On September 3, I returned home from a packed 12-day trip to Italy. Eggsploitation was one of the featured films screened this year at one of the conferences I attended. At another conference, I was asked to have the film sub-titled into Italian for the group’s conference next year where 100,000 people are expected to attend. Let me tell you, this documentary created quite a buzz.

In addition to speaking, I had a number of key game-changing discussions and was interviewed by reporters about the untold dark side of the biotech industry. Many were emotionally touched with our message.

Just 14 months ago, Eggsploitation was only an idea that I felt had to become a film. Now it is recognized as one of the outstanding documentary films of the year. I left Italy with a strong sense that CBC is just beginning to have a significant impact on a complex, self-serving industry that is motivated more by profit than by human dignity or life itself.

After seeing the continuing impact that Eggsploitation was having on uninformed women, I felt led to pursue a third film, Anonymous Father’s Day, that exposes the gripping challenges related to sperm donation. A September 5 article in The New York Times nailed the issues this next film will address with the headline: “One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring.”

The ethical, moral, and health implications on future generations that are products of unknown sperm contributions are profound. Anonymous Father’s Day will focus on the lives of those who need to know where they came from but have no way to track their biological history. Powerful stories for this film will be captured by the end of this month, the editing process begins in October, and Anonymous Father’s Day will be released in December.

Anonymous Father’s Day will cost $26,000 to produce. This is far below film industry production costs. I have been able to raise $8,000 of this cost thus far. In order to complete this documentary by December, an additional $18,000 is needed in the next six weeks. Once the film is completed, targeted promotion is required to launch this film on hundreds of college/university campuses and other key locations where its message can challenge uninformed thinking. The immediate promotion cost need will be $12,000.

Your personal involvement is so needed at this time! Would you join hands with me today and help complete this new film? Would you consider a special gift of $500 to $1,000 so Anonymous Father’s Day can be released in less than 90 days and then be strategically promoted in early 2012?

Imagine the impact your gift will have in the lives of hundreds of thousands who are confused by the conflicting message they are receiving by an industry that sees great profit more important than quality of life. Your generosity will help influence the bioethics message during a very critical time!

To help you facilitate your gift, you can give right now by clicking here or on the link below.

Thank you for your serious consideration and timely response. I am looking forward to your meaningful involvement. I pray you will be richly blessed as you generously give.

Sincerely,

Jennifer

Your gift to Center for Bioethics and Culture is tax deductible.

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President

It had already been a bad week for the moral credibility of the infertility industry. The Mumbai Mirror reported that cops were making arrests in a thriving racket involving local gangs, civic officials, and medical professionals all teaming up to traffic infants from India to countries where commercial surrogacy is illegal. It sounds like a plot to yet another movie, such as Google Baby and Made in India, showing the dirty underbelly of the booming billion dollar illegal baby making industry.

If you think this is too far from home to be interesting, and that selling babies is a rare event isolated to developing countries, please read Alan Zarembo’s piece in last week’s Los Angeles Times. Theresa Erickson, internationally renowned surrogacy lawyer in Southern California, has just pleaded guilty to being a co-conspirator in a three-ring baby-selling scheme. Erickson’s ring included Maryland based attorney, Hilary Neiman, and Carla Chambers, who served as a surrogate in the operation on multiple occasions and recruited other surrogates.

Erickson has relentlessly attacked my documentary, Eggsploitation, as over-sensationalized hype from a conservative organization whose larger agenda was to shut down the industry. Eggsploitation tells the stories of women who have been victimized by the fertility industry. Last year it won best documentary at the California Independent Film Festival. Perhaps because of the film’s impact and success, Erickson and her colleagues wrote several negative commentaries and devoted air time on her radio program to criticizing the documentary as inflammatory and misleading.

Erickson continually comforts her listeners by assuring them that she is an advocate for the “the absolute best practices,” and that the claims in Eggsploitation are specious and insulting. In short, I have been distorting the truth about how unethical her practices are, and I have overstated the health and economic challenges inherent in the infertility industry.

ABC News Coverage

The truth has now come out and as it turns out, it is Erickson who has been doing the lying. The public relations damage to the industry has been done, and who better to do it than the industry darling. Needless to say, the fertility industry is reeling.

