When I first met Alana, I was at Columbia University Law School screening my documentary film, Eggsploitation. I had done an earlier screening during the day at Fordham University Law School and noted at both of these screenings “they” were following me. They being the women who typically attend my screenings to give me pushback and reject and/or discount the message of the film, that “donating” (often times it is selling) your eggs is risky and potentially quite harmful to young women. These women who follow me around are someway involved in the fertility industry. They are reproductive lawyers, egg brokers, women who they themselves struggled with infertility and used egg donors and/or surrogates to conceive. Understandably, these women have issues with the film.

But on this particular night, I noticed in the back of the auditorium, a young woman holding up a card board sign which read, Anonymous Us. I had only recently heard about this website and the project which was being run by this woman Alana S. Newman. At one point during the Q and A period of the night, Alana raised her hand and was called upon to ask her question. She challenged the audience to consider the children being created in this enterprise, the children intentionally created and largely separated from their biological mothers and fathers (in the case of sperm donation) and half-siblings. Her message resonated with many in the audience. I chatted briefly with Alana after the screening. She was off to play music at a gig she had that evening and she handed me her music CD which was packaged in a paper bag. That music I would later use in my next film, Anonymous Father’s Day, which highlights the stories of donor-conceived people – including Alana herself, one of the people interviewed in this film.

The next day, while reading my google alert news on the film, I was mortified to see Alana referred to as “Shark Tank Girl” by one of the women attending the screening. This woman maintains a blog on third-party reproduction and had attended my screenings at Fordham and Columbia screenings. She wrote:

I was civil and level, as neutral as I could be in my questioning until Shark tank girl-well ,I only took one little pot shot, couldn’t help it. I asked is there a model by which ART is practiced elsewhere that they think is done according to their standards and that they would consider acceptable and I got an answer that made no sense-it might have, but it was just blah blah blah, nothing substantive. Which was when Shark Tank girl chimed in on how in other countries there is a homestudy done just like they do for adoption, to see if it’s a home and family fit to be parents. My pot shot was-maybe they also do a better job of screening donors too (this girl supposedly passed through and donated twice herself). I reminded the Panel that I was asking about all ART and not just Donors and that in adoption there are different risks & liabilities for placing an existing child compared to who is entitled by law to have children through any form of reproduction.

Why on earth, I wondered, was this woman calling Alana “Shark Tank Girl”? I couldn’t imagine an older woman calling Alana by such a pejorative name. I mean, as an older woman myself, watching another older woman ignore this young person’s very real pain and concerns and calling her names? So I emailed Alana, who gave me the backstory. Alana had once been invited to speak at a workshop for people considering having children via reproductive technologies – she felt she had been thrown into a shark tank because her message was not well received and she is seen as an enemy of the infertility industry.

Since then, I’ve appeared on the Dr. Oz, addressing these issues, with Alana in the audience. And of course “they” were there too. Alana’s attacker wrote again here:

Shark Tank Girl stood up to say that she is 5 months PG, that she has been an Egg Donor and is a Donor Offspring herself, here at The Dr Oz Show to say that Anonymous Donor Conception is wrong because it strips the child of their rightful PARENTAL connection to, you guessed it, the Donor. A parent and a donor are not the same thing.

Recently, Alana has come under fire again for her latest piece calling out the “new sexual predators” as it relates to older women and gay men needing young fertile women in order for them to have a child. Of course her analogy went over like a lead balloon within the industry.

Here’s what I know about Alana. She is strong and powerful and gentle and loving. She has a heart for people struggling with infertility but wants to be sure we don’t harm others, exploit the poor, see or treat children as commodities in our desire to pro-create. She’s fearless in her willingness to go anywhere and talk to anyone – even if that means being thrown to the sharks.

For Immediate Release

San Ramon, CA/July 13, 2012—News is just breaking in India about Sushma Pandey, a 17-year-old young woman who died in 2010, two days after her third “egg donation.” Her death is being attributed to the procedures used to extract eggs from healthy, desirable young females like Ms. Pandey. These eggs are often resold to affluent westerners for use in commercial production of their children. Her post-mortem report states she had “one abrasion, four contusions and a blood clot in the head, plus six injection marks” as well as “congestion in the ovaries and uterus.” The possible cause of her death was listed as shock due to multiple injuries.

