The 10 Years Since Obergefell Have Proven Its Critics Right
Opposing same-sex marriage is essential to defending the truth about human nature and about how we flourish and are fulfilled.Opposing same-sex marriage is essential to defending the truth about human nature and about how we flourish and are fulfilled.‘Lost in medical history’: The dark side of surrogacy and IVF
While surrogacy is largely used for parents who are struggling with infertility, there are other reasons one might use a surrogate — and they border on the dark.
Perinatal nurse Kallie Fell, who started her professional career as a scientist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is deeply concerned with the ethics of surrogacy, as well as IVF.
She warns that it’s not just sunshine and rainbows and that the reasons one might hire a surrogate can get a little creepy.
“A recent study that looked at data from prior to 2020 saw that most of these transactions were above 32, 34% from independent parents outside of the United States, predominantly from Asia, predominantly male, and predominantly over the age of 40,” Fell explains.
“Alarm bells should be going off,” she continues. “Why are we letting women in the United States sell or rent their wombs to foreign nationals so that those children can then be sent or taken overseas to men over 40?”
And it’s not just single men to look out for.
“As a labor and delivery nurse in San Francisco, I’ve had women — not surrogacy cases, but women from Asia — that come over to San Francisco and deliver their babies so that they can have a baby that has United States citizenship,” Fell tells Shanahan.
“And so, the same thing is true of couples, or single people, men or women, that might purchase a child from a surrogate in the United States, that those children are United States citizens,” she continues.
“And that’s their own path to citizenship,” Shanahan chimes in, noting that there are no laws regulating this.
Gay couples are another demographic that tends to use both surrogates and IVF to have children and start their own families.
“Two men who are wanting to have a family, they’ll often use an egg donor as well as a surrogate mother,” Fell explains. “They’ll use two separate women, so then there’s no claim who really is the mother. It’s on purpose that this is done.”
“So, they’ll use an egg donor, and so this woman is healthy,” she continues. “We’re going to put this really healthy young woman on high doses of medications and hormones to extract really as many eggs as they can from her. There are supposed guidelines for how many eggs they can extract, but in my conversations with egg donors, that’s not followed.”
According to Fell, some egg donors have had upwards of 50 or 60 eggs extracted.
“It’s going to affect each of these women differently, these drugs, but one of the risks is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can cause its own myriad of issues, including stroke, infertility,” Fell warns. “A lot of these cases aren’t reported. Women who are egg donors, once they give their eggs, they are, we like to say, ‘lost in medical history.’”
“We are born with all the eggs that we are ever going to have,” she continues, adding, “so there’s no studies on her fertility as she ages. There’s no studies on her risks of developing breast cancer or any other types of cancer for being put on hormones at such a young age.”
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My Stepsister Ran A Surrogacy Racketeering Ring — And Just Got Two Years In Prison
I fight against everything my kind-of stepsister made money off of.Erasing moms: How the left discards women — but keeps their parts
The baby-buying business is booming.
Powered in part by affluent gay male couples, for a few hundred thousand dollars they can purchase eggs from a poor woman, pay for a lab-arranged conception, and then "buy" another poor woman to carry the baby through surrogacy — right up until the doctor rips newborn Junior away from her hands and gives him to his two new daddies.
The baby-buyers are calling all the shots here. The women who are poor enough to submit to this have no virtually no voice.
This is evil for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that buying a baby is human trafficking. (And let’s not forget that not every baby-buyer wants to raise a child. Some want to resell. Human trafficking of human trafficking.)
Since we just celebrated Mother’s Day, we need to spotlight this abhorrent practice and how it shapes our view of mothers.
Here's the truth: It teaches us that moms aren't really needed. It teaches us that a woman in a child’s life brings nothing special that two men can’t replicate. The media eagerly publishes stories about gay dads and how they can “bond just as well” with children as the real mother who’s been paid and sent away.
So, ladies: Your contribution as a mother isn't special. Women and men aren’t really that different. You goofy Christians and your “God created two genders” nonsense has been disproved! When it comes to children, we can mix and match parents at will. We just don’t need moms.
This is what the progressive, liberal culture wants us to believe about mothers.
Oops, hold on a second
Well, we might still need women for one thing. Not their feminine nature or anything they bring to the table as a creature different from a man. No, all we need from women are their eggs.