Erickson and her co-conspirator’s scheme was to prime the pump and increase their babies-for-sale inventory by sending women, willing to act as surrogates, to Ukraine to be implanted with embryos created by anonymously donated eggs and sperm. If the pregnancies were sustained to the second trimester they would find intended parents willing to pay $150,000 for a baby. They would lie to these buyers, telling them that they had a surrogate pregnancy where the original intended parents had backed out. Then, Erickson would file the required legal documents with the courts.

The Associated Press reported that Erickson also admitted to filing false applications for the surrogates to California’s state insurance program to subsidize the medical costs of the deliveries of the babies. To be lawful, these contracts must be drawn up and filed before the surrogate is impregnated and the intended parents already secured.

Babies are being bought and sold. Women are being exploited. Non-traditional families are being made with no consideration for the children created by these technologies. And in this specific case, we see that greed trumps all.

Ms. Erickson and her co-conspirators violated a legal distinction without a difference. Do we get the parties all lined up and the contracts signed in advance or do we wait until after the baby is already in progress? Erickson broke the law by having the surrogate impregnated before the contracts were signed. But commercial surrogacy, whether done legally or Erickson’s way, is still selling babies. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it ethical.

Just as Peter denied Christ, as soon as this story broke, leaders in the industry began to back peddle from their relationship with Erickson. Pam Madsen at Fertility Advocate immediately posted this statement:

I have known Theresa Erickson as a distant colleague for years. She joined the board of directors of The American Fertility Association after I left the organization that I founded as the first Executive Director. So I only really knew her from moments at special events, Facebook, a one-time appearance on her radio show last year, or through reputation.

Madsen and others went on to explain that there had been whispers that Erickson was being investigated, and that she was involved in things she shouldn’t be. Other colleagues from the Family Formation Law Offices wrote:

We were sad to see today that any attorney would engage in baby-selling. Theresa Erickson, a California assisted reproduction attorney who was never a member of AAARTA or ACFFL, has plead guilty to multiple counts of baby-selling . . .

A favorite of mine came from the Spin Doctor, who stated that it is important to note that this case is not about surrogacy, but rather the sale of babies (and wombs) under the guise of surrogacy. You see, the Spin Doctor ascribes to the letter of the law and supports baby selling as long as the contracts are drawn up before and not after.

The Associated Press story reports that California leads the nation in trying to regulate the service and prevent such abuses. California, the birthplace of Octumom’s Octuplets, is known as the reproductive tourist capital of the world. If this is leading the nation in regulation to prevent abuses, God help us.

All signs point to the fact that this recent development is only the tip of the iceberg. Parents with children from these surrogacy arrangements are worried about the legitimacy of their parental rights. Others are wondering if there are more surrogates out there without medical care or intended parents waiting for babies when they are born.

The latest word on Erickson’s guilty plea is that the co-conspirators have entered a plea agreement and Erickson will lose her law license. She has reported that she will “go back into the surrogacy field through her “agency” and/or as a consultant.” Time will tell if justice will be served.

 
This article originally appeared at ToTheSource

We are an award winning team; writing and directing and producing this new high-impact global film and could sure use some Kickstarter funds to get us closer to the editing room. We are wanting to roll the film out in the Fall of 2011. We’ve given you, and all our friends and supporters, until July 11 to help us raise those funds. We’ve done it before and we can do it again, with a little love from our friends.

THIS JUST IN: We’ve reached our minimum funding goal of $2,300! Thank you to everyone who helped us reach this important milestone. For those who haven’t given yet, you can help us with additional expenses we will incur in making the film. In September, Jennifer Lahl will be speaking at the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS) meeting in Toronto and wants to take advantage of being in Toronto to interview some of the people at the forefront of the Pratten v. British Columbia Supreme Court Case (for more see Happy Anonymous Father’s Day). Once all of the interviews are complete, we will begin the editing process—one of the largest single expenses of the film. We will also need to pay for voice-over, graphics, and stock footage that will supplement the story and round out the film.

So please consider a gift to help us with the next phase of making Anonymous Father’s Day. You can give through Kickstarter or through PayPal.

The notorious euthanasia/assisted suicide advocate, Jack Kevorkian, died naturally and peacefully in his hospital bed last week at the age of 83, music playing at his bedside. As many have noted, his death had a certain irony. Despite being in declining health, he never took the out that he offered to other people.

