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The Isabel Brown Show
Millions of IVF Babies Are Never Born: They’re Frozen, Experimented On, or Thrown Away
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- [00:01]
A
A massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated and it just feels so good. Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car, suddenly it seems quite practical. The Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats, that only feels extravagant.
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B
IVF has become a massive international conversation when it comes to big fertility, exploiting the thousands upon thousands of families struggling with what doctors are calling unexplained infertility. And as IVF as a technology continues to snowball down the hill into the mass dehumanization of entire generations of our children. So why is everybody mad about ivf? What are the larger ethical implications of all of this? What does it mean for the future of biotechnology? And most importantly, how can we continue prioritizing the safety and human rights of children, both our children that we genetically created and children around all of the world? These are questions that you guys ask me on social media literally every single day. And with a few exceptions, this is probably one of the most highly requested episode topics that you guys have been asking for for months. So today on the Isabel Brown show, we are unpacking the implications of ivf, what it means, how it creates genetically unique people, real human beings that have never existed before and will never exist again. How it changes the fabric of our society and why people are so adamantly against it. If you've been following me for a little bit longer than just the relaunch of the show here with Daily Wire, you may know that I've talked about this subject a lot over the last few years. Not because I hate people who have used IVF technology, not because I hate people that were born as a result of IVF technology. But kind of like we talked about yesterday, because I love people and I want better for people than what this technology is doing to humanity in the mass dehumanization of human beings. And I'm going to use the word human a lot today because I think it really, really matters for us to zoom in on we. We are not talking about clumps of cells. We are not talking about unexplained tissue in a freezer somewhere. When we are talking about ivf, we are talking about embryos, which is a development stage of humanity, that we have intentionally created unique human beings with their own DNA. Our children that have never existed before and will never exist again. We're charging families $30,000 a pop per round of IVF on average. That generally is the numerical average. That this comes out to. To create 5, 10, 15, 20 children, to implant only a few of them, and more often than not, to store the rest of them in a freezer in perpetuity. It's really difficult for us to get the exact numbers on all of this stuff, but about a year ago, I believe I did a whole live stream about this, because the Alabama State Supreme Court had a fascinating landmark case that for the very first time in American legal history, declared embryos legal people. And so, as more of this stuff continues to come to the surface of the legal conversation around all of this, the political conversation around all of this, the medical implications of IVF technology, we're starting to ask ourselves, how many people are we creating through this technology? How many people's basic human rights have been violated in the process? And shockingly, how many people have died because of IVF technology? The Alabama case was highly specific, but basically involved a handful of families that had created more embryos. They had an excess of embryos than they could have implanted originally through ivf, and they wanted more children. So, like most families who use ivf, they were storing their excess embryos, and I don't even want to use the word embryo here. Their other children, human beings. In a freezer. At a clinic in Alabama, an employee somehow ended up destroying these embryos. He was carrying them on a tray, dropped them in this clinic, and destroyed all of the embryos. Translation, killed these children. Maybe not on purpose, but certainly did kill them. And this case ended up going all the way up to the Supreme Court with the families suing, saying it was the wrongful death of a minor for their children to have been destroyed at the embryonic stage in a laboratory. The Alabama State Supreme Court sided with these families, and it hasn't escalated from there as of yet, but I'm sure will be another conversation at the national Supreme Court level very, very soon as to what constitutionally defines a person. This is going to be a massive conversation when it comes to the abortion industry, when it comes to ivf, when it comes to big Fertility, and so many other ethical and policy implications into the next several generations. But if we just zoom in on IVF and we ask again, how many people have we created through this? How many people are being currently deprived of their human rights, and how many people, devastatingly, have we killed in the process to make more people? That's when things start getting really tough in this conversation and very apparent that it's time for us as a society to look in the mirror. I dove into whatever Numbers we could find about this just about a year ago. And shockingly, the United States doesn't have a whole lot of data on this because like the abortion industry, we don't really have mandatory reporting laws for all of this stuff, the same way most European countries do. But based on the numbers that we were able to crunch for you then and still remain relevant today, the general estimate from most experts is that 93% of all embryos translation babies, translation human beings that we create through IVF are never born. 93%, meaning just 7%, become born babies. They either fail to implant during the implantation process, they are stuck in a freezer literally in perpetuity for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. They are specifically medically experimented upon, human experimentation, or they are literally just thrown in the trash. Here's a clip from me about a year ago, crunching those numbers for you in real time. One report from the UK suggested that an average 15 embryos, 15 people are created in each IVF cycle. So only about 7% of all created embryos through IVF. Of all created human beings through IVF result in a live birth. Only 7%. The remaining 93% are either destroyed or indefinitely frozen, with tiny odds of ever being implanted. 