The franken-scientists haven’t yet figured out how to create their own, so for now, we need to use women for their ovaries.
After all, what could be better than flooding the female body with a bunch of hormones in order to harvest their eggs in a procedure that nobody has ever described as pleasant? Oh, and those additional hormones? Yeah, they're implicated in the rise of certain cancers for women undergoing this process.
As Nadya Williams says in her excellent article “The Babies Money Can Buy,” this procedure is “only the latest cost our society is willing to exact from women to go against their biology in order to play the fertility game (as it becomes in the process) by men’s rules. ... Egg freezing, after all, is a lucrative business, largely fueled by women trying to extend their childbearing years. But it is also fueled by men who decide to have children without, well, ever marrying a woman.”
Yes, the “we find women icky” crowd are happy to find a woman who can’t quite make ends meet and buy parts of her to make their new mom-less child.
How is this acceptable?
Oops, just one more second
Because science hasn’t yet perfected a viable alternative womb option, this practice tells women: We need to keep you around for now, but just as an incubator for our lab-made child. Sound good?
Baby-buyers prey on women in desperate financial straits with this generous offer: You can have all the discomforts of pregnancy and all the pain of childbirth, but no baby! Your hormones will be totally wacky afterward, and you’ll probably feel quite sad to lose the little person who grew inside of you.
In fact, as Williams explains:
There are additional emotional costs that are involved in carrying a child for nine months. Pregnancy is the ultimate bonding process for mothers with the baby in utero. The surrogate’s body, hormones, emotions — all these combine to treat the baby as her own, because that is how pregnancy is naturally designed to work.
Yes, the original Designer got it right the first time, and women — and their babies — are the ones who pay this soul-destroying price of separation from the little human they grew. You’ve probably read of cases where surrogates went to court to get a baby back, but savvy baby-buyers make sure their contracts are airtight. Even in cases where they decide they don’t want the baby and want it aborted.
After a woman bids a permanent farewell to the child she carried, maybe she'll receive the extra bonus of recovering from surgery, since some buyers prefer their surrogates to have a C-section. Never mind that the procedure is far riskier, requires a longer recovery, and has been known to cause a lifetime of complications.
The baby-buyers are calling all the shots here. The women who are poor enough to submit to this have virtually no voice.
Again. How is this acceptable?
Now, I understand that not every surrogate is in these circumstances, but we must grapple with the facts as we have them — and they don't paint a pretty picture.
Women and children, last not first
Remember when our culture encouraged men to put women and children first? Yeah, not so anymore. Now, we can just erase women completely.
Case in point: Colton Underwood, who starred on the reality show “The Bachelor” before coming out as gay. He and his now-husband recently bought eggs and a womb to create a motherless baby, then posed in the hospital with the child shortly after taking him from his mother. Afterward, they claimed their child has no mother at all.
Both the woman who carried the baby and the egg donor — completely erased.
Most surrogacy arrangements like this are highly questionable ethically. How did we get to the place where two rich guys can buy or rent a woman’s body parts?
Of course, it's objectionable for anyone to do it. But the fact that our culture is now celebrating two men purposefully creating a motherless child is especially disgusting. It smacks of misogyny, and it hurts the child who was created to be mothered — not just fathered.
How is the child hurt? Because that Designer I mentioned created these little ones to be nurtured on the outside by the person who carried them inside. We know about mother-child bonding: It’s emotional and physical.
Before birth in any pregnancy (including surrogacy), the child’s genetic material crosses through the placenta and circulates in the mother’s blood, according to Dr. Kristin Collier, a bioethicist. The child literally becomes part of the mother. How cruel and wrong for the child to be taken from her. Countless studies have demonstrated other ways in which the maternal-child bond is irreplaceable for a child’s long-term health.
Yes, other situations rupture the maternal-child bond. But this situation is unique because the baby was created expressly to be taken away from its mother, expressly to live a life with no mother. That makes it even worse.
It is ironic that the progressive left embraced the book and TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale" as a rhetorical tool, darkly warning how President Trump or Republicans or pro-lifers want to enslave women and force them into bearing children.
Those "warnings" come from one side of the same mouths that celebrate two gay daddies making not one but two new forever-motherless babies.