Kevorkian stridently advocated policies and views that are beyond anathema to everything for which the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network stands. He acted lethally on these beliefs, assisting the suicides of about 130 people and murdering Thomas Youk by a lethal injection, a crime for which he served nearly 10 years in prison. The question thus arises: What can one say after such a person’s passing? It seems to me that we should hope he finds the ultimate forgiveness we all need and the eternal peace for which many hope and pray.

But that doesn’t mean we cannot also look at what he did—and the kind of society he sought to forge—with a clear and unsentimental eye. And this is the hard truth: Kevorkian was not motivated by a tender heart offering death only to those for whom it offered the only respite. Rather, he was a harsh utilitarian and nihilistic radical individualist who believed in using mercy killing for the benefit of greater society.

This isn’t my interpretation. It isn’t hyperbole. Nor am I putting words in the late assisted suicide advocate’s mouth. Rather, he expressed his beliefs and goals clearly and without equivocation.

• Kevorkian was a dark misanthrope: Kevorkian was a hard-shell atheist who saw no ultimate value in human life. When asked by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta to describe the worst day of his life, Kevorkian replied, “The moment I was born.” His existential pain was reflected in his art. A talented painter, he used his gift to depict horrible nightmare scenarios, even going so far as to mix human blood into his artistic medium.

• Kevorkian Believed in Death-on-Demand: Kevorkian never advocated limiting assisted suicide/euthanasia to the terminally ill, or even the ill or disabled. Indeed, as a radical individualist, he believed that each of us essentially has a right to death on demand. In this regard, writing in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide, he bizarrely asserted that the victims of Jonestown should have had access to euthanasia so that they could have experienced calmer and more peaceful deaths:

  It ranks as one of the most bizarre episodes of obligatory suicide in modern times: the mass death by cyanide of almost one thousand fanatic adherents of the Jim Jones religious cult in Guyana in 1978. Diehard critics of euthanasia would probably argue that the awful scene of many contorted bodies of men, women, and children scattered willy-nilly over the shrubby fields was less grotesque than would be the imagined scene of the same bodies handled in an individual and respectfully proper way after an ever more serene death in an orderly clinical setting.

• Kevorkian Wanted to Tie in Organ Harvesting with Euthanasia/Assisted Suicide: Kevorkian believed that euthanasia clinics should be established that would join mercy killing with organ harvesting. He called these proposed clinics “obitoria.” Writing in Prescription Medicide, he advocated:

  . . . the establishment of professionally staffed and well equipped “suicide centers” for the sole purpose of assuring a humane and painless death for all who need and desire it. The time has come to . . . make the quantum leap of supplementing merciful killing with the enormously positive benefit of experimentation and organ donation.

  He actually acted on this desire, taking the kidneys from the body of Joseph Tushkowski in 1998 and offering them at a press conference, “first come, first served.”

• Kevorkian Was Obsessed With Conducting Medical Experiments on People He Was Euthanizing: From page 214 of Prescription Medicide:

  I feel it is only decent and fair to explain my ultimate aim . . . It is not simply to help suffering or doomed [his term for non-ill people who want to die, for example the people at Jonestown] persons kill themselves—that is merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation (now called medicide) that nobody in his or her right mind would savor . . . What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish—in a word, obitiatry . . .

  It is worth noting that before he turned his attention to assisted suicide, Kevorkian toured the nation’s prisons seeking permission to experiment on condemned prisoners during their executions. It was only when he became convinced it was not to be that he decided to use the sick and disabled to gain access to the living bodies upon which he yearned to experiment.

Kevorkian’s activism is all in the rearview mirror now, of course. But a new worry arises. Was Kevorkian as much prophet as he was nihilistic advocate?

The signs are not good. Consider: Switzerland and the Netherlands permit assisted suicide/euthanasia for those with mental illnesses. Indeed, several suicide clinics have been established in Switzerland, where people from all over the world go to be made dead. In Belgium, doctors have begun joining euthanasia to organ harvesting. In the USA, Final Exit Network activists travel to the homes of suicidal people “counseling” them on how to kill themselves using a plastic bag and helium.