This most recent exposure of the daily exploitation of females offers yet another wake up call to the truth of the real, repeat, and often lethal harms of invasive egg removal procedures, which masquerade under the lie of donation. These transactions are anything but “donations” as young females — nearly children themselves — all over the world, desperately fall prey to offers of money like those made to Ms. Pandey.

Calls for regulation by physicians in India will do nothing to protect young women who seek to “donate” their eggs because they are in desperate need of money. Regulated exploitation is still exploitation — using young women as egg farms for affluent westerners wanting children.

Dr. Allahbadia, one of the drafters of a new Assisted Reproduction Technology Bill, wants to raise the minimum age for egg donors. But how does being older mitigate for the health risks of egg donation? It doesn’t.

Kathleen Sloan, feminist leader and human rights advocate who serves as a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC) comments:

“The list of known health dangers to women who provide their eggs is extensive. It includes Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome from the profusion of synthetic hormones and fertility drugs such as Lupron, estrogen (linked to breast and uterine cancers, heart attack, stroke, and blood clots), and progesterone they are injected with; ovarian torsion; and kidney disease — and those are just the short-term risks! How many more women will have to die before India and the United States, the two countries where the out of control fertility industry is allowed to endanger and exploit women unimpeded, take action? No country can claim to respect women’s human rights while simultaneously turning them into commodities subject to life-threatening harms.”

Jennifer Lahl, writer, producer, and director of the award-winning film Eggsploitaiton states,

“What happened to Sushma Pandey is happening to women every day, all over the world. The infertility industry knows the seriousness of the health risks, yet objects to any oversight, to long-term studies, and to regulation, simply because it will compromise their profits.”

For more information, visit Eggsploitation.com

Media Contact: Jennifer Lahl
President, The Center for Bioethics and Culture
+1-510-290-3891
jennifer.lahl@cbc-network.org

A sign of the times. From the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Public Eavesdropping” feature in Leah Garchik’s column:

“The doctor takes an egg from the mom, pokes a hole in it, puts a seed from the dad inside the egg and puts the embryo back in the mom.”
  – Fourth-grader telling third-grader how babies are made, overheard in Marin County by Cathy Chute

And then, mommy takes a blood test, and if she doesn’t like the way the baby is made, she makes it go away.

In the world of commercialized conception, it seems we’ve decided the freezer is a great place to keep eggs, sperm, and “spare” embryos until we need them. We think they do pretty well in the freezer, but the verdict is still out on what happens over the long haul when you freeze and store human reproductive material and nascent human life. Commercial conceivers simply assume that because we can freeze and thaw our reproductive cells or progeny, it causes no harm or danger.

And not only can we do it; it has become big business.

Case in point: the new fad of egg freezing. It began with the laudable goal of helping the younger woman who was diagnosed with cancer. A woman facing cancer treatment is at risk for compromised fertility induced by chemotherapy. Egg freezing was used to try to preserve and protect her fertility, so that after her cancer treatment was completed and her health was restored, she might still be able to conceive — using in vitro fertilization — her own biological child. It is also used in veterinary medicine to preserve species, especially endangered species.

But this new egg-freezing industry has popped up more and more as a lifestyle choice. Maybe, baby later. National Public Radio devoted a segment to this fad titled, “Egg Freezing Puts the Biological Clock on Hold.” They reported, “As more women postpone motherhood into their 30s, even 40s, they’re hitting that age-old constraint: the biological clock. Now, technology is dangling the possibility that women can stop that clock, at least for a while.”

Even grandparents are getting into (and paying for) the act! The New York Times heralded, “So Eager for Grandchildren, They’re Paying the Egg-Freezing Clinic”! The story paints this picture, “The gray-haired entourages, it turns out, are the parents, tagging along to lend support — emotional and often financial — as their daughters turn to the fledgling field of egg freezing to improve their chances of having children later on, when they are ready to start a family.”

But of course, the facts seem to get lost in all the hoopla over a newfangled way to manipulate reproduction.

First, there is the pragmatic reality of the cost of this new experimental service. I called one egg freezing agency in Southern California, and the woman I spoke with was putting the hard sell on me. I explained I was only writing an article on this and wasn’t interested in this for myself! The costs are high – meaning if you are poor, don’t even think about freezing your eggs. It’s about $7,000 to $12,000 to harvest the eggs, and an additional $4,000 to $5,000 later to transfer the embryos into the woman’s uterus once she’s ready to have a baby. Then there are the fertility drugs to super ovulate the woman in order to maximize the number of eggs retrieve, adding an additional $2,700. Plus the annual storage fee of $300 to $600.