Do they not see how we are inching toward a similar dystopian outcome? A woman-rejecting, woman-disrespecting, woman-using, woman-abusing outcome? Do they not see that even in that show, the birth mothers are devastated when their babies — who are products of rape — are taken from them?
And we must remember the children who will never have a mom in their lives. It's a tragic loss for them, just like it is when a young mother dies or some other situation removes a mother from her children.
But at least those kids know who their mother is and sometimes will get a new mom in their lives. Until recently, humans have universally recognized and honored this crucial fact: Children need a mother. And not just daughters, by the way, though it’s sad to think about a girl growing up without her mother.
Yes, our dysfunctional culture is also rewriting the importance of fathers, and two women should not create babies who will never see or know their father. But surrogate fathers are not the same because a man’s contribution to a lab-conception process is much — shall we say — quicker and simpler.
No, this denigration of the role of a mother hits women and children the hardest.
Think about this the next time you see two daddies showing off their new designer baby on social media, which invariably generates likes and positive comments from those who fail to think deeply about this and from those who don’t understand the flawed nature of the research on same-sex parenting.
That research, for the record, is often conducted using participants recruited from LGBTQ advocacy organizations, and it mostly focuses on parental perception, not actual outcomes for children.
Them Before Us, an organization devoted to putting children’s needs before adult “wants” (including the need for a mother and a father), is a great resource for learning more about how to protect motherhood, fatherhood, and children.
There’s never been more of a direct attack on motherhood.
It's not the news we want to discuss around Mother’s Day, but when mothers are deemed unnecessary, that’s nothing to celebrate.
‘Conceiving Crime’ Podcast Tells Horrors Of Abortion, Fertility Industries That Corporate Media Won’t
'It's about reclaiming the light and encouraging the listener to take a moment to consider their worldviews,' Parker said.'SNL' openly mocks gay surrogacy — what is happening?
Over the past decade, the once universally loved “Saturday Night Live” has become a clear propaganda tool of the left — consistently pushing left-wing issues while poking fun at the right.
However, that may be changing after one April 12 "SNL" skit shockingly mocked gay surrogacy.
The sketch took place at a chaotic dinner party where guests shared bizarre personal updates. One gay couple at the dinner party had a newborn baby, and the other guests then begin asking questions as to where and how they acquired a baby — even asking if they stole it.
The skit took it so far as to ask the gay couple how just the other night they were going to a gay rave called “Bulge Dungeon” when there was a baby on the way.
“There are two different ways to see this,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” says. “Either you can see it as using comedy to normalize two men purchasing a baby, or you can see it as a big vibe shift that we are actually starting to mock and deride something that deserves our mockery and derision.”
“Because it is a legitimate question. How could two men, who do not have the genetic material nor the wombs to create and bear children, have a child?” Stuckey asks.
While Stuckey is skeptical that the skit was pointing out the gay couple’s purchase of a baby as a bad thing, she did think one line from the skit was a home run.
“That line about ‘last night you were talking about going to Bulge Dungeon and now you have a baby and we’re just wondering how to square that circle,’ that was a good one. That was the best line, because if you see a lot of these men who are purchasing children, you do have some questions, like, ‘Do you know the first thing about raising a child?’” Stuckey says.
“And so I appreciate that whatever the motive is, that we are in the mode right now of mocking something that is absolutely depraved and destructive,” she adds.
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Egg ‘donation’ centers prey on young women — and don’t disclose the dangers
If you’re a young woman who’s in a bit of a financial pinch, becoming an egg donor might seem like an easy, painless way to make some fast cash.
But the emotional and physical cost is much more than what these egg donation centers let on — so much so that the executive director of the Center for Bioethics, Kallie Fell, thinks these young women desperately need to steer clear.
“You have to start with thinking about what kinds of women are targeted to become egg sellers,” Fell tells Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.” “These women are young, typically between 20 and 30 because those are our fertile years, that’s when we’re healthiest, our eggs are healthiest, our egg quality and quantity are the best,” Fell explains, calling the advertisements targeting these women “slick.”
“‘Free tanning sessions,’ ‘pay for spring break,’” Fell mimics. “Often, too, the advertisements will list a higher amount than what they’re often given, because a woman might answer an advertisement and say, ‘Oh, I saw an advertisement for X amount.’ But then she might find out that she’s not quite what they’re looking for.”
The women are also targeted for their empathy, as they believe they don’t need their eggs at that moment and would love to help out a family in need.