Perhaps most alarmingly, media and popular culture ubiquitously extol assisted suicide as a compassionate choice, and indeed, have already revised history to transform the macabre Kevorkian into an enlightened prophet of a more compassionate culture. This is how Barbara Walters put it in the wake of his death on the ABC Nightly News:

What he hoped his legacy would be, the ‘Dr. Life’ would be, is that certain hospitals would have areas with the right doctors, with the psychiatrists, knowing that there were patients for whom there was no hope, that there would then be assisted suicide, but that it would be legitimate and that it would be compassionate. That is what he wanted and he was willing to go to jail to make that happen.

As we have seen, that was never true. My great fear is that a time may come when people will not be able to tell the difference between the values Kevorkian actually advocated and those that control our future society.

 
CBC special consultant Wesley J. Smith is also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a lawyer for the Patients Rights Council.

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.”

Make no mistake, this breakthrough technology is nothing but a modern day search and destroy method of screening out “defective” human embryos. In the early 20th century, when the infamous Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” we called this eugenics. With this breakthrough technology, embryos are created in the lab and then tested and screened. Within 24 hours, parents will be told which embryos are the “good” embryos that can be implanted or frozen for later use and which are the “bad” embryos that will be discarded.

This is the fresh hope offered would-be moms? This is the new face of medicine and technology? The physician as healer is now choosing which lives created will live and which ones will be destroyed.

And you can imagine, this technology will be used by others as well. Those who are not at risk but just want to maximize their chances of having the child of their dreams. How tempting will it be to take a look at those 46 chromosomes and find out so much more? Companies like 23andMe represent just one example of taking information gleaned from the human genome and using it for myriad reasons. With DIY home kits for only $99.00, they offer everything from genetic risk factors for up to 97 diseases, monthly DNA discovery reports, and insights into traits such as baldness or muscle performance. This may seem like benign information for information sake, but how soon will the “good” embryo be not only disease free, but the one with the hair and eye color of the parents’ choice, with the athletic ability and intellectual heft of the parents’ desire?

PRC celebrates this overnight solution as a means of cost-savings (why waste money on a pregnancy that will only be terminated?!?), decreased anxiety for parents who no longer have to endure long waits for test results, and increased chances of successful pregnancies. This “breakthrough” supports their long-term “commitment to giving couples the best chances of having healthy babies.”

One has to wonder if this Brave New World will soon demand all babies be made in the laboratory if society’s goal is to have only healthy babies born, and the smartest and prettiest babies too. Why not?

Why not? Because it robs us of our dignity when we take baby making into our human hands. It robs children of their dignity when their lives become chiefly the products of our imagination and technology. No matter how high we build this tower, God will still look down on us, and we will fall.

We enjoyed a wonderful evening at the Lakeside Olympic Club in San Francisco. CBC Special Consultant Wesley Smith served as master of ceremonies for the evening, delivering opening remarks that reminded us of the importance of the bioethics issues for today and for a truly human future. Dr. William Hurlbut of Stanford University presented the 2011 Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics to Professor Luke Gormally, who traveled from England to join us for the evening. We are grateful for his extensive contributions to the field of bioethics and we again extend our sincere congratulations to him.

Thank you again to all of our supporters. You make our work possible.

Guests Arriving at the Lakeside Olympic Club
Wesley Smith During His Opening Remarks	The 2011 Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics	Dr. William Hurlbut Presenting the Award
Professor Luke Gormally, Recipient of the 2011 Paul Ramsey Award	CBC President Jennifer Lahl Closed the Evening	The End of the Evening

More Pictures from the Evening are Posted on Facebook

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.

Lahl: Were you in need of money?

Linda: Yes! I had spent $30k to renovate my parents’ old house because it was falling apart, and they did not have the money to fix it themselves, and it was not in living condition for anyone to live in, not even myself. It was in my grandfather’s deed to fix the estate if he were to pass away. He died three years ago, the year before I decided to be a donor.

Lahl: Were you wanting to help someone out?

Linda: I was sitting in the lobby, waiting to get my blood work done for my pre-screening to become an egg donor, and I saw an older couple sitting and waiting to talk to the doctor. Seeing them in the lobby waiting made me realize I was doing something for older Asian couples who could not have children. I figured if I give an act of kindness, I’m saving this couple’s marriage, because I understand in my culture a woman who cannot bear a child is useless. I remembered my mother’s best friend going through this procedure, and this was the only way she was able to bring a baby into this world. I felt like I could help other older Asian women in her shoes.

