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…

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…

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…

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 Mary Jo Anderson

The current battles over the fate of thousands of babies conceived via in vitro fertilization would confound even King Solomon.

Sensational news reports surrounding the $180,000 price tag for Ukrainian black-market babies shocked the determinedly secular segments of society, and few remain unmoved by the story of the FBI’s round-up of “baby-brokers.” Beyond the initial horror of children clinically conceived and sold as a commodity, investigators discovered that these babies have dozens of full and half siblings that were sold elsewhere. This opens the possibility that, in 25 years, a young man might unknowingly marry his sister. Read more…

What a mess, and, of course, these children, wherever they are, IF they are, will have no idea WHO they are.

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

Alex Walterspiel and Melanie Waters, a married couple in their 30s, conceived their 3-year-old son through in vitro fertilization and hoped to get pregnant again with one of the remaining frozen embryos.

But when the California couple returned in 2011, they said, the clinic told them the fertilized embryos were gone. Read more…

Wow. Where does it end?

by RUTH PADAWER

As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt. Read more…

An open letter to the ASRM from Susan Kane, a donor conceived person, in response to Todd Essing’s commentary (Balancing the Rights of Donor Offspring With Those of Donors: But What About Parents? Forbes. June 30/11,  http://tinyurl.com/Essig-2011-06-30) which was a response to the commentary that Naomi Cahn and myself placed in BioNews last week (The Birth of Donor Offspring Rights in the USA?,  http://tinyurl.com/6ce5kny).

By Michelle Laque Johnson

Click here to view a video of Dr. Morse speaking.

People who promote same-sex marriage say the Catholic Church’s stand that marriage is a sacrament that must be between one man and one woman is gay-bashing. Why, they ask, should it matter to you if two people of the same sex get married? Love is love, right? Read more…

A follow-up to Betsy’s post on pre-natal DNA testing:

That knowledge has a flip side. “How much responsibility are we expecting people to take for the genetic makeup of any child they might have?” asks Josephine Johnston, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank near New York City.

If a child is born with a condition that could have been detected, the presence of the test changes that outcome “from something that happened to you, to something that you participated in,” she says. Read more…

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President

Pacific Reproductive Center (PRC) of Southern California (AKA, the reproductive tourist capital of the world) has just announced the opening of an on-site laboratory with breakthrough technology that has the ability to analyze all 46 chromosomes (23 from the mother and 23 from the father) of a human embryo within 24 hours. It is billed as “fresh hope for would-be moms at risk of miscarriages and birth defects.” Read more…

There are several new things up on the podcast page (and more to come).  Recent additions include:

On the latest issue (May 16) of her radio show, “From the Front Lines of the Culture War,” Dr J interviewed Andy Crouch, author of “Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling.”  He’s focused on the things we’re creating and upholding; the “you’re just against this” charge sounds more ridiculous than ever.  (Check out CatholicRadioOfSanDiego.com for more information on the show.)

On May 18, Dr J and Todd Wilken met on Issues, Etc to discuss Germany’s recent decision to subsidize in vitro fertilization in order to stimulate their birthrate.

There’s also an interview given by Dr J to Phyllis Schlafly on Eagle Forum Live, where they discussed non-religious reasons to support traditional marriage and took comments and questions.

Great article. From start to finish.

by Barbara Kay

A Canadian provincial court rules that gamete donors may not hide their identity.

The British Columbia Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Adoption Act and Adoption Regulations on Thursday. They argued that the legislation denies offspring of sperm and egg donors (gamete donors) their Charter rights, which ought to be equal to those of adopted children with regard to knowledge of the identity and medical history of their biological parents. Read more…