114 million people, a third of the population of the United States of America, we've created in the last 40 years for the purpose of IVF. 114 million people and 7% of them, 8 million, were born. So that means what 93% of them were not. If we do that math, we're talking about 106 million children that have been created in the last 40 years or so, that have been conceived, that are genetically unique human beings that have never existed before and will never exist again, that are stuck in a freezer somewhere, that have been experimented upon and or were thrown in the garbage. There are very few people drawing attention to this conversation because it's a really hard one to, to have. And before we welcome in our amazing guest for the show today, I just want to say and preface our conversation with this. In no way, shape or form I do, I want you to hear me say that if you were created through the process of ivf, you are a bad person, or you are less of a person, or you don't deserve to be here. Not at all. In fact, I am a firm believer that in every single circumstance, the circumstances of your conception, how you were brought into the world and does not define your humanity, God does. So you are a human being just as much as anyone else is and worthy of the same rights and dignity and protection as anyone else. In fact, that's why I care so much about this, because any other of your siblings potentially that are in a freezer somewhere are also human beings just as much as anyone else and deserve our dignity and human rights and protection. Nor am I saying, by the way, that if you are a family who has used IVF in the past, that you are evil people. Not at all. And it's honestly an injustice that our conversation, this conversation hasn't happened in our country up to this point because we've been afraid of asking some of these tough questions, letting people kind of feel offended about some of this stuff, and going out of our way to protect as many people as possible, even when it is very, very difficult to emotionally to do so. One of the people who is spearheading this conversation, perhaps louder than anyone else, is my friend Katie Fost, who is the founder of an organization called Them Before Us. Katie's entire mission in life is to create what she calls a child first movement, putting the rights of children above all else, the rights of the vulnerable above all else, and having adults make the tough decision to protect our kids wherever we possibly can in America and the world at large. Katie is an expert on IVF and how much IVF has changed in the last several years. Going into IV g, into editing the genomes of your babies, into creating designer babies, more than anyone I know. And I'm so excited for you guys to get to learn from her today. Highly requested guests, Ms. Katie Faast. Please, please join me in welcoming her to the show. Back to our really important conversation in just a second, but first want to tell you about how Meta is investing in people and communities across the United States to lead the nation in innovation and opportunity. Our friends at Meta recently committed over $600 billion to strengthen communities, create meaningful workforce expansion opportunities, and to build out the next generation of AI technology and AI infrastructure. But this goes so much more. Beyond technology, it's about real impact on real people. It means supporting new jobs that enable parents to provide for their families in their hometowns, giving them so much more moments to spend time with their loved ones. It means stronger local communities where small businesses can thrive and building the kind of future where our children will have incredible opportunities to. This investment back into the American economy reaches into every corner of our country. From new job opportunities being built into local communities to workforce training programs that will prepare Americans for tomorrow's careers. And as we build the next generation of AI technology responsibly, we're also building a stronger, more prosperous America. Because at the end of the day, American progress starts with people right, with our families and our communities, we welcoming new opportunities for the next generation. And that is exactly what Meta's $600 billion commitment represents, a belief in America's potential and an investment in our shared future. You can learn more about what Metta is doing to reinvest in our country at meta.com/building America. Please, please join me in welcoming my amazing friend Katie into the show today. Katie, thank you so much for carving some time out of your very, very busy schedule. Thank you to join us. You know, we've seen on this conversation related to IVF such a dramatic downstream effect in the last two years even than really my entire lifetime combined. So I want to start here with you just to give people an overview who aren't as plugged in or as aware on the scientific side, what we're really talking about here. Walk me through what is ivf and what are some of the more ethical complications there that people are concerned about in our country?
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C
Well, IVF just means you're making little lives in a laboratory. That's what it means. In vitro fertilization, fertilizing humans in glass. There's a lot of problems with fertilizing humans in glass. I would say the primary issues as it relates to the rights of children is it violates their right to life and it very often violates their right to their mother and father. So for those of us that care about both of those things about child protection in the most fundamental realms, IVF is actually one of the greatest offenders when it comes to protecting children these days. We don't exactly know how many children are created in the lab every year, how many are discarded, destroyed, donated to research, left forever in frozen storage. We don't exactly know how many children lose their mother or father in the process of ivf. But our best guess, best estimate, based on the information we can piece together from various speculations around what individual clinics might be reporting or what the little information that we do have that's publicly reported, it's a safe bet, according to the Heritage Foundation's report about two years ago, that IVF destroys maybe four times the number of embryos every year than Planned Parenthood does, that we're really looking about loss of little lives on a mass scale. And it makes sense, right? Because if you're talking to somebody who has an unplanned pregnancy and you're trying to persuade them to not abort their child, typically there's one little life at stake. But when you're talking to somebody that's going through the IVF process, they may have five embryos. 10, 15, 20, 25. At some point, obviously none of those, not all of those children are going to make it to life. Most will be sex, selected out of existence, screened out of existence. They won't make the grade where they give embryos grades between days three and five. And now we've got, you know, boutique offerings where people will genetically polygenically screen the embryos for up to 900 to 1200 traits. And, and so what we're doing is we're mass producing little lives so that we can screen out the ones that don't fit what we want in terms of our specific child that we want right then in the exact way that we are ordering it. So unfortunately, IVF is a massive targeter of children as it relates to their right to life. And then of course, once you're making a baby in a laboratory, there's no need to use the sperm and egg of the people taking the baby home. It's just as easy to use somebody else's sperm or egg. So anywhere between 30 to 60,000 of the 90 created through IVF every year will be born intentionally separated from their genetic mother, father, or both. And these are big issues for kids because obviously their right to life means whether or not they survive. But having a right to your own mother and father often determines whether or not these children will thrive.