“Their altruistic intentions are exploited,” Fell says, and Stuckey couldn’t agree more.
“I mean, it sounds like the song ‘Fancy’ by Reba McIntyre. I mean, she’s talking about being a young prostitute because her mom is sending her out to help pay their bills. This is not sex, but it is selling your body for money, sometimes for desperation,” Stuckey says.
“And not just your body,” Fell says, “You’re not just putting your health at risk, but you are in essence, as an egg seller, sperm seller, you are giving away your future child that is your genetic material that will make a future child. And I think that young women don’t always think that through.”
“You are willing to give up your own child to someone else, and you have no idea how that child will be raised,” Stuckey agrees.
However, it’s not just the future of the child or the “slick” advertising targeting young women that bothers Stuckey and Fell — but the fact that the advertising does not include the known health risks to the young women they’re targeting.
“In nowhere on them do they include the known risks or even the statement that we don’t know what the risks are,” Fell explains, noting that she’s been speaking with an “egg seller” who’s trying to file a class-action lawsuit in Canada for the physical harm she experienced.
“She just talks to me about how she called the clinic with pains, complaints of shortness of breath, and other side effects, and instead of talking to a doctor, she talked to a coordinator who just reassured her that it was normal. She never actually saw a physician or a provider of medical care until she was sedated on the table, ready to collect her eggs,” she continues.
“These advertisements are very flowery, they use very cunning and slick language, and once they’re exploited for their eggs, they’re put on high doses of hormones and medications that have long-lasting side effects,” she says.
In a film for the Center of Bioethics and Culture, the stories of these women who were harmed are told — and they face everything from strokes to ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome to losing their own fertility.
“And those are just kind of immediate risks. We don’t know what happens to these women long-term, their risk for cancer later, or their children,” she adds.
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‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is back — and it’s more delusional than ever
The trailer for the sixth and final season of the left’s favorite show, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has hit the mainstream — and of course it’s not hiding its true agenda in the slightest.
The show is based on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a novel by Margaret Atwood, but the novel, which was written in the 1980s, doesn’t blame Christian conservatives for the dystopian setting. Rather, the plot simply involves women who are being forced into being surrogates for wealthier, infertile women.
Atwood herself has said that she was influenced by many different religions, including Islam, for her best-seller.
“Their argument, from what I understand,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” says of the left, “is that the religious right, and really all Republicans, because Donald Trump is not the religious right, but they say that he’s co-opted Christianity to try to turn America into this Christian nationalist religious extremist dystopia where we are forced to give birth.”
The reason they believe this is because many Christians on the right are against killing babies in the womb.
However, Stuckey is well aware that their interpretation is delusional, to say the least.
“Something that is really happening in the United States right now is a widespread billion-dollar surrogacy industry that thrives in the United States, which is the Wild West of reproductive technology when it comes to the creation and cryopreservation of embryos, the farming of eggs, the procurement of sperm,” she explains.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of the reproductive industry in the United States is surrogacy,” she continues. “When we’re talking about a surrogate, it is typically the creation of a child using the DNA of two individuals which are complete strangers creating these embryos and then transferring these embryos into a surrogate who is not the biological mother, is not related to the child at all, and this carrier, this surrogate, carries the child until birth.”
“Very often these are premature births because they are high-risk pregnancies. They were not naturally conceived; this baby doesn’t share DNA with the carrier,” she adds.
In many births of babies carried by a surrogate, they take the baby away immediately to ensure that the baby doesn’t bond with the mother, who was the only home the baby has known for the first nine months.
“They’ve just gone through something really big, really dramatic, really traumatic, and they need that bond. But in surrogacy situations, that skin-to-skin opportunity is taken away, that bonding experience necessary for the health of the child is taken away to prevent that bond,” Stuckey explains.
And it gets worse. In a 2023 study from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinic Outcome Reporting System, it was found that between 2014 and 2020, 32% of surrogacy pregnancies by American women were for buyers outside the United States. 42% of those buyers were men of Asian descent.
“We already know there’s an organ-harvesting black market that exists. We know that child sex trafficking exists. And surrogacy plays a part in all of that. Yet most people won’t say anything about this because they are scared of being called homophobic, because they know it is very often men using these services,” Stuckey says.
“This is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’” she adds.
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