Fertility doctors are bullying women into IVF



In her late teens, Catie VanDamme was diagnosed with endometriosis, which is a disease that can make it more difficult for a woman to successfully conceive.

At 29 years old, after she got married and before she and her husband had started trying for a baby, she decided to go talk to a provider, who ran some blood work.

The doctor explained that her hormone levels, which dictate “how many eggs you could have or will have,” were low.

“It was used as a scare tactic,” she tells Stuckey. “The doctor that I signed up to see just took me on this path of, ‘Well, this is a really huge issue that your numbers are low,’ and really, it was the sense of ‘You needed to start IVF a couple of years ago’ type.”

VanDamme describes the feeling she had sitting in that office as a “gut punch.”


“What was most jarring to me was the push towards making embryos right away. It was like I went in for blood work and all of a sudden I was supposed to be scheduling appointments to come back to start the process,” she continues.

Despite the doctor’s insistence on beginning the IVF process immediately, VanDamme began to question the morality of putting human embryos on ice and whether or not there were other interventions possible to help her production of the necessary hormones, and she decided to get more opinions.

“We went to a third doctor,” she tells Stuckey. “And that was probably the most jarring experience.”

“It was, again, the same story of, ‘Okay, your blood work is kind of iffy, you should have started IVF a long time ago, but are you sure you even want to go through with this?’” she explains, telling Stuckey that the doctor then told her couples spend thousands for babies who die or are born with birth defects.

He also asked her if she was sure she even wanted to be a mom, said that he himself had “a really annoying niece,” and said that she could travel with her husband instead.

“It felt like I was sitting across from death,” she says. “I think he has seen so much carnage of what he has done at the sake of making money and playing God.”

However, despite the incessant fearmongering, VanDamme went to see a doctor who specialized in NaPro Technology — and was pregnant a month later.

“I worked with a provider to chart my own cycle, and it was done through something called the Creighton method,” she tells Stuckey. “He did something as simple as doing a follicle scan with me for a couple cycles and found out that I just wasn’t ovulating correctly. My hormones were out of whack.”

“All he did was put me on some progesterone medication. It was $4 with my insurance,” she explains. “He told me to go on a paleo diet and take a couple of these different medications that help with ovulation, and we’ll continue to see what happens.”

“And in like two months, I was pregnant,” she adds.

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Higher rates of autism? The harsh reality of being an IVF baby



In-vitro fertilization is sold as a cure-all for those struggling with fertility issues — but not only does it rarely work, it also can cause a myriad of issues in the mother and child when it does.

Jennifer Lahl, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, is one of the leading voices sounding the alarm.

“IVF is fraught with risk. It’s risky to the woman’s health; it’s risky to the health of the unborn child,” Lahl tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.” “You can just follow the CDC data, and for the last 10-plus years, overwhelmingly, all IVF cycles fail.”

Data is now coming out that IVF increases the chance of pregnancy-related complications, like preterm labor and birth defects.


“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,” Lahl explains.

“Shouldn’t that be something that at least could make us pause and think? We know that pregnancy is risky; I 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,” she continues.

Stuckey has also done her research on the issues associated with IVF, and one of them is a higher prevalence of the child being diagnosed with autism.

“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,” Stuckey says, noting that in IVF they “take the sperm and put it on the egg.”

“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 supposed to re-create, and when you force them to re-create, then the baby is going to inherit a lot of problems,” she adds.

“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,'” Lahl agrees.

“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,” she adds.

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[rebelmouse-proxy-image https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Screenshot-2025-03-21-at-4.05.29 PM-1200x675.png crop_info="%7B%22image%22%3A%20%22https%3A//thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Screenshot-2025-03-21-at-4.05.29%5Cu202fPM-1200x675.png%22%7D" expand=1]Though many local churches pray over parishioners longing for children, the EveryLife campaign is a uniquely public display of support.

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[rebelmouse-proxy-image https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Screenshot-2025-03-06-at-2.21.50 PM-1200x675.png crop_info="%7B%22image%22%3A%20%22https%3A//thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Screenshot-2025-03-06-at-2.21.50%5Cu202fPM-1200x675.png%22%7D" expand=1]The legislation paves the way for a semblance of transparency in an industry that has spent years evading it.

The real ‘Handmaid’s Tale’: Why Lily Collins' surrogacy announcement was the bridge too far



Lily Collins' is the latest celebrity to announce the birth of a child via a surrogate — and the announcement has sparked yet another debate surrounding the ethics of the practice.

Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” isn’t a fan of Collins' choice.

“How do we get to the point where we are now renting wombs and in some cases buying children via egg and sperm donation?” Stuckey asks, noting that criticizing surrogacy is often met with manipulation and emotional games.