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B
Absolutely. And that's a powerful, comprehensive overview of where we're at. Obviously a lot of nuanced conversations in there. But I think what's really been interesting in the last two or three years in the American political realm is seeing people start to come forward and say, you know, we need to start asking ourselves the question, just because we can, should we? And the follow up to that question has always been IVF technology in a microcosm is miraculous. Like, the fact that we have the capacity to do this is insane. But what about, what about all of the other potential ways this technology could be used to degrade the value of human life even further? About practicing eugenics, about the mass discarding of genetically unique individuals who will never exist again and have never existed before? And in this last six to 12 months, I've seen a crazy slippery slope unfold with all of this. So there's a few zoom in moments on the evolution of the IVF movement that I would love to focus on with you today. The first being ivg. This is something that I had not heard about until the last couple of months. But rather than in vitro fertilization, it's called in vitro gametogenesis. Can you explain to us what the heck this thing is and what it is intended to be?
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C
Well, let's talk about big fertility in general. If you want to manufacture a baby, you need three things. You need sperm, you need egg, and you need womb. Sperm is very, very easy to get to. It's plentiful, it's cheap. Eggs are much harder to get at. Women have to pump themselves full of hormones. You have to laparoscopically extract them. It's very high risk for women. Even though it's hard to know exactly, Big fertility doesn't care to study it, track it, or share it. And then getting wombs is the hardest part. Finding somebody to rent their body out for nine and a half months. It's a hot commodity. And so, honestly, when you're trying to assemble a baby, the cheapest, most efficient way to do this is going to be to cut women out of the process altogether. So we've got a couple different options for that. You know, we are working on artificial wombs or China is right now I'm trying to figure out how can we make sure that women are not part of gestation at all. But another really big way that you're going to be able to lower the price, increase the product that you're trying to desire is to cut women out of the egg retrieval process as well. So we have scientists at the Oregon Health Science University just a couple months ago that said that they had succeeded in creating embryos via IVG in vitro gametogenesis. And what that means is creating an egg cell out of some other cell from the body saliva or blood or skin. And that means, like, well, the implications obviously from the. Oh, this means equitable parenting for everybody, means that now two men can both be biologically related to a child.
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B
Right.
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C
Okay, so there you go, an advancement in adult equality. But let's also talk about what this means. That means that you could take the skin cell from one man and the sperm from that same man, and he would be mother and father to a child. It means that you could be walking past somebody at a restaurant and scrape their skin or grab their hairbrush. You could create their genetic child without them knowing it. You could make 12, you could make 200 without them ever knowing it. You have another terrible aspect of this called generational compression, where you can create an IVG embryo and then pull some cells off of that IBG embryo and create Another embryo and another embryo and another embryo, and in essence create great, great grandchildren from one embryo in the course of like two weeks. What we're talking about is beyond Frankenstein. We are talking about tinkering with humanity in a way that we have never been able to dream before. So notice how so many of these innovations are pushed in the name of helping adults have the children that they desire.
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B
Right.
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C
This is a, this is supposed to be some big landmark for same sex couples who finally are going to, you know, overcome the bigoted barriers of biology so they can both be biologically related. Okay, great. You're going to get that achievement at the cost of absolutely destroying a child's humanity. I mean, as if IVF had not already done that enough already. You are talking about doing to a child what has never been done to a human before. So anybody that is tinkering with ivg, they need to have their funding pulled. Every conservative governor and attorney general needs to make sure that no university is ever having this funded. We are experimenting with the smallest lives in the world in ways that we're never going to be able to take back.
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B
You know, it's chilling to hear you say all of this. I've known this is going on, but just how well you articulate it, it sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. And I think what's so concerning to me about all of this is that we're never seeing men be erased in the process of parenting or procreation. This almost always is universally tailored to erasing women and the role of moms throughout this process. Basically degrading womanhood down to your egg cell or your ability to just be a womb, a rental unit to grow a baby for other men. There's a startup company in San Francisco and I think I have their homepage of their website to throw up here for you to react to. Called conception. And this company brags about being one of the first companies in the world to show themselves as the leaders in medicine, creating stem cells entirely, entirely into egg cells. So they're, you're right. Taking these skin cells, hair follicles, undifferentiated pluripotent stem cells, and then they're artificially regenerating all of these things into eggs without a woman ever participating in the process. Which is terrifying to me, but is shocking that the so called feminist movement isn't saying anything about this. What's your read on that as a woman?