Then, there are the medical realities. Nowhere on any egg freezing sites that I visited did anyone disclose the realities of the risks to women and children related to maternal age and pregnancy. I’ve written before about the risks of advanced maternal age which heightens the risk of “fetal loss” – meaning age increases the likelihood that she won’t carry the baby to term.

One important study noted this stark conclusion:

There is an increasing risk of fetal loss with increasing maternal age in women aged more than 30 years. Fetal loss is high in women in their late 30s or older, irrespective of reproductive history. This should be taken into consideration in pregnancy planning and counseling.

Shouldn’t a technology that claims to be able to put the biological clock on hold be accountable for disclosing the maternal-child health risks to women?

And this is still experimental science. Even the sites that show their methods and success rates show that this is a field still learning about the best methods and techniques. Do women really, if properly informed, want to experiment on their future children? This graph demonstrates the wide range of “success” depending on the freezing method:

 
I say freezers are for food, like the Thanksgiving turkey, not for our future progeny.

 
The Human Egg Freezing Project (West Coast Fertility Center, YouTube):

 
This article also appears at NewFeminism.co

Statement by Kathleen Sloan
Regarding the New Jersey Gestational Carrier Agreement Act (S1599/A2646)
May 30, 2012

The worldwide use of reproductive technologies has grown exponentially in recent years. While these developments have brought benefits to many by successfully treating some types of infertility, deep regulatory divides—or their complete absence such as at the national level in the United States—have fueled growing national and international markets in which privileged individuals and third party intermediaries, who benefit financially from the commodification of reproduction, exploit vulnerable, uninformed, low income, and poor women for their reproductive capacities. Surrogacy and the trade in human eggs in particular have become pervasive national and international phenomena in which women’s poverty and subordinate status everywhere increase their exposure to gender-based exploitation and physical harms.

Unequal relationships between the buyers (intended parents) and the women who rent their uteri, favor the needs and desires of the buyers. These unequal transactions, in the absence of regulation of the fertility-industrial complex, result in “uninformed” consent, low payments, coercion, poor health care, and severe risks to their short and long-term health. In addition, both the children conceived through commercial transactions and the intended parents may suffer as a direct result of these arrangements. While the full magnitude of the harms resulting from reproductive exploitation is unknown due to lack of regulation, documentation, and oversight, reports of egregious harms continue to mount.

Unless her own eggs are used with intrauterine insemination, women recruited to serve as surrogates are subjected to the many risks of synthetic hormonal stimulation in order to synchronize their menstrual cycles with those of the egg provider. Hormones and drugs used include Lupron which is not FDA-approved for this purpose; estrogen, which is linked to breast and uterine cancers, blood clots, heart attack and stroke; and steroids which can produce high blood pressure, glaucoma, cataracts, peptic ulceration, and an impaired immune system. High rates of multiple births and infection resulting from Invitro Fertilization (IVF) place both surrogates and babies at high risk for complications. When problems arise during the pregnancy, the wellbeing of the fetus tends to be given precedence over the health of the woman serving as a surrogate since the intended parents are paying large sums of money for the baby being produced. Care of the surrogate ends with the birth of the baby even when the woman who bears the child suffers lasting effects.

If the intended parents’ circumstances change during the pregnancy, or if the child is born with health problems or disabilities, the infants may be left to the surrogate or abandoned. Intended parents may find that they face unplanned financial costs and inadequate legal protections.

The practices of reproductive organ, tissue, and cell commerce, particularly surrogacy and ova sale, infringe upon several basic human rights under international law, and are violations of international agreements on health and medical standards. Policy makers and the public at large must recognize reproductive commerce as a unique kind of human exploitation. As the European parliament stated in a resolution, surrogacy and egg sale constitute an “extreme form of exploitation of women.”

It is estimated that nearly half of surrogates in the U.S. are “military wives” who represent an ideal supply source for agencies and brokers. They often survive on low incomes and tend to marry and have their own children at young ages, so the prospect of doubling their income by serving as a surrogate is a powerful incentive. These women have few legal or regulatory protections, making them sitting ducks for exploitation and fraud. It is no coincidence that surrogacy brokers and clinics are concentrated in areas where there are large military bases. One could also point out that while the military heavily recruits from the working class and poor demographics to provide their cannon fodder for endless wars and occupations, these people are doubly exploited for their reproductive capacities by profit-driven private enterprise.

