Ruth Institute Blog

About ten years ago, I set the goal for myself to perform a one-arm pullup.

Working diligently and using a variety of training techniques, I got very close to that goal.  Agonizingly close.  Despite years of effort, the feat eluded me.  Yet I never gave up.

Finally, I got the idea to radically restrict my carbohydrate intake, lose the belly I was developing and thereby increase my strength-to-weight ratio.  I cut out sugar, grain and other starchy foods.  Fifteen pounds came right off, and I was able to get my chin over the bar using one hand.  This makes me very happy.

You might ask, Ari, what the heck does this have to do with anything that the Ruth Institute stands for?  Are you just writing this to brag? Read more…

by Damian Adams

Social acceptance of commercial conception ignores all the hidden costs.

It is often said that we cannot put a price on happiness. However, for those who are medically or socially infertile, happiness has a dollar value. For the first time in history adults can use technology to create their babies, with the only restriction being their ability to pay. Read more…

by Terrence McKeegan Co-authored with Tyler Ament

WASHINGTON, April 27, 2011 (C-FAM) – Costa Rica must legalize in vitro fertilization or face penalties for alleged violations of human rights protected by international law, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

In 2000, the Costa Rican Constitutional Court ruled that IVF in the country was unconstitutional because it violated the right to life of the embryo.  Four years later, the Center for Reproductive Rights petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to accept a case claiming that the human rights of two Costa Rican couples were violated by the ban. Read more…

An antitrust suit is filed against America’s fertility clinics

FERTILITY assistance is a big and profitable business in America. Those needing help to conceive—infertile couples, older women, gay men using surrogate birth mothers—may be charged steep prices by the mostly privately owned clinics. In turn the clinics pay egg donors fees that often run into thousands of dollars. In contrast, an egg donor in Britain can legally be compensated by only the same amount as someone serving on jury duty—£61.28 (just under $100) a day. Read more…

Jennifer Lahl, CBC President—and Executive Producer, Director, and Writer of Eggsploitation—recently interviewed Linda about her egg donation experience.

Lahl: You told me you saw the ad on Craigslist’s posting by the fertility center, looking for Asian egg donors. What made you answer this ad?

Linda: I thought I fit the description very well: Great grades, college educated, great looks, and genetics. The list could go on for all the ego reasons I would want to do this. Read more…

from Yahoo News:
France’s top court refused Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States, in a ruling that affirmed France’s legal ban on surrogacy.

In a case straddling international legal rights and bioethics, the Court of Cassation ruled a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents.

Keep reading…

“Surrogacy is also banned outright in most European countries, including Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland. But the French have articulated the reasons for this rejection most eloquently”: Read more…

Yesterday there was a segment on NPR titled Taming The Twin Trend From Fertility Treatments. They talked about how various forms of ART have caused an increase in the incidence of twin pregnancies:

Twins, once a rarity to marvel over, are now a common part of American culture, thanks in large part to increased use of reproductive technology. Twins are conceived naturally just 2 percent of the time; for those who get pregnant with fertility treatments the rate is more than 40 percent.

They also discussed some of the health risks associated with twins: Read more…

(March 15, 2011) Dr J traveled up to the Los Angeles area for a screening of “Eggsploitation,” Jennifer Lahl’s documentary on the fertility industry–in particular, the way egg donors are used by the process.  (Jennifer Lahl is one of Ruth Institute’s academic advisors.)  She gives a short talk after the screening but before the author’s Q&A.

Listen here.

More information on “Eggsploitation” is available here.

Women undergoing egg retrieval undertake real yet poorly studied health risks.

To retrieve her eggs, a woman first takes one set of powerful synthetic hormones to shut down her ovaries, then another to hyperstimulate them to induce a yield of eggs many times the normal number.  Whether this is done as part of her own fertility treatment, or to donate eggs to another woman, or for medical research, the process is the same.

Pressures on young women to donate eggs are increasing.  AHB joins other groups calling for more and better studies of egg donor risks so that women may be offered a meaningful informed consent before agreeing to have their ovaries hyperstimulated and their eggs retrieved.  AHB calls for a national registry to track the health and well-being of women donating eggs, the prohibition of payment for egg donation, and a moratorium on egg donation for research until the long-term health risks are better understood. Read more…

Yet more evidence that Anonymous Sperm and Egg Donation is Over (and not soon enough, if you ask me).

newsweek.com:
Currently, in the United States, you need a license to sell a condo or cut hair in a salon, but not to broker human life. The $3 billion fertility industry goes largely unregulated, offering blank pages to those searching for information where the rest of us are free to access vital statistics of public record. “I’m not a treatment, I’m a person, and those records belong to me,” says Pratten.

On top of the serious risk of inbreeding and the medical and health concerns associated with anonymous sperm and egg donation, we all should be entitled to know our biological heritage for the sake of the effect it has on our self image and identity: Read more…

On December 31st Diane Rehm (on NPR) rebroadcast a show about DNA Sequencing & Personal Genomics. (Yes, and I’m just now getting around to blogging about it…)

When they started taking comments and questions from listeners, the first caller hit on something that made me wonder how this rapidly developing technology is going to affect the future of Assisted Reproductive Technology for everyone.