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C
Well, as it relates to surrogacy, there is definitely one segment of radical feminists that do come out hard against surrogacy, and rightly so. They understand that this is a commodification of women. And so the few places where surrogacy is banned, largely across Europe, that is the case. It is banned because feminists did put. Feminists did put some pressure on those governments to do so. But obviously, those successes are being undermined because now the LGBT lobby is much stronger than the feminists. And now that them, as a sexual minority, right, they need equal parenthood, they need equal access to children, and their bodies prohibit that from happening. So, of course, a lot of these innovations are going to be driven forward in the name of adult equality. Whereas, really, the way we need to be looking at this is child protection. All of these things ultimately need to come down to child protection, because, you know, I spend a lot of time at them. Before us, we lobby against commercial surrogacy bills, we speak up against ivg, we object to the redefinition of parenthood. Many of these are being driven by the gay equality, like LGBT movement. But in a lot of those different scenarios, all of the adults are very happy, right? The egg seller might be very happy. The woman that rented her womb might be very happy. The woman who takes the baby home, if there's a woman, she might be very happy. So a lot of the times, there is no female victim as it relates to the baby assembly process, but there is always a child victim. The child is always being forced to lose something that they have a natural right to. Either their right to life or one of the mothers that, you know, their genetic mother, their birth mother, or maybe the social mother who raises them. Sometimes they lose their father in the process. And the truth is, no child should lose their right to life or the right to the mother and father just because an adult wants something, even if that adult is a supposed sexual minority.
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B
Can I just say, nothing has transformed my life as a new mom for the better than my Helix mattress. The day that it showed up on my front step, I was thinking, oh, my gosh, what the heck am I going to do with this thing? I already have a pretty great mattress that I really like. There's no way this mattress could be that much better. Yes, it is. And my husband and I literally get into a sleep coma every single night. Our daughter, in the morning time, usually ends up in our bed snuggling for an hour or so too, because she loves our Helix mattress that much more than where she sleeps in her crib, too. It is game changing for our family and for everyone. We know who sleeps with a Helix mattress every night. And trust me, if you are going to get anyone the best gift that you possibly can this holiday season, it is the gift of a good night's sleep. You can take their sleep quiz that matches you with the perfect mattress based on your sleep preferences in literally just a few minutes. They have everything for hot or cold sleepers, mattresses that are firm, soft, or somewhere right in the middle in between. And they also offer kids mattresses, mattress toppers, bed bases, and so much more. Like I said, I literally go into, like, a sleep coma every single night. I sleep really weird. I'm, like, half asleep, waiting for my daughter to cry. I'm running really hot. Which, if you're a mom, you know, you know, in the postpartum phase, and for whatever reason, I used to get, like, maybe two, three hours of sleep a night, I am finally sleeping through the night again as a new mom since sleeping with my Helix mattress for the last few months. You want this to go to helix sleep.com isabel for 27% off site wide. That is helix sleep.com/isabel for 27% off site Wide. Make sure you enter our show name at checkout so that they know exactly who sent you. Again, that's helix sleep.com Isabel. You know, there's a common saying that's going around these days in the midst of this conversation that I think is interesting. It's harsh, and I understand why people think it's so hard to hear. But generally, people have started to ask themselves, do you have a right to have children? And the answer, generally is no. If you look at this from a biblical worldview, children are not commodities. You can't just create new human beings because you want to go out and purchase a designer item at the mall that day. And yet that seems to be how our society is catering towards adults, that you do have a right to create someone's life and to manipulate their life even before they are ever implanted in a womb to fit whatever you are shopping for that day. And I think this framing of children's rights is so important because no one in our society is talking about that. So on the public policy side, how do we start to approach that conversation? Is that something that we can reasonably start to fight for, or do you think our culture's just not really ready for that yet?
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C
We are fighting for it. It is time. And whether or not we feel like we're gonna win or public opinion is with us, this is about justice. And you don't decide to do justice or may not work out. You do justice because it's demanded of us. You do justice because the least of these can't defend themselves. And so it's our job, the adult's job, the ones that can speak and do interviews and submit amicus briefs and push policy. It is our job to protect the rights of children when they can't speak for themselves. So do adults have a right to a child? If you make a baby and you're the genetic parents of that baby, you're damn right you've got a right to that child. There's a pre political understanding and a preeminence in law that has gone back to since before the founding of this country that understands that you have a preeminent right that should be privileged to the children that come from you. That is what parental rights are. That is why we recognize that those adults can direct the education, medical care and upbringing of their children. They have special interest, they have something, a relationship with that child that's unlike any other relationship in the pantheon of human experiences. But that doesn't mean you have a right to any child, and it doesn't mean you have a right to a child at any cost. There you have to look at the flip side of the equation, and that is children have rights. They have a right to life. And just like you have a right to the children born to you, children have a right to the people to whom they are born. That goes both ways. And when you're looking at it from a natural law perspective, there's two sides of that same natural law coin, that same relationship that says I want that specific baby at the hospital. There's something special about that child that distinctly speaks to me. They have a relationship to me that is beyond what the government decides we can have. You can look at it from the child's perspective. The child doesn't want to go home with just any adult. They want to go home with those two adults because those two adults, number one, grant them their biological identity. Number two, are statistically the safest, most connected to, most invested in, most protective of adults in their entire life. And number three, if they go home with the two people responsible for their existence, they get the perfect balance of mothering and fathering that maximizes their development. So there is something special about those two adults. And try as you may to cut and paste children into any and every adult relationship, not every configuration is going to benefit children the way their own right to be known and loved to their mother and father can't. So what do we do policy wise? We properly frame the victim. The reason why we get all policy wrong is because we get the victim wrong. The victim determines the policy. And for way too long, in matters of infertility or marriage or divorce or modern families, we have said adults that don't get what they want are the victims. But that means that children have to lose their rights so that we can care for the victims. And that's wrong. Children who lose their right to life or their right to their mother and father, they are the victims. And that means that all adults, single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile, conform to the rights of the children because the only alternative is kids lose their rights for adults. And that's an injustice.
