, you know, that's a different point of entry into a conversation about, you know, you're asking a young woman to perhaps lose her fertility and hopefully helping you, do you really want to put that burden? You know, can you live with yourself? I know a couple that has a child through surrogacy, and the surrogate mother died, you know, like, moments after the baby was delivered. And for their whole life, they have to live with the guilt that every time they look at their child, this child, that woman lost her life. For them to have that, you know, that's a heavy burden, you know, So I think with stories like that, you know, people can kind of. Some of it's just finances. Do you know you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars, maybe ruin your health and maybe never even get a baby? You know, is that really how you're supposed to be using your financial resources? Because we're stewards of everything. Our body, our time, our money. So for me, it's really, who are you speaking with? Like you just said, most people just don't know. They just think, oh, they got a baby. Isn't that great? Thank you, God, for this wonderful new breakthrough in medicine to help us have babies.
- [32:59]
Ally Stuckey
And most people don't think about the leftover embryos. There was, you know, a gay couple that did this whole video talking about how, you know, they've got two surrogates, they've got two egg sellers, and they're both trying to have their own biological children. And they go through this whole process and they have, I think, 12 embryos. I mean, are they gonna have a dozen children? No, of course they're not. They're probably gonna have two. And no one asks, well, what about the other 10? What about their siblings? What's gonna happen to them? Most people just, honestly, they don't think about it. And if they do, they shut their mind off because they don't want to think about it.
- [33:37]
Jennifer Law
And it's human experimentation. I mean, all over Instagram, just like a few weeks ago was a picture of a little baby that was born that had been frozen 20 something years. I mean, have we even stopped to think? We just did it. You know, most of the time when things make their way to being used in the doctor's office, they've gone through years and years of clinical trials, and all the clinical trials are focused on safety. Is it safe? Does it work? Is it safe? Does it work? And we. There's no clinical trial. We don't know. Is it safe to freeze a human embryo for 20 plus years? Yeah, we don't know. We're just doing it.
- [34:09]
Ally Stuckey
Yeah.
- [34:10]
Jennifer Law
And the Child can't consent to that.
- [34:12]
Ally Stuckey
Right.
- [34:12]
Jennifer Law
You know, the child and the parents aren't told. You know, we don't really know we're gonna freeze them, but we don't really know.
- [34:19]
Ally Stuckey
Yes. Okay. I want to talk about embryo adoption because I get this question a lot and you know, I have a hard time with it because I remember something that you said a few years ago that, you know, you would rather people, if they're going to adopt, to adopt the children that are already born. Right. And am I saying that correctly? Okay, I want to kind of break that down because I also don't think it is immor for someone to adopt what they call, like this snowflake baby. I think a snowflake adoption where you take the frozen embryo, you implant it into yourself and then you have this child, you raise this child. But is that the way to solve the problem of having over a million frozen embryos, or does that create a demand for more frozen embryos? What do you think?
- [35:04]
Jennifer Law
I've written a lot about this and I have very formed, solidly formed opinions which don't put me in good standing with some pro life people. I think first, we have no business freezing embryos. Under Germany federal law. Thou shall not freeze an embryo. We need federal laws. That said, that's it. We've got over a million, no more. This is wrong. We're going to stop freezing embryos. We're not going to shut down ivf. We're not going to do a Supreme Court, Arkansas case and everybody loses their mind. But, you know, we're going to stop freezing human embryos. In Germany, the law is you can make three and you have to implant them all. So I'm not a big fan of three because that's a risky pregnancy. But we need to stop freezing them. Then we need to have some kind of a plan where we go back to the people. It's like, you know, I used to have birthday parties for my kids. You know, there was always the parents that would come like an hour late, like, come get your kids. I would go back to those people and say, these are your children. You need to make a decision about what to do with them. The burden is on you to decide what to do with your children. You can either have more children because they're your children, you can allow them to be embryo adopted, or you can allow them to die. I think it's cruel to keep them frozen indefinitely. So those are kind of your options. Now. The argument is a lot of those people have moved on. We don't even know where they are because there's a. There's a whole issue with just tracking big fertility and what's going on. So when you can't find people, then I think then we as a society have to come to terms with what to do with them if they're not going to be embryo adopted. The problems I have with embryo adoption are twofold. One is the medical problems. You're still not getting rid of the risk of an IVF baby. So that baby that's been frozen has the complications and the risk exposure of babies that are born through assisted reproductive technology. That's how we got the embryo. And then when you embryo adopt into your womb, you're like a surrogate mother. And we know surrogate pregnancies are risky because you're pregnant with a foreign object. It's not your baby. It's like when you get a splinter and your finger gets infected. You've got something that's in there, so it's good.
