A (5:43)

It's amazing. Yeah. And when I first met you and heard about your organization and what you're doing. See, I'm a person philosophically who has believed life begins at conception. The whole time, I've not had a problem with that, but it hadn't occurred to me that, okay, well, these are humans then, that are being basically disposed of with the Rest of the trash. And so you even made me start thinking about it so differently, just, just in meeting you. So I can. I think it's probably so amazing just for folks to hear, but also just what you've been able to offer people. Because I think kind of to your point, there's so many people involved in the reproductive technology industry as the people who work for it, who got into it because they thought they wanted to help people. Right. I mean, that, that does seem like, I mean, great. It's great money, it's research, it's cutting edge. Like there's things like that. But ultimately people are like, this is really hard. People can't have kids and I want to help them. And then you have the folks who are involved in it from the customer side because they are desperate to have children. But there's a lot of kind of what you're saying, these unknowns, or you start realizing the human cost of this and people feel very trapped. And so I think there's a lot of people maybe even listening who have engaged in some of these practices or they have embryos on ice or they've lost embryos. And to hear that there's someone who's saying, yeah, but we are going to acknowledge this is human, human lives. And there's. We can offer dignity and burial and, and recognize that, you know, it's not condemnation of people who didn't know all the facts when they got into it. That actually to me seems like overwhelmingly true. Most people don't know all these details when they get involved. Is that what you have found when you've been talking with people, whether you're on the sort of helping people now side or on the, when you were in the industry or adjacent to the industry.

B (7:31)

Right. The word that I hear so often when families find me and I'll talk a little bit more about the difference of how I reach out to clinics and how I try and help and work with families when they find me. The number one word that these families I hear from them is desperation. You know, they have exhausted all of their options. I mean, the desire to have children is such a good and holy desire. And it's something that I think many of us take for granted that it will just happen. And in our, in our society, where if you, you know what, you want something, you can work hard and you can get it, and this is something that falls outside of that. We are not all together in charge. You know, we can hope, we can pray, we can try and do you know, what's. What's good to enhance our health and know what's happening. But sometimes we don't know why. We don't know why we can't have children either to conceive or to carry them to term. And there is this desperation that by the time somebody gets to an IVF clinic, they are just grasping at straws for hope. And most people don't really understand the process. And there's very, you know, there's cognitively, I'm sure, interesting things that go on where maybe the clinic is presenting this idea of embryo attrition, but they're not in a place where they can understand what that means for them when they are down the road, 10, 15 years from that.

A (9:10)

Can I pause you? What do you mean by embryo attrition?

B (9:14)

So embryo attrition, typically what happens in an IVF cycle is that the ovaries are stimulated with hormones. Normally, you know, the healthy, functioning body releases one egg at a time once a month. With ivf, women are treated so that they are able, the clinic is able to retrieve as many eggs as possible at a time. So they're making the ovaries work in a way that they're not meant to work, which is actually quite dangerous to the mom. There's a lot of health risks involved in just that process. But once those eggs, multiple eggs are retrieved, and it's different for every woman. Sometimes the retrieval is one egg, none. Sometimes it's 20, 25 and upwards. So kind of the average is, you know, you kind of think, well, maybe 12 to 15 eggs would be retrieved. The clinic is going to try and fertilize every single one of those eggs. And if fertilization is successful, and sometimes it's not with each and every egg, but if successful fertilization happens, you may have eight brand new zygotes which turn into morulas, which develop into blastocyst. It's all the same individual, just different spots of the development continuum. But along the way, some of those newly fertilized eggs, those new, brand new human beings, they may not survive. So it's expected that maybe like 30 to 50% of successfully fertilized eggs actually develop, continue to develop to a point where they could be transferred. So there is a lot of this attrition rate fallout along the way. That just happens because it happens. Sometimes it's because of the egg quality, sometimes it's because of the fact that this is a lab and not a womb and it's trying to recreate that environment. But it's not a one to one Perfect replacement.

A (11:09)

Yeah, thanks for explaining that.

B (11:11)

Yeah.

A (11:11)

And you were saying so. So a lot of people go into it and they don't understand that process. You know, okay, there's going to be embryo attrition, and we're going to do this many. And so they kind of, maybe they don't know that going in. That's kind of where I cut you off to explain that.