Lahl: Would you have answered the ad and just “donated” your eggs?

Linda: I probably would have if I knew that there weren’t such horrible, long-term side effects, and if I knew exactly who my eggs were going to (relatives or family). But, I would not just have answered the ad if the money factor wasn’t a part of the equation. I needed the money because my parents were not going to contribute to the renovation.

Lahl: You did three donations in all: one in April of 2009, one in April of 2010, and the last in December of 2010. All three donations were done with the same agency. How did each of the donations go?

Linda: The first time went very easy; the pain wasn’t that bad. However, it still hurt and I had pain in my abdomen, and I couldn’t walk afterward. It took me four hours to wake up. The second time, it hurt a lot almost right after I woke up two hours after the egg retrieval. [I had] the same pain in my abdomen, and I couldn’t walk after. The third time was by far the worst. I woke up two hours after, but the pain hit me four hours later. It hurt so bad I couldn’t walk! Five days later, I had retained so much fluid inside my body, I could not breath right and I could not sleep from the pain in my abdomen. I had to go to the hospital because I felt like I was going to stop breathing and my heart was going to stop. I looked pregnant. This third time, my body just did not want to take the hormones anymore. I know it just wanted to shut down on me.

Lahl: You mentioned that the director of the agency at first was very friendly and pleasant, and then she got very pushy and the doctor wanted to just “pump” you up with drugs to get as many eggs as possible. Tell me more about that, how you were feeling about the treatment.

Linda: I felt used and just like an egg producer. I felt like that all they cared about were my eggs, and not me and my health and well-being.

Lahl: Were you able to advocate for yourself? Did you feel they listened to you and were concerned for your health?

Linda: I don’t think so. They wanted me out of the hospital as soon as possible to take the liability off their shoulders.

Lahl: Tell me about your concerns about where your eggs ended up?

Linda: I have no clue what has become of my eggs. They could have brokered them to many people, and they could be capitalizing on them even more. Supposedly, a couple who really needed my eggs got them to make a baby, however, they harvested 12 eggs the first cycle, 12 eggs the second cycle, and 15 the third time. That’s a total of 39 eggs. But looking at the pictures on my ultrasounds showing the formed eggs, it looked like a lot more eggs each time.

Lahl: Do you know if you have children out there?

Linda: The director of the clinic, who was also my egg broker who paid me at the end of each donation, said that the baby boy was beautiful, but she could be lying. I really could not ask any more questions though, because I know psychologically it’s not healthy for my mind to really want to know. I have no rights to want to know because of the contract I signed with the clinic.

Lahl: What are your thoughts on the children created by your eggs?

Linda: Well, there are a billion people in China, so what difference would it make if there was another little mini me out there or not. However, me not having any ties to any baby would be ideal. I just hope that whoever decided to have these children are going to give them the nurture that the children need to have the best potential it could have. As a child growing up, I felt like my parents didn’t give me their fullest, and I hope that these parents, who decided to bring my genetics to life, decide to give and spoil this child with their 110 percent efforts.

Lahl: You had to be admitted into the hospital for severe OHSS, indicating that you looked pregnant and that your lungs were filled with fluid. How did you end up in the hospital?

Linda: I thought it was just something little, but the pain was so bad that I could not sleep. The fluid would not escape my body, and in my stool there was blood. It just wasn’t good and not normal. I ended up staying in the hospital for four days. I did not leave the bed for those four days. I slept all four days, and they monitored me peeing and put me on monitors and gave me shots in an I.V. and all sorts of meds. They weren’t even sure what was going on with me! They had to call the fertility doctor at 4am to find out. It was the worst pain I had experienced. I still won’t forget the guy’s face who did my exam. He kept asking me if I was wearing anything under my shirt. There was fluid or possibly even blood inside my chest that didn’t belong there.

Lahl: Who paid your bills?

Linda: Their insurance company. And I’m still getting bills today and just faxing them right back to them.

Lahl: Looking back on your health before your donations, how is your health now?

Linda: My health now isn’t as great as it was. Before I began donating, I was 135 lbs. and a cross-country runner. I had no problem getting up early in the morning and jogging five miles or so before work. Now I am 158 lbs., but was 180 lbs. when I was in the hospital. Now I’m on a strict vegan diet and working out and running 5k to remind myself I’m still standing, and working hard to improve and better my health after my near-death experience.