Society has barely begun to grapple with the issues surrogacy raises. In many countries, most notably in Europe, surrogacy is an illegal medical procedure. But in the U.S. there is no national regulation, earning its title of the Wild West of third party reproduction and its status as second world-wide only to India in the supply of surrogates.

Surrogacy is a stark manifestation of the commodification of women’s bodies. Surrogate services are advertised, surrogates are recruited, and operating agencies make large profits. The commercialism of surrogacy raises the specter of a black market and baby selling, of breeding farms ala The Handmaid’s Tale, turning impoverished women into baby producers. Surrogacy degrades a pregnancy to a service and a baby to a product—an entitlement for those with the financial means to procure one.

For millennia, women’s human rights have been abused and ignored with impunity. As developments in biotechnology facilitate the commodification of reproduction, alarm bells should be sounding about the new door that has been opened for yet further disregard and degradation of women’s humanity, wholeness, physical and emotional inviolability. Simply put, if you care about women’s human rights, you cannot allow their exploitation as commodities and their health endangerment for others’ profit and gain.

 
Kathleen Sloan is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and the former Program Director of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President

I recently wrote about women who wait later into life to conceive and find they struggle with what they call “infertility.” In fact, there is no infertility as a result of aging; rather it is the biological reality of menopause. Menopause is a natural and normal event that occurs in a woman’s life. It is not a disease that needs to be treated as most Western medicine does. Fertility is a natural organic treasure—one that is temporary and unique for each woman. It can be understood, protected, and cared for, just as we try to do for all other aspects of our health and well-being.

The human body is an amazing organism and human reproduction is a finely tuned orchestration of events. Women would do well to learn more about human reproduction and the sensitive system of fertility so that we can protect and preserve and utilize our fertility and do everything possible to prevent true infertility. We cannot stop the aging of our bodies and the naturally occurring menopause. But there is still much we can do to understand and care for the reproductive season of our “fertility” and be sure we can bear children.

It’s a miraculous event that human beings can procreate at all. While we are not as bad as the koala bear, which has a very low birth rate of typically one baby every other year, and human beings aren’t rabbits either. The female rabbit can produce as many as “800 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren” in a single mating season!

So, what can you do to protect your fertility?

1. Do not wait too long if you hope to have children. Maternal age is a big factor—perhaps the single most important factor—since our fertility dramatically drops as we age.

Maternal age also negatively impacts our ability to carry a baby to term. This study states, “There is an increasing risk of fetal loss with increasing maternal age in women aged more than 30 years. Fetal loss is high in women in their late 30s or older, irrespective of reproductive history.” (emphasis added)

Increased maternal age also causes significant risk of maternal morbidity, with the older mother being more at risk for gestational diabetes, having babies born with chromosomal abnormalities like Down’s syndrome, hemorrhage, and hypertension.

2. Know your menstrual cycle and your body. Understand your fertility the way you understand your food and exercise. In the best case scenario, a woman has about 5-6 days each month when she is fertile and can achieve pregnancy. The spread of these few days is dependent not only on when a woman ovulates, but also on how long sperm can survive and how fast they swim and reach their destination. This highlights just how finely orchestrated the event of conception is.

3. Engage in a healthy lifestyle—avoid excess alcohol, smoking, and obesity. All have a negative impact on our fertility as does high stress levels.

4. Avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states, “Chlamydia and gonorrhea are important preventable causes of infertility. Untreated, about 10-15% of women with chlamydia will develop pelvic inflammatory disease (PID).” They note in 2009, in the United States, there were, “1,244,180 chlamydial infections and 301,174 cases of gonorrhea.” Think about how much these totally preventable diseases negatively impact fertility! The impact of STDs on fertility is not often shared with young women, particularly by interests (e.g., the media and the sexualization of women) that encourage, support, or promote sexual “freedom” and promiscuity for young women. This is like encouraging girls to smoke because it’s cool and not telling them about the known impacts of smoking upon their short term and long term health.

5. Avoid being too thin. Athletes and women with eating disorders are especially at risk of infertility due to their low body weight and the impact low weight has on amenorrhea—causing a women’s menstruation to stop.