B (11:24)

No, that's okay. And sometimes there's even the idea that more is better, like we have more chances, you know, if we only have one, one newly created embryo, all our hopes are on that. But if we have a few, you know, if that first one doesn't implant, and it's a. It's called a failed IVF cycle, but it's actually a very early miscarriage because that very young human being didn't survive, then they have more that they can go to. So the idea of having multiple embryos in the beginning is often quite reassuring. But for a family who has been raising a child or two or three or even more children who are conceived with IVF and they're done raising children, either they can't carry children anymore, or they've just decided for whatever reason that they're not going to do any more transfers, they may have multiple embryos still in storage. And a lot of times people's that connection to these embryos, the realization of who these embryos are. Our faith lives change when we become parents. You know, a lot of things are different when we are in the process of IVF compared to when we're down the road years later. And it is heartbreaking for families to try and figure out, well, now what do we do? These are our children, These are our embryonic children, that what do we do? It's really hard.

A (12:46)

So what's the difference between how you talk when someone comes to you, finds you, versus how you might approach the clinic?

B (12:54)

So when I talk to the clinic, I'm calling the laboratory and I'm introducing who we are, what we do, that we provide burial for any of the arrested or deceased embryonic human beings in their lab as an alternative to medical waste. And that kind of shocks them to begin with because they're looking at these humans every single day. But it's so easy to forget these are humans, every single one of them. If fertilization was successful, that fertilized egg, that's synonymous with embryo, and that's a human being in the very early stages of development. So just driving that awareness and hopefully kind of shocking their system is. But with the Clinics. I'm talking about the embryos that have died or that will die later that day and giving them an alternative. When families find me, and this is the reason that I don't go out to the public in general is because it's usually almost always families who are in the situation. I just talked about families who did ivf. They're raising beautiful, wonderful children who were conceived that way. Those children are 100% beautiful gifts from God, of course, but they have these other embryos, these other embryonic children that they're struggling to do with. So they're contacting me because they know we provide burial for deceased embryos. I'm talking to them. And their children are not dead yet. Those children are still cryopreserved. And while they are frozen in that vitrified state, they're not dead. So this family is looking at making a decision to remove those embryos from that kind of life support system and letting them die so that they can be buried. And so I have an obligation to lovingly and compassionately and truthfully help them to understand what that decision means. If they found me, they already know. But I have to say it like it's my responsibility to help them understand the decision that they're making. I owe that to them. I owe that to their children and to let them know that there may be alternatives that they want to think about. Is it possible to carry even one more child? It may not be, but it may be something to prayerfully think about with their spouse. Can they continue paying for storage for a while longer as an act of good faith, as a way to, you know, if these children were born, they'd be feeding and clothing and giving them shelter. Can they, can they pay and sacrifice for a little bit longer with storage as a way to continue caring for these children? As an organization, we don't have a position on embryo adoption, but I do put it out there as something for them to prayerfully discern on their own. And if they do look at that as an option, I do encourage them to really treat it as placing their children for adoption as if they were live born children, to really work through a thoughtful process to make sure that they can do what they can for these children and their future families. This is not a, you can't donate a human being. You know, we don't do that. And these are not donated tissues or cells. These are human beings. So we have to be thought of as an adoptive process. There are some theologians out there that would actually say when there's no hope for these children to let them be removed from storage and pass away and then have the dignity of burial, I don't know about that. I'm still growing. But when it comes down to it, the act of creating human life in a laboratory is so fundamentally disordered that it creates situations for which there are no good solutions. There's no ready, easy solution for, you know, the ripples that throwing that pebble in the water creates. These ripples where, you know, very good, educated, moral, ethical, God fearing people come down in all different directions because the start of the process was so contrary to how human beings in our lives should start. And I just want to be clear too, that's not saying anything about the human beings who were conceived via ivf. You know, no matter how we're conceived, we are good, we are meant for love, we are meant to love, and we are all children of God. But the act itself poses some very significant problems and dilemmas that are downstream.

A (17:40)

Yeah, I was engaging in a conversation with a group of people about kind of a case study. It was Christian worldview, and it was kind of made so people could debate, you know, how do you answer these questions in a Christian worldview? And the case study was a couple desperate for children, decides to go the IVF route, gets 10 embryos, implants, a few of them thinking they won't all make it, and they end up getting four kids all at once, like very close together, you know, under twins or something like that. And then she's like, okay, well, now we're in our 40s, we have two sets of twins. I still have six embryos, but now I don't know what to do. And it's really interesting because it's kind of like, to your point, how often do humans really have the opportunity to sort of play God with life and death and have human lives in the balance that you have to decide, do I pull the plug or not? You know, sometimes there's end of life choices that are very difficult that people have to do. But it's really hard because we shift from, I so desperately want something, I will pursue something that has all these ethical issues, but it's not like it's the end of the ethical issues. If you do it, it only opens up this Pandora's box of more problems and folks will answer, you know, comment back to us, or push back and say, you know, there's ethical ways to do this. You could just do one embryo at a time. You could never freeze them. You could never have them graded or discarded. And all these Kinds of things. And we just talk about that's so cost prohibitive. It's so rare. And I think you mentioned too, the clinics really only have to account for their success rates, so they don't want to put all 10 that someone might fertilize in because, well, these are graded poorly and they're not going to survive. That's going to damage our. The perception of how successful our clinic is. And so there's just, you know, you're. Katie likes to say you're going to fight your doctor or you're going to fight the people at the clinic every step of the way if you're trying to do it the most ethical way possible. And even then, you still can't get away from the questions of how many of them will die because of just mass production being formed in glass, you know, any length of time that they're not implanted right away. You know, I don't know what, how they're stored if you don't freeze them. So if you have 10, what do you do? You know, so it's just we weren't designed to answer these questions. And. Yeah, from a faith perspective. Yeah. So is your organization faith based? Do you have folks who pursue you who don't really have faith or what is that like?