Lahl: You contacted me and said that you wanted to tell your “near-death” story. Why do you want to tell your story?

Linda: I don’t want others to experience what I went through. It felt like I was fighting a cancer that no one knew about, and I felt so alone in this world. No one else was in my shoes, and I got into this position myself and no one would understand—not my parents, not my family, not my girlfriend. I just want people to be aware of the consequences, because it’s not something you think about before you decide to sign your life on paper to an agency who is out to just take from you for their best interest and not yours. I went through this three times, and I didn’t learn my lesson until I almost faced my death three months ago. I don’t ever want to put myself through this experience again or see others go through what I went through.

Lahl: What do you want people to know?

Linda: That you can possibly die from this, and it’s not a joke, or worth $5k or any amount of money. Losing your life would end your chances of making that money, period. I was a victim and I will stand and speak about it. They are out there preying on ones like me.

Lahl: What would you say to a woman who was thinking of donating/selling her eggs?

Linda: JUST DONT DO IT. You don’t want the psychology of the idea of a baby out there looking like you. You definitely don’t want to go through the procedure, the injections, the medication, and all the office procedures. It will ruin your relationship with your family, and if you think it’s a way to get back at them because you feel like they don’t care, this is NOT the way.

Lahl: What should be done for you, given your experience?

Linda: It’s not about me at this point, but I hope that my experience can be told and shared with the rest of the world because this egg donation operation is not something that should continue on. I hope that I can help to form a foundation and a bond to help women who have experienced these same issues that I’ve dealt with, and be there for one another in a time where maybe in the future among the group of women who have been egg donors, [if some] go through cancers or long term problems that were never foreshadowed, that we can as a group of people be there for one another in this experience.

Lahl: Do you think the agency owes you anything?

Linda: Too much, at this point. I don’t even know if a lawsuit would be enough to discuss in detail what they owe me for their wrongdoings. I can only pray that others out there don’t go through what I went through.

Lahl: Have they offered to pay you more because of all of your health complications?

Linda: Not enough to go through what I’ve gone through thus far and what I’m still going through today.

Lahl: Are you concerned for your future health or future fertility?

Linda: Absolutely! But I just have to live day by day and stand strong no matter what happens, and be thankful I am still alive today and hopefully tomorrow.

See also:
Diary of a Nameless, Faceless, Egg Donor
Experience of an Anonymous Egg Donor

*name changed to protect identity

UK scientists announced that they will ask the rarely-says-no UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) for permission to implant an IVF embryo that is biologically related to three parents (two women and one man). The genetically modified embryo will be created by taking the mitochondrial DNA from a second (destroyed) embryo and replacing it for that of the first. The purpose is to prevent maternally passed genetic diseases. But health is always the justification for opening doors best kept closed. If it succeeds, the technology will not long remain limited to the few and far between. These things rarely do.

The three-parent child would not be possible without in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF has unquestionably helped bring great joy to the barren and brought precious children into the world who otherwise would not exist. But that is far from the whole story. It has also unleashed a terrible hubris around human reproduction, mutating it into a form of manufacture, including such staples of industrialization as special orders for style, warehousing, quality control, harvesting natural resources to support the industry, and independent service contractors who facilitate productivity and efficiency.

The baby manufacturing industry also has an aggressive political lobbying arm, ever on the ready to castigate those who question the wisdom of the current laissez faire system as being cruelly insensitive to the pain of barren families. No wonder cowardly American politicians have yet to muster the true grit to enact even modest regulations.

Supporters of unregulated IVF promised us that the technology would be limited to married couples who could not otherwise have children. Those who raised concerns about the consequences and potential societal costs of removing reproduction from intimacy and placing it literally into the hands of laboratory technicians were castigated as alarmists—people whose fears were disproportionate to the very limited changes in reproduction that IVF would bring. The syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman put it this way in a column called "Making Babies," published in the Austin American Statesman on January 17, 1980:

A fear of many protesting the opening of this [the first IVF] clinic is that doctors there will fertilize myriad eggs and discard the "extras" and the abnormal, as if they were no more meaningful than a dish of caviar. But this fear seems largely unwarranted.