From the transcript:

SUE
Good morning. I want to say that nobody has touched on reducing risk for future generations yet. I think this has broad ramifications for adoption law and closed records. Would you respond to that, please? Read more…

And what happened to the other embryos? And how will this child feel when he grows up and learns we was created through science, not conceived out of love, for the purpose of helping his siblings, not because he was wanted for his own sake. Talk about feeling used. I hope his parents can also afford his therapy. Even his name will serve as a constant reminder of his utilitarian purpose in life. Read more…

by Mary Rice Hasson

A pretence of altruism cloaks the mercenary and exploitative reality of this aspect of IVF.

“Melissa” is a college student, blonde, bright, and beautiful. A high achiever with a soft spot for other people’s troubles, she heads back to her Ivy League campus this week. First stop: the financial aid office to sign loan documents to secure this pricey education and coveted degree.

She’s exactly the type of young woman targeted by egg donor agencies, desperate couples, and fertility clinics. They want her eggs. Badly. And they know how to find her. Read more…

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President

As millions around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, issued a press release announcing the birth of their baby boy, born on Christmas Day. Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, a healthy baby, was born through modern, assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Using an anonymous egg donor and a “gestational carrier” (I always think this term sounds more like a new form of aircraft—as in “the cargo just arrived on the newest gestational carrier.” Where is the feminist outrage?!) Elton and David fulfilled one of their greatest wishes: to be parents. They have now joined the ranks of the growing list of celebrities having babies via ART.

This got me thinking about another list I read a few years ago: the “Ten Best Chores to Outsource.” Expecting to see housecleaning, gardening and landscaping, pool cleaning, laundry, I was shocked and saddened by the number one “best chore to outsource”: pregnancy. From the Time piece: Read more…

The stories from Anonymous Us are very powerful. Here is an extract from one called Safety in Biology:

When I tell people I wish I had been raised by my real father often they are offended and say things like, “Your real father is the man that raises you, kisses your scrapes, tucks you in, reads you stories and loves you.” This is a wildly naive idea and if Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

The story of Carlina White, the American woman who was abducted as a baby and has only just found her mother and her own identity, has made world headlines. But how many journalists are drawing the obvious moral of the story: kids need to know who they are.

Right now, babies are being concocted in laboratories around the world from the ova and/or sperm of anonymous donors and in some cases carried to birth by surrogate mothers — all to satisfy the desires of adults to have a child. Their successes will be written up with sentimental approval. Read more…

First Ever Story-Collective for People Involved in Reproductive Technologies

“Not all the kids are doing all right,” says Alana S., founder and curator of AnonymousUs.org, “Anonymous Us is a place for all participants in the fertility industry to share their own truths in a way that retains dignity and privacy for our loved ones, while also sharing valuable perspectives and life experiences.” Read more…

The Wall Street Journal reports on the growing phenomenon of reproductive tourism. I encourage Regular Ruth Readers to go to this story and comment.

In a hospital room on the Greek island of Crete with views of a sapphire sea lapping at ancient fortress walls, a Bulgarian woman plans to deliver a baby whose biological mother is an anonymous European egg donor, whose father is Italian, and whose birth is being orchestrated from Los Angeles. She won’t be keeping the child. The parents-to-be—an infertile Italian woman and her husband (who provided the sperm)—will take custody of the baby this summer, on the day of birth.

You understand, this is all a business deal. Some people want babies. Other people have the raw materials for babies, the eggs, the sperm and the wombs. An entrepreneur brings the buyers and sellers together, in a purely voluntary commercial transaction. Who could possibly have any moral reservations? Anyone with even the slightest hint of an “ick” reaction just has a vestigial ethical code that obviously no longer serves any legitimate purpose.
So, let me raise some issues about the commercialization of babies.
1. A child is not an object to whom other people have rights. A child is a person Read more…

CBC’s Jennifer Lahl and Wesley J. Smith are occasional writers for ToTheSource.org. Recently ToTheSource interviewed Jennifer.

To The Source: How did you become interested in egg donation? What brought this to your attention?

Jennifer Lahl: I became interested in it as a broader issue within the various reproductive technologies. I’ve been writing and speaking on reproductive technology for close to a decade, and through my work, egg donors in the U.S. have found me and contacted me to tell me their stories. These were women whose stories had a negative outcome, and the donors had nowhere to go. Also, being involved in the stem cell debates, I was concerned with the growing demand for human eggs which will be needed to do the research. Read more…

I was going to write something about the award of the Noble Prize in medicine to the developer of IVF. But my friend from Down Under, Carolyn Moynihan of Mercator Net said what I wanted to say:

There is something quite ironic in this week’s award of the Nobel Prize to Robert Edwards for the development of human in vitro fertilisation. During decades in which the whole thrust of reproductive medicine was to render fertile women infertile for 99 per cent of the time, Dr Edwards and later his colleague Patrick Steptoe were perfecting techniques for turning infertile women into mothers.

And yet these two grand projects are only apparently contradictory. Both pushed medicine away from its basic curative function and towards a social engineering role: efficient contraception would suppress bodily rhythms to make every child a wanted child; IVF would make wanted children appear even when the body was not fit to conceive. Read more…