B (20:28)

So we will start. We will work with any family with any faith or with a faith that's newly starting, of course. And no matter what a family decides, we. We don't judge. We're here to serve their children and them with compassion and dignity. And hopefully it provides some healing because this is such a unique grief. I mean, you can be fiercely in love and so thankful for the children you've raised from this process and at the same time torn up by the agony of having to decide what to do for these other children. So I have formed the organization to be faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church. We're not a part of a diocese, we're recognized by a diocese. I have diocesan priest who's our chaplain, and then a board of directors who are well formed in Catholic ethics. So they help make sure that I'm staying on the right path. I was at a conference of reproductive endocrinologists not that long ago. And it was in one of their sessions somebody brought up ethical ivf. And it was like the trigger word of the day. I thought heads were going to spin around because know they want to believe that what they're doing is ethical. But the thing about trying to do IVF ethically, maybe there's some guardrails that the patient could really push to have in place. But you know, if, if we're talking along the lines of Christian, Christian morality and Christian ethics and we're praying the Lord's Prayer, one of the things that we're praying for is to deliver us from temptation. And once that foot goes into the IVF clinic and you're in a position to have to push back against these things, the cost is going to be prohibitive. The clock is ticking. You're not getting any younger. You know, the more, the better chances for you to do this. You are in a highly desperate, highly emotional, charged, time sensitive place of temptation. And, you know, we don't have a right to a child. You know, children are a gift. We can do our best. We can use medicine responsibly. There's a lot of alternatives to look at, but there's, it's. The great mystery is that why sometimes children aren't a part of the plan or a part of the plan when we think they should be, or a part of the plan in who we think they should be. You know, there's a lot of genetic profiling that goes on in this space, you know, with the good intent to eliminate suffering. But we're humans. Like this is, you know, humans, right? We suffer. That's part of it. And that's what makes our hearts grow as we walk that narrow path. And there's, there's a lot of temptation in this space that hard as it is to, to talk about and to live with, we really need to do our best to help protect people who are suffering from infertility and miscarriage, about going down a path that would end up causing them tremendous pain.

A (23:36)

Well, and yeah, two points from that. First of all, coming shortly after this will probably post this week, but we're going to have an IVF series. We've interviewed doctors, people who do natural reproductive technology and restorative therapy and all these things, but they've talked about over and over, IVF does not solve infertility. It's trying to circumvent it and go about it a different way. Often it can exacerbate the problems that are already there. So it's not actually helping women or men who are infertile. So that's huge.

B (24:09)

It's a biased baby. Absolutely.

A (24:12)

And to your point about suffering, the problem is we talk about this all the time at the before us, someone is going to suffer that is actually never going to change. The problem is some of these reproductive technologies and decisions are just taking the suffering and you're putting it onto someone else. And I mean, with ivf, it seems like someone else in addition, because it's not alleviating the suffering. Now people like you're saying they're suffering, then they enter into a place where now they have even more ethical questions, dilemmas. What am I supposed to do? Financial costs, all this stuff, physical harms. But now also children are dying, being experimented on, being discarded, sex selected out or frozen indefinitely. And so the suffering has just amplified and spread to more people. And that's what number four us is just saying, someone is going to suffer. We're saying adults have to bear it, not cause children to bear it. For you, you know, as much as possible.

