Ruth Institute Blog

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…

Still more to come on this front, but ITAF’s closing lecture is featured in this week’s newsletter, so it’s up out of order.

Dr J delivers the closing lecture (also entitled “It Takes a Family to Raise a Village”) at Ruth Institute’s summer student conference.  She traces the roles of marriage in society and gives examples of how the devaluation of marriage has hurt women and children (particularly among the poor and those in Marxist states).

It Takes a Family to Raise a Village

Gotta love that headline.

by Mary Rose Somarriba

Jennifer Aniston’s big new movie made headlines this week—for flopping. The Switch, a romantic comedy about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated, brought in embarrassingly low ticket sales of only $8.4 million on opening weekend. Hollywood reporters have tried to think of all number of reasons for why it flopped so badly, ranging from the myth of lazy August filmgoers to the theory that Aniston is a blockbuster buzzkill.

But the answer may be the story itself. Just four months ago, Jennifer Lopez’s film on the same subject, The Back-up Plan—which came out this week on DVD— opened to a low $12.2 million. As reporters Gregg Kilday and Kim Masters put it, “Artificial insemination, it turns out, is the new box-office poison.” Read more…

Alana S, who blogs at the Family Scholars blog offers this testimony about some of the ambiguities, complications and stresses of being a conceived through anonymous sperm donation:

I decided to tell my mom about my blogging. I decided to explain to her how extensively I plan on combating commercial conception. Read more…

Also right on cue, after noting how many women would be willing to freeze their eggs, comes this story on the risks of birth defects associated with IVF. Please note: these data are from IVF, and are almost certianly mostly more or less “fresh” eggs. We don’t know yet the impact of freezing and thawing out eggs after 10 or more years.

Scientists carried out a survey of 33 French centres collecting data on more than 15,000 births from 2003 to 2007. Read more…

Just this past weekend, I told the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers that the use of Artificial Reproductive Technology is the newest threat to marriage as the lifelong fruitful union of a man and a woman. I argued that the very existence of the ART option is distorting women’s marriage decisions. They believe that they can postpone marriage indefinitely, and if Mr. Right never shows up, they can still become a mother on their own, artificially.
As if on cue, Time magazine steps up to the plate with corroborating evidence:

New research from Belgium and the U.K. suggests that women may increasingly be considering freezing their eggs as a way to prolong fertility as they pursue a career — or find the right romantic partner. A survey of nearly 200 female students found Read more…

Brad Wilcox weighs in on the My Daddy’s Name is Donor study. Brad is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and lectured at our ITAF conference last summer.

Seventy-one percent of the adult offspring of these single mothers agree that: “My sperm donor is half of who I am,” and 78% wonder “what my sperm donor’s family is like.” Half report that they “feel sad” when they see “friends with their biological fathers and mothers.” Donor offspring with single mothers also are much less likely Read more…

My last post dealt with the sampling and reporting problems associated with the latest study purporting to show that the children of lesbians are doing just fine. The fact is, that the study claims that the children of lesbians are doing better in every dimension than the children in the general population. The underlying message of this story is not simply, “leave us alone to have kids the way we want.”

Herewith, are the 3 Really Pernicious Messages behind the “Lesbians Make Better Parents” Story line:

1. Women are better parents than men. Therefore, Read more…

by Elizabeth Marquardt

A revealing new study shows that, for donor offspring at least, being wanted isn’t everything.

Experts estimate that there could be around one million young people alive in the world today as a result of sperm donation. How are they doing? Elizabeth Marquardt of the Institute for American Values and colleagues have done a unique study based on a large, representative US survey and, in a report published today, tell us that the kids, many of them, are not okay. In this interview with MercatorNet during a recent conference hosted by the Social Trends Institute in Barcelona, she talks about some of her findings. Read more…

Wow. Powerful title.

by Michael Cook

Is it high-tech child abuse to rob children of their biological heritage?

A 51-year-old Michigan man may have fathered as many as 400 children by donating sperm to an IVF clinic between 1980 and 1994. At the time Kirk Maxey saw this as a way to pay his way through medical school and to help infertile women. “You would get a personal phone call from a nurse saying, ‘The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?’,” he told Newsweek last year. Read more…

By ROSS DOUTHAT, New York Times

If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout. Read more…

While I was over at the My Daddy’s Name is Donor site, I came across this entry, called Debt and Donation, by a woman who was donor conceived herself, and who “donated” her eggs for the money. Poignant, painful, powerful: I can’t begin to do it justice. Go read it yourself.

The Institute for American Values has just published a new study, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, of how donor conceived persons are doing in comparison with those who were born and raised by their biological parents and in comparison with those who were adopted. I have not read the report yet, just the Executive Summary. But I was struck by one of the exchanges that has already occurred on the site.

FamilyScholar blogger Olivia Pratten writes:
I have been speaking out publicly about my donor conception for many years. I am always very critical of the anonymity, the means to which I was brought into the world and I’m almost always disapproving of the infertility industry.

Inevitably someone will say to me “but you were so wanted.”

My answer is always, “yes, and your point?”

Responding to this post is a gay man, called “T.”
Read more…

I am flattered by the attention from Daily Kos blogger, Dante Atkins. Sadly, this post is short on substance, and long on ad hominem attacks and innuendo. I will leave aside for now, his silly attack on our logo, of all things. I will ignore his mangling of the Biblical story of Ruth, except to note one thing: I chose Ruth because she is a unifying figure, loved by all the major faith groups. Catholics love her; Jews love her; Evangelicals love her; Mormons love her. Everybody loves Ruth, it seems, except for leftist bloggers. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how leftists like Dante expect to build a coalition when they alienate every major faith tradition in America. Read more…

This article was posted April 28, 2010, at The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. It is a really interesting, quick read and quite the eye-opener. Thank you, anonymous author.

I volunteered to harvest eggs for a friend, whose ovaries had ceased producing eggs in her early 30’s. She bought donated sperm from a California university sperm bank several years prior to my egg harvest and was being counseled about infertility options. This was not an “eggs for money” contract. I volunteered without a compensation obligation.

My experience began with an appointment to determine if I was a qualified egg producing candidate. I was 30 “something,” athletic, bright, employed as a professional, and married, with no children-yet. I talked to my husband and friends about it and their main concern was the medical risks to me. Read more…

As mentioned in previous posts, Time Magazine is spotlighting America’s 50 Years on the Pill through somewhat rose-colored glasses.  Really?  No negative effects?  Even sliced bread can’t compete with that prognosis.

As part of Dr J’s series on 50 Years of the Pill, we’ve included a podcast of her interview on Issues, Etc., where she discussed the topic.  Has the Pill accomplished what its defenders promised?  What other effects has it had on the way we view sex, fatherhood, babies, careers, and families?

This podcast is also available on our podcast feed or through iTunes.

50 Years of the Pill

Please keep your eggs and sperm inside the body until you are ready to use them.
See what happens when you don’t? According to this article from the UK, errors in IVF clinics have doubled in the last year. Lest you think this is some ordinary error, listen to this:

One couple were told by the University Hospital of Wales’s IVF clinic that their last remaining embryos had been lost during treatment. The pair, identified only as Clare and Gareth, had been trying for a baby for eight years. Clare told the BBC: “I was sat there, gowned up, waiting to go in and have a transfer.

“They said you’ve got one embryo remaining, the other two embryos have gone missing.

“They said in the next sentence I can assure you they haven’t gone into anyone else.”

She added: “Those were two potential babies.”

No kidding. Read the whole article here.