- [37:13]
Ally Stuckey
It's different DNA also.
- [37:14]
Jennifer Law
Yeah. So it could be a high risk pregnancy, and it could be a high risk pregnancy that's risky to the mother and also to the child. So you can't get away with those risks. And then I think my final is, you know, in adoption. And, you know, Katie Faust is so solid in this space on adoption, and I've learned much from her. But, you know, we know that we're supposed to tell children early and often their story, you know, no secrets. I'm old enough. When I was growing up, my parents would say, shh, they're adopted. They don't know. You know, there's no secrets now. It's not good. But here's a child that's going to be be told. Your parents really wanted children, and so they made a bunch of embryos and you didn't get picked right away, so you got put in the freezer. And then they had their children, and then they decided their family was done, so they didn't want you anymore. And then you have to tell this little child that you were really wanted, but not really that wanted because you were not wanted enough to get the first implantation, you know, and then. And then they decided you're not part of their family anymore because their family's done, their family's complete. And, oh, by the way, you have siblings out there that were lucky. They were chosen first, so you have brothers and sisters out. I just think that's going to be a hard, hard thing for a kid.
- [38:33]
Ally Stuckey
Is that different than the story that you would tell a child who was.
- [38:36]
Callie Fell
Adopted as a newborn, though, it is.
- [38:39]
Jennifer Law
That, because a lot of times it's not. Well, I wish Katie was here because she would have the stats, but, you know, a child that's adopted, there's you. Some reason that the parents can't raise a child. My sister has an adopted child. The mother was a street mom. She was just in and out of rehab. She was a drug user. So it wasn't that she wanted or didn't want. Who knows? She wasn't even in her right mind. So it's not the same of really wanting something that you just tuck away and freeze and then you decide you changed your mind. You know, adoption is. There's this child that's just been born. You know, for whatever reason, we can't put this child in that home. I mean, it could be. It could be drugs, it could be alcohol, it could be whatever. I still think that's. We can help with those problems. So more and more moms can keep their babies and we can come alongside them.
- [39:31]
Ally Stuckey
Right. But, yeah, I mean, babies who are frozen embryos and ivf, they're typically coming from parents who have the means to go through ivf. So that's like, typically parents who have a lot of resources. So it's not like, oh, we couldn't afford this child, or, you know, I was an addict or I was in a destitute situation. It's like, no, we could afford our child. We just wanted to stop at 4. We're good to go. Sorry. You're gonna be frozen forever. That, I do think, is probably a more difficult origin story for a child to understand than the child of, like, yes, your mom did want you, but she couldn't take care of you, so she did this valiant, heroic thing of allowing us to care for you.
- [40:17]
Jennifer Law
I think that's critical, and you articulate it much better than I did. And also the fact that adoption laws have changed dramatically over the last many years where adoption records are open so children have access to original birth certificates. Now, that's not the case in embryo adoption. Now, you may know who the parents of the frozen embryos are, and there are stories out there of parents who shared their embryos, and now they're all one big happy family. But I don't think that really works. But, you know, the. The child that's been frozen for 20 something years, we might not ever be able to tell that child who their mother and father are.
- [40:54]
Ally Stuckey
Yeah. Would you say it was a win, though, if, say, a million Christian moms, a Million Christian women said, okay, we are going to clear out the freezers and we are all going to adopt these frozen embryos. Like, would you say that that is positive or would you still have. Would you still have some concerns about that?
- [41:16]
Jennifer Law
Yes, I would. First I'd say, well, let's take care of all the. Adopt the orphans out there. Let's take care of all the kids in foster care. Right now, I know there was, I think it was a church in Texas where the whole church just said, we want all the kids that are in foster care. They are now permanently living in our home. Yes.
- [41:31]
Ally Stuckey
We interviewed the filmmaker from that story is amazing.
- [41:34]
Jennifer Law
So I think as a matter of priority, again, I think our priorities to the children already here that are languishing in orphanages or foster home or, you know, that don't have, you know, permanent homes to be raised in.
- [41:48]
Ally Stuckey
Not because we think that they have more inherent worth than the babies in the freezer.