B (25:08)

You know, I do in my day job, which will go undisclosed because I would like to keep it that I, you know, I hear a lot about high risk pregnancies. And IVF pregnancies are by nature going to be classified as a high risk pregnancy. So I think it's like 30% of the reasons for IVF, the diagnosis is unknown. So there is a huge portion of patients who are pursuing IVF or being so called, treated with IVF where the diagnosis is an undiagnosis, yet all of the pregnancies are classified as high risk. So it's as if the infertility isn't so much the condition itself, but a symptom of something that is being overlooked and that is not good health care. And I would really challenge the medical community to try harder because that is, that's not okay to start treating somebody for something we don't know what it is. Making the ovaries work in a way that they're not meant to work and putting a woman's health in danger. And then of course, there's all the downstream products. But one of the other things I hear in this space too is around the genetic profiling of these children. And it's becoming more prevalent for people who are carriers of certain genetic diseases, certain certain genetic conditions to, even though they don't have infertility, to use ivf. And the way that you hear it positioned by sometimes the families themselves through misinformation, but of course through the clinics, is that we can help you have children who don't have this condition. And that is not true. They are having these children. They are being created in the laboratory and they're being identified and they're being discarded. So it's not as if children with this condition didn't exist. They do exist, but they're being located and they're being exterminated. And that is another very dangerous thing. And the idea is, so these children don't have the suffering, but, you know, suffering is part of us. You know, suffering makes us become better people. And you wonder, well, at what point do we start eliminating people who have a genetic position towards, you know, alcoholism or mental illness or, or, you know, we don't. Life is not an easy, smooth path and we're going to get what we're going to get and we're better because of it. We can rise to it or we can do things that are really not good for humanity. And this is a scary place to go in these ways, Right?

A (27:47)

Yeah, that's such a good point. Well, yeah, you can't eliminate suffering from humanity. You can only eliminate humans. Right. It's like Iceland, I think, said they cured down syndrome by aborting anyone that tested positive for down syndrome. So that's. It's not a cure. We, and we interviewed a doctor for our series who talked about using crispr. They're kind of clipping, trying to clip out genetic issues and by doing that, they were causing other genetic issues. They just, he said it's just too impossible to try and be able to finagle everything just right. And I just continue to think, you know, from the faith perspective, when we're trying to answer or, or act God, like we're creating issues and all these ramifications we can't see because, yeah, a creator, an intelligent being designer that actually is working all things together and paying attention and knows every single little thing and how it all works together in this large story of the world, right? Suffering. How will suffering maybe work to make someone better or cause something good to happen? But we're trying to edit and clip out and do all this stuff and we just mess it up, make it even worse. So it is a really fascinating, like, sort of philosophical view of our technology and how it actually impacts humans.

B (29:08)

There's so much to it. I mean, and even in some of this, I hope, cut whatever you need to cut, please do. But like, even when they do the genetic testing, so they're finding that there's a lot of false positive in genetic testing as well. So the baby's being thrown out literally with the bath water. And what. So that newly created human being, when they're about five days old, the developmental stage is called the blastocyst. So you've got the inner cell mass, which is kind of this tiny part in the inside, and that is going to continue developing into larger embryo fetus. You Know, infant, all that the trophectoderm around the outside is what turns into the placenta. So supporting that embryo, fetal growth, the biopsy comes from the trophectoderm, those cells, not the inner cell mass. And they're finding that there is a lot more abnormalities in the cells in the trophectoderm, the placenta, than there ever were in the inner cell mass. So we are wired to self correct. Which is kind of amazing. Like, you know, that is in itself that the cells know. Okay, we need to. This one moves to the placenta, this one stays as the person. And we're biapsing the wrong part and getting results that are not always accurate.

A (30:22)

Yeah.

B (30:22)

Or reflective of the actual developing human. Wow.

A (30:26)

Yeah. Wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, I didn't even know that. Well, where else can people find you or what would you recommend in terms of people who are pursuing. Who are interested to hear more about burial for embryos and things like that?

B (30:40)

Well, like you said, you can go to our website, which is sacred heartguardians.org all the information is there. The deceased embryos come to us at any time from anywhere across the country. And we do four burials a year, once every three months. All the burials take place in Minnesota. We have a priest who offers the right of committal and final commendation at the grave site. It's simple but very dignified. There's something very healing for families if they can have their embryos buried closer to where they live. So sometimes families will contact me and have, you know, want to know if I can help them find a cemetery and a priest that's closer to them. And I'm more than happy to do that because I think that is a very part of the ongoing, the grief process and healing to know that your children are near where you are. Yeah. And so, yes, just go on our website, send me a note through the online form or call me, and I'll do my best.

A (31:43)

Well, Laura, thank you so much for this important work. Yeah, even like I said, I was, I've been in this space for a few years and really had not occurred to me that this would be something that families would benefit from. But even just like you're saying, it's the. It's taking that view that we're talking about human beings and it's kind of carrying that to the natural conclusion of they deserve dignified burial. They deserve, you know, within the Catholic tradition, the last rites and the things like that. But, yeah, they're not to be disposed of like garbage. And so it's really beautiful what you're offering families. So we're just thankful. And thanks for coming on the show to chat with us.

B (32:19)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

A (32:21)

All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Check our description and show notes for more information. Thanks so much for joining the them before us movement.