- [29:50]
B
I'm watching this injustice spin out of control very, very quickly. You touched on this a little bit in your overview of ivf. But with the evolution of this technology, we're watching people take things to an nth degree that we've never before really considered in civilized, truly progressive society. A big portion of that being selecting certain embryos based on their performance metrics, a grade that they get in a laboratory before they are ever implanted, based on their likelihood to have certain diseases if they're the specified biological sex, that you're looking for different genetic traits. And this is actually going to a new degree. As of this week, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and his husband announced that they were investing in a new startup company related to genome editing of embryos to forever eradicate society from preventable diseases. I have no idea how that's even remotely possible, but point blank is eugenics and I think we need to start talking about it as such. Have you seen this coming for a long time? And what's different about this announcement compared even to the selection of different embryos based on their thrivability, according to some scientists.
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C
So this is not new. The technology to edit genes has been around for close to 10 years through a technology called CRISPR. And there was a Chinese scientist back in 2018 who did edit three babies to supposedly make them more HIV resistance. In his words, the children are doing well. He did go to prison for three years because this is absolutely against all of the ethics that we have had. Even in China, they're like too far, man, too far. When you've gone too far for China, you know that something is going wrong. And so this technology has existed, but it is not allowed in the United States States. And so Altman and his business partner are saying, we're just going to do the research. We're not going to launch this until it's safe. But of course they're looking at places that don't have the same kind of regulations that we have, like the uae, so that if they do want to try to edit some baby jeans, they're not going to be able to do it on US soil. That should tell you something. So have I seen this coming? Yeah, of course, of course. I mean, already right now, even if you're not talking about genetically screening children or grading children, you're still shopping for children. You right now can get on your phone and Google egg donor catalog, sperm donor catalog. You can filter the different characteristics of your future child based on the hair color, the education, the race, the eye color. Right. How many, how many sample sizes are available? Are they known or are they unknown? So we're already custom ordering children just in terms of the gamete purchases that we are making. And you know, in the United States, we unfortunately, I'll tell you, big fertility gets so much mileage off of us thinking, well, this is about our infertile sister in law being able to have the baby that she wants. People come to the United States for fertility services because they can select the embryos, the sex of their embryos. A lot of places you're not allowed to say, I want the girls, but I don't want the boys. But you can do it here in the US there's a boutique clinic in California where 90% of the clientele don't have infertility. They just want to pick their babies, not just the genetic selection, not just male or female. They want to pick the eye color of their child and not just blue eyes. They want that specific shade of blue eyes. But in that situation, you're not talking about creating a child with blue eyes. You're Talking about creating 20 embryos, selecting only the girls and then the blue eyed girls and then the girls with the blue eyes with that one shade of azul that you want. Okay, so we've already gotten to the place where we are designing babies even without gene editing. So why would we need to edit the genes? Right? Because we already know how to mass produce children. We already know how to customize them. And they're saying, oh, it's because of health. We want to make sure that this child doesn't have cystic fibrosis. And if only we could just make them healthy rather than trying to treat them on the other side. Well, why don't you just eliminate the kids with cystic fibrosis? You already have the. Because that's not what this is about. This is about a super race. This is about making kids where you're designing them to be smarter or taller or wider. And this is about. I mean, you want Gattaca? Yeah, you got Gattaca. Baby Gattaca on steroids. So all of this, like, oh, it's going to be reparative. We're just going to. That's the Trojan horse into which you're going to get the designing of a master race. Oh, by the way, just for the wealthy. So I just want to say, like, it's about time that we get really serious about what's happening in the world of big fertility, because it's basically some of the greatest human rights abuses that you've ever seen smuggled in under the guise of helping the infertile couple next door have a child.
