Ruth Institute Blog

By Rachel Pepa [Please note the other resources at the bottom of the article when you click "Keep reading."]

A review of Precious Babies: Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting after Infertility By Kate Brian

As an informal guide to having children after fertility problems, Precious Babies has much to recommend it. There is, however, an omission which, as a donor conceived (DC) person, I found particularly troublesome – the book is entirely devoid of DC voices. Read more…

I just saw this headline in the Des Moines Register:

“Judge: Put both moms’ names on
the birth certificate.”

 “Both moms?!?!?!”  Yes, you read it right: “both moms.”

Judges created same sex “marriage” in Iowa in a case called Varnum v Brien. So, now another judge rules that the spouse in a same sex marriage should be listed as the child’s other parent. Listen:

“Pursuant to Varnum v. Brien, where a married woman gives birth to a baby conceived through use of an anonymous sperm donor, the Department of Public Health should place her same-sex spouse’s name on the child’s birth certificate without requiring the spouse to go through an adoption proceeding,”

The State Attorney tried to argue that the state law’s wording in regards to parentage is gender-specific, and not open to interpretation. (Hold it right there: do you mean to tell me that a State Attorney was actually defending the state’s family law?!?!  We aren’t used to that here in CA.  Out here, the Attorney General and the Governor just flatout refused to defend Prop 8.   But I digress!) The State Attorney quite sensibly stated:

“It is a biological impossibility for a woman to ever legally establish paternity of a child.” Read more…

by Rebecca Taylor

I have heard countless times that parents that undergo in vitrofertilization (IVF) must love their children so very much to go through such an expensive and invasive process to have children.  I have no doubt that parents undergoing IVF believe they are doing what is best, but looking at the realities of IVF that many parents are not aware of, one has to wonder if IVF is really about the children at all. Read more…

The “marriage equality” movement is based on faulty logic and is not about creating “equal rights.” Leaders in the “marriage equality” movement either are not honest with their followers, or truly do not understand their own arguments. Whichever is the case, they need the concept of “marriage equality” to contain an element that is simultaneously false and unstated. Like I said, I have no idea if the leaders are willful on this point or not. I am nearly 100% sure the rank and file members of that side have not even begun to think about it like this.

Here is the part that is both false and unstated: Read more…

by Wesley J. Smith

Click here to watch the related music video.

Pro choice and pro life women have come together in coalition to protect women from being exploited for their eggs by Big Biotech. Reason?  Women would take all the risks and the companies could make all the money but for the small payments to women to undergo the unnecessary extration procedure. Read more…

I think conservatives and libertarians err when they refer to “gay marriage” as such. They unwittingly concede a tremendous amount of ground when using that term. If I was on the left I would secretly be quite happy every time I saw a conservative or libertarian use it.

But since I’m not on the left, I cringe. In my view, the issue is really about the redefinition of marriage. Calling it a redefinition is the correct viewpoint since that is what is at stake. The historical definition of marriage included two important concepts.

1. The innate procreative abilities between men and women. No such ability exists in same sex sexual activity. This point alone makes it very clear that sexual activity between a man and a woman is not equal to sexual activity between people of the same sex. Read more…

This article was first published October 13, 2011, at cbc-network.org.

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President

Despite all our society’s talk of civility these days, it seems the public square is only becoming more of a lion’s den. And people of a certain stripe are being excluded or marginalized purely on the basis of their religious beliefs. Read more…

by Damian Adams

Not knowing your biological father is hardly a fit topic for Hollywood slapstick.

Starbuck is a new French-Canadian comedy about what happens when a sperm donor who has fathered 533 children is tracked down by over 100 of them. There is all manner of hilarious slapstick when he anonymously steps into their lives after watching them from afar. According to the Ottawa Citizen, it’s “a sparkling crowd-pleaser”. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

Watch the video.

It’s Father’s Day again — that is, Anonymous Father’s Day, a time to become aware of what the children of donor dads think of their absent, unknown progenitors. Read more…

Alana Stewart, Elizabeth Marquardt, Jennifer Lahl, call your offices! Check out this NPR interview with a representative of the IVF industry and Wendy Kramer, founder of one of the sibling donor registries. Listen to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of reproductive medicine practitioners.