- [41:54]
Jennifer Law
Correct, Correct. It's just. Yeah. And all the stuff we're talking about is what's called a supererogatory act. We are required to do any of this. We're not required to adopt. We're not required to adopt embryos. We can do it. But if we don't, we're not gonna stand before God one day and he's gonna say, why didn't you adopt the orphans? You know, it's not something that we have to do to be in good moral standing. So. But I think I'm like the champion women taking risks with their health. I mean, most women who maybe would say, yeah, I'll be a part of the party to adopt all the frozen embryos, they're probably young moms with their own children. And why would you want to put that young mom in a high risk pregnancy situation that might cause all kinds of complications to her when her, you know, medically, our best interest is her health and well being to be there to provide for her own children.
- [42:55]
Callie Fell
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- [44:03]
Ally Stuckey
When you're giving your message to young women going to college, don't sell your eggs. People might call it egg donation, but you taught me it's not really donation. It is selling. They just say donation so they can get around the law. But you also said, don't take hormonal contraceptives. So how does that relate to the things we're talking about?
- [44:22]
Jennifer Law
Well, we're talking about preserving fertility. You know, we're talking about maintaining our healthy, fertile bodies. And I think when you're putting oral contraception in your body and that evidence is out there, I mean, if people don't know about it, it's, you know, I always say, why did God give us Google? So you can go and ask, you know, what are the, you know, so why would you want to take something that's very fragile, that is a short window of your time and play fast and loose with it? It's the same thing with, I mean, obesity. Obesity is driving infertility rates in the United States. And that's not healthy for you. Smoking. The first things they say, get your BMI down. If you smoke, don't smoke. If you drink alcohol, stop drinking. Those kinds of things. That. Because it's fragile and it's precious. And don't we take care of things that are really precious to us?
- [45:17]
Ally Stuckey
I know I am now, like, retrospectively appreciating so much of what my body was able to do in getting pregnant and in having a baby. As I am learning about how intricate the ovulation cycle is and how, you know, you mentioned human experiments that we're doing on embryos. We're also doing those on women, not just through surrogacy and egg selling and ivf, but also in the suppression of the ovulatory cycle for years at a time when your ovulation and your period is really like, like a fifth vital sign. Like, it is something that indicates how your body is doing in other areas. When we artificially suppress that, we, I mean, we know some of what that's doing. We don't know everything about the damage that that's causing women. And I actually think it could be helping drive the fertility crisis in our country.
- [46:08]
Jennifer Law
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [46:10]
Ally Stuckey
Yeah.
- [46:11]
Jennifer Law
And, you know, I a call also to young girls that are listening, learn your body. I mean, I didn't know when I was growing up, I had no idea what was going on in a 30 day period. You know, I knew eventually I'd have a period, but I didn't know what was going on before, during, after. I didn't know anything about temperatures and, you know, all that. And it's so funny in the age of information how absolutely clueless a lot of women are about how their body works.
- [46:39]
Ally Stuckey
Yes. And maybe we would all appreciate, and young girls would appreciate more being a woman, being female if they knew how amazing their bodies were. Which brings me into my next set of questions, which is about the, you know, transgender trend that is really lucrative for big fertility and for our medical industrial complex. You said on my show that those who go through so called gender transition, they get on the puberty blockers, the cross sex hormones, all of this stuff which can be effectively sterilizing. They are becoming lifelong slaves to the medical industrial complex. So you've done even more work on this since we last talked. So can you break that down for us? What's going on there?
- [47:25]
Jennifer Law
Well, yeah, and I wasn't even planning to get involved in the gender debate work at all. But, you know, Callie Fell, who you mentioned earlier, and I were both nurses. She's a labor and delivery perinatal nurse. I was pediatric. And when we found out that they were blocking puberty and then they were offering fertility preservation, which is the intersection of big fertility into the trans space, we thought that is it. So, yeah, when you are before you block puberty, you offer ovarian tissue or testicular tissue preservation because there's no gamete yet, there's no egg or sperm that are mature that can be frozen because the child hasn't gone through puberty. So you take the tissue of the testicles and the ovaries in hopes of freezing that and implanting it later on when the child wants to have a child and hoping it takes. And then if they've already been through puberty, you offer them fertility preservation to freeze and bank their egg or their sperm. I think that is just pure evil. You are knowingly damaging healthy fertility with a treatment. Treatment in quotes. That is not needed. This is not a needed treatment. It's not like we damage children's fertility. If they have cancer and they have to take chemo and so that's when we got in that space. And two colleagues of mine just published a paper a few months ago, and I happened to be providentially in D.C. in a meeting with Educational Secretary Linda McMahon and the Senior Policy Advisor for RFK, and his name is Andrew Guernsey. And Andrew mentioned that Trump had tasked the HHS to do a report. And so my little radar went off because our publisher paper was just about ready to come out, and we were able to send it to Andrew and get that paper cited. But we actually looked at fertility preservation from. It started with endangered species. You know, we want to protect, you know, some beloved whale from going extinct. Then it went to cancer patients, adults, and it went to pediatric cancer patients. And then it moved into this gender category. It's a train wreck. I mean, and you are. It's almost in my mind, it's criminal that you do something that would knowingly damage and then you offer fertility preservation. And if you're in your doctor's office and your doctor is offering you something, you go, oh, he's offering it because it works.