- [34:35]
B
100%. I mean, that's the only response I usually get from people when we talk about IVF in my content. And I'm 100% sympathetic to the fact that we do have a fertility crisis in the United States of America. I consider myself incredibly privileged that my husband and I were able to naturally conceive our daughter two months after our wedding. I realize that that is not the norm today in America. And I can't tell you how many of my friends, my family members, my cousins are really struggling to conceive children. And they desperately want to have a family, which is so needed. Right. We need more families and more babies. And we're so actively discouraging this in our country. But this seems to me to be in some ways like a financial scam for young women especially. I have one of my dearest friends who has struggled with infertility for years now into her marriage. And after several years of being unable to conceive, every scan looking appropriate and them not being able to, to really clearly explain anything, they slapped a diagnosis on her of unexplained infertility, which I'm now learning that one in seven couples in America have this label of unexpected explained infertility at its face value. Insane, right? There is always an explanation for why you are unable to conceive a child. She's now gone through a much deeper diagnostic process, and like most women who get this label, turns out is struggling with endometriosis, and now they're appropriately dealing with that. But the very first thing that they ever told her was here, IVF, IVF, IVF. Sign up for IVF, it'll cost you $30,000. We'll fix the problem and they were always very uncomfortable with this idea, but it just felt like they were being pressured into a financial corner even because of it. And I have to wonder how many families are being scammed the same way. We'll learn more from Katie here in just a second. But first, in case you're not paying attention, next week is Thanksgiving, which means it is the time of family gatherings around the dinner table, sharing an amazing meal together, reconnecting with our national heritage, our family traditions, and so much more. And we have loved doing that this fall as a family together, thanks to Good Ranchers. It's why we're Good Ranchers subscribers in our family and why Good Ranchers is an essential part of our family's routine. They have 100% American meat from local farms and ranches all over the country delivered right to your door. As a subscriber, you can get 25 off and free shipping on every order, plus a free gift for life. Good Ranchers. The quality is completely unmatched. Truly, every time we end up buying something meat wise at the grocery store, I look at my husband and I go, yeah, this just isn't gonna cut it. Whether it's a steak, a seafood item, chicken nuggets, which Good Ranchers has now, and my husband eats in about two seconds whenever they show up on our front porch, you can taste the quality difference. And it feels so incredible knowing you are supporting an American company that shares your values. Here's the deal. All new subscribers to any Good Ranchers box using the code Isabel will get an additional $100 off your first three orders. That is a lot, you guys. $40 off your first order, $30 off your second order, $30 off your third order, and free meat for life when you subscribe. So hit up goodranchers.com this holiday season, full of delicious meals and opportunities to gather together with your family. Again, use code isabel@goodranchers.com let's all get back to the table.
- [38:02]
C
So we do have a fertility crisis in the country, but the truth is a lot of it is a marriage crisis. Women are made to have babies from their late teens until they're about 35. You've got a 20 year window and a lot of women aren't even getting married. I mean, average age I think for women is now up to 29. And then if you think, well, I'm going to wait a few years and we're going to pay off our debt and we're going to do from traveling and you don't start having children until you're 35. I mean, that's a geriatric pregnancy. And so, number one, we need to get serious about telling women the truth about their bodies. The clock is ticking. You don't have forever. You really do need to prioritize dating and marriage early. And the incredible thing about women is our careers can be very flexible. And they don't. They don't. And they shouldn't look like a man's career. Like, our lives should look different. We should prioritize marriage and children early when we are working with our bodies. And you say that you're very fortunate and you're very privileged. I don't know how old you are, but I think that you're in your mid-20s, and that's about the time when you're supposed to get pregnant. If you kicked that down the road 10 years, you too, might have unexplained infertility, which, as you said, very often is not unexplained. It's unexplored. It's undiagnosed infertility. Because doctors don't get a whole lot of payback if they spend a lot of time doing testing to figure out, do you have endometriosis? Do you have pcos? Does he have some kind of hormonal imbalance that's dropping his sperm count or decreasing his sperm health? It actually takes a little bit of work, a little bit of elbow grease if you want to put the work in to find out what are the dozens of conditions that might lead you to the place where you are struggling to conceive on your own. Sometimes it's as simple as you need to lose weight. Sometimes it's a hormonal imbalance. So it does take a little bit of work on the doctor side and on the patient's side. But what's the payoff? The payoff is you're not desperate for a technician to decide whether or not you can have children. You're not paying 15 to $25,000 every single time you want to create embryos. And then additional, if you want to transfer the embryos that you have stored or frozen or just created fresh, I mean, at that point, you are freed to have your body get pregnant on its own. And that is why, honestly, the whole IVF executive order on behalf of Trump, it goes against Maha, Honestly, like, do we think that we should make America healthy again? Infertility is very often, if you're not talking about pushing your childbearing into your late 30s and 40s, if you are struggling with infertility, so often it's because there's a root underlying health condition that needs to be addressed, resolved, and healed. And isn't that what Maha is all about? There actually is a whole wing of the medical world that does that for fertility, and it's called restorative reproductive medicine. Restorative reproductive medicine. And if you're struggling to get pregnant, look up a restorative reproductive medicine doctor. Go get the diagnosis that your allopathic doctor has refused to give you, because it's so much easier to just get the kickback from the fertility company for the referral, like get healthy, figure out what's going on, open the floodgates so you can have all the babies on your own and start doing it sooner rather than later.