Goodman then engaged in intentional reductionism of the question at hand, noting that an ethics committee gathered by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University viewed IVF as "entirely a pro life activity." Still, Goodman noted, the committee had concerns:

Should we, they ask, respond like a consumer society to the demands of the buyer? If we don’t stop here, where do we stop? The questions are cosmic. But the issue in front of us at this moment is quote specific: one clinic.

That was like saying the specific question at the start of an invasion is the presence of the first tank that crosses the border. Goodman then advocated the very public policy approach toward IVF that allowed the sector to become a free-for-all:

I think we should neither fund such a clinic at this time, nor prohibit it. We should, rather, monitor it, debate it, control it. We have put researchers on notice that we no longer accept every breakthrough and every advance as an unqualified good. Now we have to watch the development of this technology—willing to see it grow in the right direction and ready to say no.

It has been 31 years since Goodman wrote those words and we haven’t said no yet. To the contrary, the IVF industry has become an aggressive promoter of a virtually anything goes, procreative license. Consider:

• The human egg has become, pound for pound, the most valuable commodity on the face of the earth, with eugenically desirable (beautiful, brilliant) women paid tens of thousands of dollars for twenty microscopic eggs. The health consequences to these women are potentially very serious, as vividly exposed in the award winning CBC documentary, Eggsploitation.
• Embryos are indeed discarded as medical waste, in Goodman’s words, as if they are "no more meaningful than a dish of caviar."
• Embryos are eugenically selected for implantation or discarding, with embryos not only selected out for health reasons, but also for superficial cosmetic purposes such as eye and hair color.
• Bioethicists and futurists look to the technology as a method to eventually "seize control of our own evolution" by genetically engineering our progeny, say, for greater intelligence.
• Hundreds of thousands of embryos have been stored and are now, with the advent of embryonic stem cell research, seen by biotechnological researchers as mere natural resources ripe for the harvest.
• Concomitantly, to further the objectification of human life, many bioethics and scientific groups have engaged in post-modern biological redefinitionism, for example, claiming that embryos only become real embryos after implantation. Before that, they are mere "balls of cells" that are no different from the cells we lose every morning when we brush our teeth.
• "Savior siblings" are being created for the purpose of generating stem cells and tissues that can medically treat existing children.
• In a deeply bitter irony, doctors commonly implant more embryos than are needed and abort the excess, a process euphemistically called "selective reduction."
• Octomom!
• Poor women in countries like India are biologically colonized, paid by the rich to gestate their babies. If the babies don’t meet desire, the children are abandoned by biological and birth parents to an orphanage.
• Surrogate birth mothers have become objectified, now known by the impersonal term "gestational carrier."
• The IVF industry’s actions lead naturally to reproductive cloning, with some advocates already calling for it to be allowed once it is "safe."
• And now, we have the prospect of embryos with three biological parents, the creation of which would be a blatant form of human experimentation since no one can know the long-term physical and psychological outcomes of such biological alchemy.

Ellen Goodman and her ilk have been proven utterly wrong about the limited nature of IVF and our willingness to meaningfully regulate the sector. But it is too late to matter. IVF, which started from small and compassionate beginnings—one clinic—has grown into a voracious and very profitable industry that refuses to say, finally, enough is enough. Indeed, at this point, it is hard to see any reproductive desire or technology about which contemporary Ellen Goodmans won’t say, "Now we have to watch the development of this technology—willing to see it grow in the right direction and ready to say no."

CBC special consultant Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a lawyer for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.

There seems to be no end to the filthy bottom of the reproductive tourist trafficking industry. This story just broke, covering the bust up of a baby breeding surrogacy ring. Fourteen Vietnamese women had their passports confiscated and were being held in two houses while they gestated babies which were being sold by the company, Baby 101. Some of the women apparently volunteered, as they were promised $5,000 per baby. It was evident upon investigation that some of the women had been raped. Apparently the women were able to send an email to the Vietnamese embassy, which tipped off Thai officials and led to the women’s release. I hope this matter is being aggressively investigated; this most certainly is no isolated incident.

Which is why Eggsploitation is such an important film and part of a larger project within the CBC on the meaning of sex and procreation, the eugenic and exploitative reproductive technologies, and the commercialization of baby making. Additionally, debates are heating up in France and Australia as they review their human cloning and stem cell laws and are posturing toward paying women for their eggs for research.