- [49:41]
Ally Stuckey
Right?
- [49:41]
Jennifer Law
You know, you just assume, and you should be able to assume that. And so these children who've had their fertility damaged, well, then if they want to have children, they will need all kinds of assisted reproductive technologies depending on, you know, what parts of their body were. You know, if you're a woman and you had your uterus removed as part of your gender surgery, you'll need a surrogate.
- [50:04]
Ally Stuckey
Right? Well, and it's not. Even if you do choose to preserve those parts of your DNA, I mean, your body and your reproductive organs, even if you don't get a hysterectomy, they atrophy so much because of the testosterone. It is. I mean, it's not guaranteed that you will be able to physically carry a pregnancy.
- [50:24]
Jennifer Law
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [50:26]
Ally Stuckey
Yeah.
- [50:26]
Jennifer Law
Yeah, it's criminal.
- [50:28]
Ally Stuckey
And a lot of these people will say, well, I don't want kids. I mean, you're 17 years old. You think that you know what you'll want in 10 years. And you're so sure of yourself. All of us thought that at 17, by the way, whether or not we were confused about our gender. But, you know, I've had Daisy Strong in on my show who tried to transition to being a boy, and she cut her breasts off, and it's just such a horrible situation. She was able, thankfully, to, you know, after she detransitioned, to have kids, but she wasn't able to breastfeed. And she posted about that and how difficult that was for her that she is still living with the struggle and the guilt of not being able to breastfeed her children. It's one thing to choose not to. It's another thing to not have that choice. To have that choice ripped from you. And there doesn't seem to be any guilt or any sadness or any hesitance by a lot of people in the medical field about those real cases of regret and trauma that exist among detransitioners.
- [51:25]
Jennifer Law
Well, they actually just discount these people that have detransitioned. You know, when I look, you know, being a pediatric nurse and I look at the American Academy of Pediatricians, and I go, how far have you lost your way? I mean, it's just, it's mind boggling that they are knowingly harming. I mean, these are people that are trained in biology and medicine. It's, you know, it's just, it's, you know, it breaks, it breaks my heart, Ali.
- [51:51]
Ally Stuckey
But we did see how the medical industry is so willing to suppress real science in favor of political ideology. I mean, a lot of them did the same thing during COVID Yes. When. And I've just realized how much now that, you know, I have been a mom for a little while, just how much medical intuition you. You gain as a mom. It doesn't mean that I have all of the expertise in the world, but I just remember when the American Academy of Pediatrics said that if a child is around adults who are wearing masks all the time, it will have no detriment whatsoever to their development. And they had to take down a PDF that they had previously put up years earlier. That said, it's so important for your child to be able to see the movement of your mouth when you're articulating words and to see you smile. It's so important for their emotional development, their cognitive development, their speech development. And then because they wanted to be anti Trump or something, they denied that. And so it seems like a lot of people in these scientific institutions, they are willing to suppress the truth because it's politically expedient. And the rest of us who don't have medical degrees, we're left to just, I don't know, search in the dark.
- [53:07]
Jennifer Law
Yeah. And I always encourage moms because moms are often most the ones taking their children to see the doctor. You know, be that mama bear, say no, say no, I'm not leaving the room, doctor. No, I'm not signing that. No, I'm not letting you do that test or give that shot or whatever. Because mothers really do have that mother's Intuition. You know when your child's sick, and you know when your child's really sick. And that's something you just know in your gut. This little guy needs to see the doctor today, or. No, this little guy will be fine. He just needs a couple of days and some Tylenol and some fluids, Pedialyte. But trust your gut, and if you don't like your doctor, find a new one.