“If you show compassion for the surrogate, if you show compassion for the baby who has just been torn away from the only body and smell and heartbeat that she knows, you are being hateful towards the parents who wanted to do this,” Stuckey says, adding, “Because in all of these, in all forms of reproductive technology, what is being prioritized more than the well-being of the child is the wish of the parent.”


While many women on the left have protested stricter abortion laws by dressing up in dystopian garb, Stuckey explains that those people are missing the point, as renting a womb via surrogacy is “actually akin to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”

“For some reason, liberals love to dress up in their red robes and pretend that Margaret Atwood’s novel is about abortion, like allowing children who have been conceived to not be murdered and to be born. That’s not what it’s about. It is actually much closer to the surrogacy industry,” she says.

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” rich women who struggle with infertility use lower-class women against their will to carry their children for them.

“I know people say, ‘Well, it’s voluntary, and so if everyone consents to it, what’s the big deal?’ There are a lot of things that people consent to that are morally wrong,” Stuckey says. “Many of them may say that they are consenting to what they do, that does not mean that offering your body for a price is moral.”

The argument doesn’t end at whether or not it’s morally wrong to financially incentivize a woman to loan out her body but rather whether or not it’s morally wrong to tear a baby from the only mother he or she has known for nine months.

“It is physiologically true that at the moment of birth, the child longs for the woman who has been carrying him or her,” Stuckey says, noting that it’s even more egregious in cases where it’s two men renting out another woman’s womb.

“In the case of two men, they’re actually purchasing the egg-seller, they’re purchasing a separate surrogate, they’re taking the baby away from the biological mother, they’re taking the baby away from the woman who carried that child, and they are intentionally raising a child who is motherless,” she explains.

“I mean, what a cruel, draconian, demonic, social experiment that we are forcing un-consenting children into in the name of ‘love is love’ and inclusion,” she adds.

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Colton Underwood glorifies baby-buying, denying a child’s need for a mother



Former "The Bachelor" star and self-professed Christian Colton Underwood made headlines years ago when he came out as homosexual.

Now, Underwood has announced alongside his husband, Jordan C. Brown, that they’re expecting a baby boy via surrogacy in the fall. Underwood even created a podcast called "Daddyhood," as he’s been pursuing “daddyhood” for two years now.

“It’s almost always a baby boy,” Allie Beth Stuckey notes, before explaining that Underwood had been struggling with his sperm count before he was able to find an “egg seller.”

“The reason again I don’t say egg donor is because it’s only called egg donor because of a technicality. It’s not legal to sell human tissue in the United States, and so egg donors say that they are being paid for their time and their effort, not actually their eggs,” Stuckey says.

“But we all know the truth. They’re not donating their eggs; they are selling their eggs,” she adds.

In an interview with Men’s Health, Underwood explained that he and his husband wanted the “egg seller” to be “somebody deep and cool.”

“I believe in nature versus nurture. So give us the basics, and we can show this kid love,” he continued.

Stuckey disagrees, quipping, “I’m not sure that you actually believe in nature, because you are denying that a child needs a mother.”

Underwood related the process of finding an “egg seller” to using dating apps, which Stuckey also finds disturbing — as YouTuber Shane Dawson, who got his baby boy via IVF with his husband, related it to looking through catalogs.

“They literally go through catalogs of women, not that different than prostitution, and they choose who is going to be the genetic mother,” Stuckey says.

But it’s not as simple as just choosing a woman and giving her their sperm.

“There’s the egg retrieval first, from the so-called egg donor. And then there’s the IVF process where they are using the sperm from these two men and they are mixing it together with the eggs that were retrieved and they’re creating embryos out of that genetic material, and then they are implanting the embryo that is created, that is selected, into a different woman,” Stuckey explains.

That woman is the surrogate, who then has to take hormones in order to prepare her body for the foreign entity that will be placed in her uterus.

“That’s very dangerous for the embryo, by the way. It can also be very dangerous health-wise for the surrogate because this is a very unnatural process,” Stuckey says. “The woman’s body can reject this little embryo.”

The reason they use an “egg seller” separate from the surrogate is also completely unnatural.

“Why do they have to be legally separate? So that neither woman can claim motherhood, so that neither woman can say that they are bonded to this child. Even the law recognizes that there is this strong, fierce, biological bond between the mom and a child,” Stuckey says.

“It just makes it easier for everyone except for the baby, who will never know his biological mom and also is immediately ripped away from the only body, the only woman, the only home he has ever known immediately at birth.”

“Again, treating a child much worse than we treat puppies and kittens in the United States, who legally we have to keep with their mother for six to 12 weeks after birth,” she adds.


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