We think everyone is entitled to whatever they want and whatever they agree to, so we think the informed consent process is essential. So everyone needs to understand what the restrictions and rules are or are not, agree to it only if all the parties agree, and don’t have any changes to that agreement unless all the parties agree.

When asked about the fact that children haven’t given their consent to these arrangements, here is his flippant answer:

Well, as far as I know, no one has ever consented to the circumstances of their own conception. I happen to have teenage boys who I suspect currently probably would not consent to me being their father. I don’t know too many teenage boys who would consent to whoever their father is. Read more…

According to a  recent study of ovarian cancer ”After 15 years of follow-up, they found that women who had undergone IVF were more than four times as likely those who had not to develop borderline ovarian cancer, a malignancy that is treatable and survivable.”

Now, I would normally think that a four times greater risk of cancer would be cause for concern. Not so.

“This shouldn’t be a cause of concern to women undergoing IVF,” said Flora E. van Leeuwen, the lead author and head of epidemiology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. “We’re talking about in an increased risk of a very rare tumor that is highly treatable.”

That’s assuming that this particular risk is the only risk associated with IVF.  Is that how all known carcinogens are treated?

Wonderful! The world is coming to its senses!

FROM THE IONA INSTITUTE BLOG:

In the last year to 18 months the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, pictured) had handed down several excellent decisions. The most famous is the Lautsi judgement in which it ruled that Italy could place crucifixes on the walls of state classrooms.

In another, it ruled that a prohibition on same-sex marriage did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights, and this week it ruled that a ban on the use of donor sperm or eggs does not violate the Convention. Read more…

By David Picella

For couples that are experiencing infertility, the desire to have a child can be overwhelming. Every month that passes is another missed opportunity. Depression, grief, sadness, and despair eventually set in and at some point most couples become desperate enough to gamble with tens of thousands of dollars on expensive procedures like InVitro Fertilization (IVF) without fully understanding what they are getting themselves into. For the vast majority of couples who try IVF, false hopes turn false, and things that sound too good to be true prove to be so. Read more…

by Margaret Somerville

A Canadian radio station created world-wide controversy recently when it ran a “win a baby” competition.

An Ottawa music station, Hot 89.9, recently launched a “Win a Baby” contest. The prize offered was up to three rounds of fertility treatment worth C$35,000. It’s reported that the station received around 400 applications “from a diverse range of people, including same-sex couples, single women and cancer patients.” Read more…

Tonight Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse will interview Katie Elrod. Elrod has been a humanities teacher and administrator in independent schools for over 15 years, and has taught in the Perspectives program at Boston College. She received her BA and MA in philosophy from Boston College, where she was a Lonergan Fellow. Read more…

by Richard Egan

Human cloning researchers pay women to risk death so they can pursue their doomed experiments.

In an article published in Nature on 6 October 2011, Scott Noggle and his colleagues at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory report on their experiments in which they have derived stem cells from human embryos created by adding the nucleus of a somatic cell to a human egg. Read more…

Such children struggle with a unique anxiety: What if I fall in love with my half-sibling?

by CHRISTOPHER WHITE

Thirty-two invitro fertilized children gather at the Swedish Medical Center in 2003 in Denver. The Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Center gathered the children from each of its 16 years of work in the field. Guests included Payton Kline, 4 1/2 months, the 5,000th invitro fertilized baby born at the center. – Kevin Moloney/Getty Images Read more…

Infertility can bring so much heartache to couples desperately wanting a baby. Sadly, desperation opens the door for exploitation. Recently, two high-profile surrogacy attorneys, Theresa Erickson and Hilary Neiman, were caught exploiting surrogates, stealing from California taxpayers and, most horrifically, selling babies.  Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

Most couples who marry, even today, probably intend to have one or two children at least. Marriage and the baby carriage (as family scholar Brad Wilcox likes to pair them) have always gone together. But this is not what is meant by the new catch-phrase “intentional parenthood”. Read more…

by Karen Clark

Not much unlike Alana’s expereince in the Shark Tank, Jennifer Lahl’s experience was not much different.  These people should be ashamed by their uncivil behavior.  Thankfully, Diane Allen, of the Infertility Network, was a voice of reason and respect. Read more…