- [53:50]
Ally Stuckey
And I did that during COVID because my doctor was such a bully in so many ways that I noticed that he was really a bully when I came to appointments without my husband. When my husband was there, he was really nice. When I was there, he made me feel. Feel really small and really stupid. And so we moved pediatricians and of course, haven't looked back since then. But you don't even realize as a mom, like, how much on a daily basis, you are memorizing every single tiny thing about your child and how you anticipate. You just anticipate. You know, how they're going to react to something, you know what they're going to say, you know, the questions that they're about to ask. And we can forget about that intuition when we're confronted with someone, you know, by someone in a white coat.
- [54:34]
Jennifer Law
Yeah, it's easy to do. I'm intimidated by that. And so it does take, you know, digging deep and bringing out your mom a bear. And I know that a lot of, you know, people in America don't have the luxury, the options to shop doctors around. They're in a system where there's only certain doctors that will take their types of insurance. But still, as much as you can, you have got to first always advocate for your child. And part of advocating for your child is advocating for your family. I'm sorry, our family doesn't do that. You know, so it's not just, I want this for my child. I do want this for my child. But the reason I want it, because our family, these are what are priorities for us. These are our values. This is what we believe to be true.
- [55:16]
Ally Stuckey
Yep.
- [55:21]
Callie Fell
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- [56:53]
Ally Stuckey
What can the average mom, the average person who is listening to this do when it comes to the injustice of frozen embryos, the eugenics that's going on, the exploitation in egg and sperm selling and surrogacy. It just feels overwhelming sometimes.
- [57:10]
Jennifer Law
Well, education is our best tool, I think. And the more people hear your show and you know, I know I was on a few times and it was, I was so encouraged by how many people woke up and said, I never knew. You know, so now people listening today will go, I never knew. Maybe I can learn a little bit more. One of the reasons why we make films is people like to watch movies. All of our films are free on our YouTube channel. You know, all of our films are under an hour. We're not going to ask for a big chunk of your time.
- [57:41]
Ally Stuckey
What's the name of the YouTube channel?
- [57:42]
Jennifer Law
Well, I think the YouTube channel is the center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Yeah. So they can find all those, those films. You know, I tell women, if you're, if you have like women's groups, show a movie and talk about it. You know, watch exploitation before you send your daughters off to university. You know, watch one of our, we have two surrogacy movies. Watch one of the surrogacy movies. If you know somebody in your church thinking about hiring a surrogate, surrogate, you know, is there some way to just invite people to have a conversation? Not that we're going to lecture. We don't want to lecture. We don't want to wag our finger at people. But just get more information. We don't have to be afraid of more information. You know, more information helps us make better choices.
- [58:24]
Ally Stuckey
I Think pastors and churches have a place to give guidance on their websites and their mission statements, or at least in their belief statements, even from the pulpit or in their women's groups. Or maybe it's kind of like, you know, a miniseries that's done on Wednesday nights or whatever. Just about what should Christians believe about life? Not just when it comes to abortion, because you'll get conservative pastors who will talk about that, but few conservative pastors will talk about IVF and reproductive technology. But if we believe what we say we do, that those human beings are made in the image of God from the moment of conception, then it's not just abortion that matters. It's how we create and treat and preserve those babies that matters, too. And I do think we will be accountable to God for those things, especially pastors, because they're held to an even higher account. And so I would say pastors get really clear on this. A great place to start is these videos. And then there's lots and lots of research about this, too. Listen to all the conversations I've had with Jennifer, with Katie Fouse, with Kali Fell, and there are some others, too, that we've talked to. Women who went through ivf, regret it, who did natural fertility methods, were able to get pregnant. We have looked at this from every angle. There's a lot of information out there at this point. If you're ignorant, you're choosing that. That's just the truth. There's a lot of information out there to get educated.
- [59:50]
Jennifer Law
And, you know, my, you know, call to action for pastors is, I will often say, for heaven's sakes, infertility is in the first chapter of the Bible. And so we have permission to talk about it because a lot of times people didn't want to talk cloning during the cloning debate because it's like, well, cloning isn't in the Bible. I'm like, okay, well, we can talk about things that aren't in the Bible, but I will say, but infertility, the barren womb, is in the Bible in several cases and several stories, so we have permission to talk about it. What we don't talk about is how we treat and address infertility.
- [60:20]
Ally Stuckey
Absolutely. Well, Jennifer, thank you for being a champion on this and thank you for continuing to educate and inspire me and so many others. I really appreciate you.
- [60:29]
Jennifer Law
Oh, it's been my joy and my delight to be here.
- [60:32]
Ally Stuckey
Thank you.
- [60:32]
Jennifer Law
Thank you.