A press release stating, “Controversial human infertility documentary finds fertile ground at Berlin’s European Film Market,” has opened more doors into European countries for wider release (have we mentioned that Eggsploitation has already been sold into 20 countries?!?). This one press release initiated a Skype phone call to me from a woman in Slovakia, who had heard about the film from a colleague in Finland. Now the film is being shown in Prague this month and in Stockholm in July.

Sadly, the reason this film is even more important is because of what the Slovakian woman told me during our chat. She informed me that the farther east you go into Europe, eggs are now being stolen from women. I paused and then asked, “How can eggs be stolen?” And the depravity was revealed. Women are super-ovulated, taken into the operating room for the egg-harvesting surgery, and when they wake up from anesthesia, they are informed, “There were no eggs to collect, so you won’t be paid your 50-60 euros.” There seems to be no bottom to the depths of depravity of this industry.

To that end, we are releasing a new and expanded edition of Eggsploitation and coupling it with our 2009 film, Lines That Divide: The Great Stem Cell Debate. Both films are helpful, educational documentaries that address the scientific agenda which heavily depends on the female reproductive body and human embryos. I encourage you to get a set or two of these films and share them with friends in your network. I promise, you won’t be disappointed. And please consider sending a gift of support. We have big plans in store. Stay tuned!

CBC Documentary Combo Pack Eggsploitation (Expanded Edition) AND Lines That Divide: The Great Stem Cell Debate $29.99 + S&H Save $6.99! When You Buy the CBC Documentary Combo Pack

 

Eggsploitation Expanded Edition Trailers, Clips, and Calla Papademas’ full-length testimony   $16.99 + S&H

If you previously purchased a copy of Eggsploitation you can upgrade to the Expanded Edition for $10.99. Click here to order

Dear Friend,

The Board of Directors of The Center for Bioethics and Culture cordially invites you to The Eighth Annual Paul Ramsey Award Dinner, to be held at 6:30 PM, Friday, March 25, 2011, at the Lakeside Olympic Club in San Francisco. The evening will include addresses by

• William Hurlbut, M.D.
• Wesley J. Smith, J.D.
• Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder and President
• Luke Gormally, 2011 Paul Ramsey Award Recipient

RSVP by March 11, 2011:

• Reserve One Seat ($125)
• Sponsor One Table ($1,200)
• Sponsor One Life Table ($2,500)
• Sponsor One Paul Ramsey Table ($5,000)

Who was Paul Ramsey?

Paul Ramsey (1913–1988) is regarded by many as one of the most important ethicists of the twentieth century. He served as Harrington Spear Pain Professor of Religion, Princeton University and was a distinguished and prolific writer on bioethics during the advent of the field in the early 1960s. Ramsey’s commitment to the sanctity and dignity of human life has shone with clarity and brightness as a beacon in the general darkness of academic bioethics for the past fifty years.

What is the Paul Ramsey Award?

The Paul Ramsey Award is a project of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, marked with an annual event to honor those among us that have and are deeply impacting the bioethics discussion by actively equipping our society to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, profoundly defending the dignity of humankind, and enthusiastically embracing ethical biotechnology for the human good. The Paul Ramsey Award is given to those who, in the spirit of Ramsey, have demonstrated exemplary achievement in the field of bioethics

The 2011 Paul Ramsey Award
Recipient: Luke Gormally

The Paul Ramsey Award nomination committee is pleased to announce Luke Gormally as the 2011 recipient of the Paul Ramsey Award for excellence in bioethics. Professor Gormally is a leading British bioethicist and was long-time Director of The Linacre Centre. More recently, he served as Senior Research Fellow of the Centre and Research Professor of Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Michigan; he now serves as Director Emeritus of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. Gormally has published numerous books and papers on issues such as euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, the sanctity of life in medicine, healthcare allocation, and reproductive ethics—taking a life affirming stand on each of these issues over a career of faithful research.

Paul Ramsey Award Winners, past and present (left to right): Edmund Pellegrino (2004), Germain Grisez (2005), John Finnis (2006), William May (2007), Albert Moraczewski (2008), Gilbert Meilaender (2009), Leon Kass (2010), Luke Gormally (2011, above)