- [41:17]
B
Oh, amazing advice, Katie, and exactly what I think so many young women need to hear. It's a hard truth that this is often involving a lifestyle change on our part, but I think is really empowering because it gives us the capacity to have a path moving forward. We're not reliant upon the pharmaceutical industry or a long diagnostic process necessarily, or some magic public policy solution. A lot of it can start at home, but it involves that looking in the mirror to admit maybe we're doing something wrong, which is a hard, hard thing for women especially to reconcile with. I see this a lot in the pro life activism that I do against the abortion industry. When I'm speaking with young women who are so angry about the lies of the abortion industry, they're so bought into it, and you try to present a different way of thinking, and they just scream in your face and scream in your face. But I found when you can just take a moment and lower the temperature a little bit cooler heads will prevail. And you can see a bit more clearly the devastation that this industry has done for certainly millions upon millions of babies throughout history, but also their moms too. And I'm really hopeful we can start doing that. When it comes to the dehumanization of children through ivf, you might be thinking, if you're watching this today, hang on a second. Dehumanization? How are we dehumanizing people if we're making more people? That doesn't even make any sense. But as you've shared, Katie, we're making sometimes 10, 15, 20, 30 embryos per cycle of IVF when women sign up for this. So those are 10, 15, 20, 30 unique human beings that are suspended in time in a freezer. They are experimented upon, they are thrown into the trash can. Or very shockingly, as I saw Last week turned into pieces of jewelry. I think I have the graphic to show you here on the screen. I'm hopeful. If not, we'll put it in post production. Katie. But I know you're familiar with the story. A company is now advertising making IVF jewelry. I had seen this about a year ago, and it resurfaced for me again just a few days ago. Called Blossom. Blossom Keepsakes is saying they are creating IVF embryo Keepsake Keepsake jewelry. Here's what they say on their website when storage is ending and donation does not feel right. What they mean by that is storage of your child, of a real human being in a freezer and donating it to another family so that that child can be born. There is a gentler way to honor what you created. Your baby. We craft modern heirloom jewelry that quietly holds your embryo within a beautiful, discreet setting. Each piece is made in order to. Made to order in precious metals and handled with care at every single step. They later say on a different post on social media, to IVF mamas, the tiny embryos you have created still hold so much love and meaning when it feels, quote, impossible to make that decision. The decision to literally throw your children in the trash. Remember, there's another way you can honor them, Keep them close and let them be a part of your life by wearing them as jewelry. I read that, and I just shudder. But I think it involves our society, like the individual women, having to look in the mirror and say, I need to make a lifestyle change. Our society's ability to look in the mirror and say, what have we done? I mean, we have created millions of children to throw them away or wear them as an accessory. Tell us what you know about this company and how we can combat that dehumanization.
- [44:43]
C
Well, I will tell you, we get tons and tons of mail and messages from people saying, I went into this because I was told I was infertile and this was the only way I could have a child. And I'm a Christian and I'm pro life, and there's no way that I would leave any of my children there. But I'm 47, and the doctor told me that I can never do this again. We don't have money to pay for a surrogate, and I don't think that I believe in surrogacy anyway. And so for the last six years, we just keep paying the storage fee, and we don't know what to do. They're our children. We can't thaw and discard them because that's the first choice for the surplus embryos that the American Society for Reproductive Medicine will offer parents. We can't donate them to research. Like, I can't let somebody experiment on my child. And usually those experiments lead to improved fertility resources in the future. So you're destroying little lives to create better little lives in the future. They're like, I can't. I can't give my child over to the researchers. And they're like, I can't donate my child. I can't donate them to another couple. I mean, like, the truth is those are 100% genetically my children. And I mean, like, we're living in a pretty nice house in the suburb of, you know, St. Louis. And, like, what if they are raised by a single guy that's in a, you know, the base, a basement condo, and those kids look more like me than the children that I do, and then they come and find me someday and say, why didn't you have. Why not? Why not me? Why did you keep them? They're like, I just can't face it. So I've just been paralyzed. I've been absolutely paralyzed for the last five, six years. I'm just agonized over this, but I don't know what to do. And the answer is, there is. There is no solution at that point where the child is not going to lose either their right to life or their right to their mother and father. Best case scenario, maybe they're adopted. But there's only a couple clinics in all of the country that do embryo adoption in line with true best practice of traditional adoption. Most of them will be donated under, like, the same kind of property law that, truthfully, we dealt with in slavery. Like, we. When. In 2019, when Virginia passed their commercial surrogacy bill, it was the first time since slavery that they had categorized an entire class of people as property, and it was embryos. That's the only way the law knows how to deal with unborn children is to treat them as property. And. And so the truth is, like, these jewelry companies, it's sickening and horrifying and absolutely capitalizing on a very real panic that a lot of parents are having. They don't know what to do because they either went into it blind or they were really manipulated by their fertility doctor, or they just didn't think it through, which, honestly, 20 years ago, not a lot of people were talking about this. Now there's more resources for people to understand how predatory big fertility is. But it was too late for a lot of these couples. Well meaning couples that did get a child or two or maybe none and then ran out of money or were in debt because of the IVF process, and they absolutely are sick, sick month after month after month, knowing that their very real genetic children are completely, you know, in frozen limbo and there's no way out.