6. Avoid egg freezing schemes and gimmicks that “promise” you the ability to freeze your eggs so that you can use them later on when you are ready to have a baby. Egg freezing is expensive and considered experimental. There are no long-term studies done on the results of the effectiveness of egg freezing and the health of the resulting children. It also ignores the serious health risks to older pregnant women.

 
Human reproduction and specifically, our fertility, really is a gift that needs to be protected and preserved, just as we have learned to protect and preserve the health of our respiratory and muscular systems. Natural conception, within the normal timetable of human fertility, is better for the human body and for the children. For women who intend to have children, natural conception should be the goal, a goal achieved by understanding and caring for the body and avoiding risk factors including oral contraception. Oral contraception, like those pills that have been given a Class 1 carcinogen rating by the World Health Organization, might control your fertility for a while, but at the risk of cancers, clots, and death. Why would you take this risk—or any risk—with the precious gift of your fertility?

This article originally appeared on NewFeminism.co and is posted here by permission.

By Jennifer Lahl, CBC President

When the news broke that Mitt and Ann Romney welcomed grandchildren numbers 17 and 18 this past Friday via “gestational surrogacy,” those of us here at CBC central—who oppose commercialized conception—wondered where the bottom is in these murky waters of assisted reproduction.

Tagg Romney posted this on his facebook page after the twins were born:

Jen and I are happy to announce the birth of twin boys, David Mitt and William Ryder. Everyone is healthy and happy. They weighed in at 5 lbs 13 oz and 19-3/4 inches and 6 lbs. 13 oz and 19 inches. A special thanks to our gestational surrogate who made this possible for us. Life truly is a miracle, and we feel so blessed to be able to celebrate the arrival of these precious boys into our family. For those keeping score at home, these are grandchildren numbers 17 and 18 for my parents.

Those who are regular readers know I have mentioned in the past the list in Time magazine:
“The Ten Best Chores to Outsource.” Expecting to see housecleaning, landscaping, pool cleaning—you know, actual chores—I was shocked to see the number one best chore to outsource was pregnancy. As the Time article put it:

Outsourcing brings to mind big factories and call centers. But entrepreneurs around the globe now offer services—from tutoring to sculpting a bust of your grandpa—to regular folks for a fraction of the cost in the West. Thought the world was flat before? Well, now you can hire someone in India to carry your child.

Outsourcing pregnancy has become big business, transforming having a child into a “bits and pieces” brokered industry: sperm from a handsome Scandinavian stud; eggs from a smart, beautiful Ivy League woman; a womb-for-rent from a poor woman in India trying to provide food and education for her children; and brokers in the middle helping set up the legal transactions to build a better baby the 21st century way. Just this past week, London’s Daily Mail ran a story titled, “The Designer baby factory: Eggs from beautiful Eastern Europeans, sperm from wealthy Westerners and embryos implanted in desperate women.”

Sadly, the “gestational surrogates”—truly desperate women—in these stories are identified as “uneducated, bare-footed, dirt-poor Indian women from outlying villages.” The surrogacy consultants who run the WYZAX surrogacy clinic assure intended parents that the surrogates will not get attached to the babies.

The Romneys didn’t have to exploit a poor woman in India. They chose to exploit a woman, probably much less poor, right here in the U.S. And their surrogate might not have felt so exploited. She was just “helping a couple have a baby”—and being compensated for her help. Because of little regulation in the U.S., commercial surrogacy is legal and couples like the Romneys don’t have to outsource their pregnancies to India. Our Canadian neighbors got it right when the Supreme Court of Canada wrote, “allowing the purchase of human gametes and surrogacy services devalues human life and degrades those who choose to participate in such a commercial transaction” (emphasis mine).

Many of the news stories I’ve read over the weekend about Tagg and Jen Romney using a “gestational surrogate” state that this means the child is biologically theirs. I’m not sure how the press came to that conclusion because a gestational surrogate only provides the womb. Gestational surrogacy is just the derogatory term for the woman who carries and gives birth to the baby. They could have used an egg donor, which would mean the egg donor would be the genetic mother. They could have used a sperm donor too, meaning Tagg wouldn’t be the genetic father of the boys, if that was the case. And all this, apparently ignoring the Latter Day Saints’ position on surrogacy (the LDS church strongly discourages surrogate motherhood). Tagg and Jen have used this same surrogate in the past to give birth to their first son.

Outsourcing pregnancy. Wombs for rent. Commercialized Conception. Call me shocked and disgusted.