- [48:05]
B
On that note then, I mean, obviously for so many people, it just feels like this impossible situation, which I suppose it is. What should we be doing moving forward for parents that are in that situation specifically? And they've been seduced by a lot of this propaganda that we see in the medical industry and the mainstream media and our public policy. But secondarily, for those that are considering I'm having a hard time conceiving a child, I'm being told I have to do ivf. What path forward can we offer for young American families so that this doesn't have to be the norm as we dehumanize an entire generation of our children?
- [48:41]
C
So first of all, on the policy front, let's go upstream and solve the problem. First, on the policy front, even if you don't want to say ban ivf, say never ever freezing embryos. No frozen embryos, period. If you're going to use ivf, you immediately implant whatever child you currently make and there's none in frozen. Because the truth is kids go into the freezer and they very rarely come out again. So stop freezing babies. Yeah, don't freeze babies. Like that's one way to stem the flow of children that are abandoned. I mean, a lot of these children are abandoned. They're 20, 30 years old.
- [49:12]
B
Right.
- [49:13]
C
Many of the parents have stopped paying the storage fee. Some of them, we can't even contact them anymore. So then what is the answer if you do have frozen children? Well, you know, we often say that if you're in an unplanned pregnancy. What is the solution to an unplanned pregnancy? It's not abortion and it's not adoption. If you made the baby, you raised the baby, the solution is parenting.
- [49:35]
B
Right?
- [49:36]
C
You created the baby, you engaged in the baby making activity even though the birth was unplanned. That child has a right to life and they have a right to you and the child's father. And so the solution is for the adults to do hard things so the child doesn't lose their right to life or their right to their mother and father. That's what we say in an unplanned pregnancy. So look at the other side of it. What do we say with a hyper planned pregnancy where you are so serious about planning this right that you've gone through the cost and the egg extraction and the embryo creation and maybe you've got a couple kids, but then you've got a few others. What is the solution? The solution is not for the children to die and it's not for the children to lose their mother or father. It's the same solution. The solution is parenting. Go get your children, implant them. Maybe you're a little older than you would like. Maybe it's going to cost you a little more money. Maybe you have to buy a sprinter van, maybe your mother in law needs to move in so that you can have more help. But the solution is not for the children to die and it's not for the children to be donated away. You made the baby, you raised the baby. And then what do we do on a cultural level? Well, we need to communicate to everybody, whether it's in the policy space or the personal space. We don't have a right to children. Children have a right to life and they have a right to their mother and father and we need to do hard things on their behalf. It is a society characterized by injustice if we expect the weak to sacrifice for the strong. But that is routinely. What have we. What we've been doing in the world of big fertility and marriage and family in general.
- [51:10]
B
That'S so powerfully said Katie and I know echoes all of the work that you guys do with them before us in our last couple of minutes. Can you just share with us a little bit about what's next for you and your organization and how people can continue supporting your very, very important work in our country and world?
- [51:26]
C
There's nothing we're not doing. I feel like we've got a database that's going to launch next year where we give every state in the country a grade on how well they are protecting or victimizing children. So look for that. We've got a hit site coming out on the Human Rights Campaign which makes I like there's nothing I would rather do than destroy them from top to bottom. So we're just going to publish how their corporate Equality index victimizes children. And about 50% of the points that these mega corporations can earn come at the price of child rights. We have a documentary coming out next year that we're co producing with Focus on the Family that focuses on the fundamentals of the child and how you can either accept that children have a right to life and a right to their mother and father and these two adults. Adults do things for kids that no other adults can do. You either recognize that or you ignore. Ignore it. And children are victimized. So we're really excited about that. And the other thing that we've got going on is we are spearheading the first national coalition to challenge gay marriage to reclaim that legal institution on behalf of children. Because the result, the obvious, necessary, preordained result of making husbands and wives optional in marriage is now mothers and fathers are optional in parenthood and parenting laws. And so we are going to change that. We are working with every major national organization to change public opinion, to create a judicial strategy where we are going to win back this institution. And we are working with major leaders in the Catholic and Protestant space to equip the church to become a child centric fighting force. So if you're victimizing kids, we're coming for you. And if you want to protect them, you're one of us.
- [53:10]
B
Katie, I'm so grateful for your courage and your very, very brave voice in our country. We need it now more than ever. And just honored to know that there are people out there fighting for our kids, that we don't all exist on an island. But there are so many ways for us to link arms and support one another and change the national conversation. It was such a pleasure hosting you on the Isabel Brown show today. Everybody make sure you follow her. We will drop all of the links to do so in today's episode and we will be sure to have you back very, very soon.
- [53:39]
C
Yeah, thanks so much for having me as well.
- [53:41]
B
It was a joy beyond grateful for Katie and her voice, her organization and everyone who is willing to have this tough conversation. I think the answers forward still require so much more dialogue, but we're honored to have been a part of it here on the Isabel Brown Show. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you guys are watching to the channel and like today's topic, if you have other subjects that you really, really want us to cover, drop it in the comment section wherever you are watching or send me a DM on Instagram. We always want to hear from you guys about what stories are out there that you think are important for us to create a better future, to build a new American dream, and to protect human dignity wherever we possibly can. Love you guys. See you tomorrow. Sat.