Big Fertility is part of a 'human rights crisis,' says children's rights advocate

A recent episode of The Ellen Fisher Podcast showed a debate over life issues, with Them Before Us founder Katy Faust noting that the rights of the child seem to get the least amount of consideration in the reproductive decision-making of adults.

Faust debated IVF, surrogacy, and donor conception as 'paths to parenthood' with Kayde Mason, a surrogate, egg donor, and director of Elevate Egg Donor and Surrogacy Agency.

Key Takeaways:

• Katy Faust and Kayde Mason debated various life issues, and Faust continually redirected her arguments to focus on the needs of the child rather than the desires of adults.

• Mason has been a surrogate and an egg donor, and says she does not view even her own biological offspring as her children. She claimed that third-party reproduction is "an empowering choice for families and for the child," yet failed to explain how such an arrangement empowers the child, whose rights are typically not considered.

• Faust countered the idea that children created through IVF are the "most wanted and loved" children, and noted that when these children question their biological origins, they are often stonewalled by the adults in their lives who claim they should be "grateful" to exist. Faust called this akin to "emotional gaslighting" in an attempt to get the child to "shut up."

The Details:

On the March 24 episode of The Ellen Fisher Podcast, Faust discussed IVF, surrogacy, and egg donation with Mason, who has been a surrogate twice and donated her eggs five times.

While Mason shared much of her own personal experiences with surrogacy and egg donation as a consenting adult, Faust consistently turned the conversation towards research data and the effects third-party reproduction has on the children created.

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What's best for the child

Faust explained:

"What's best for the child is when adults sacrifice so children don't have to.

It is a world where the rights of children are recognized and respected, and then adults do hard things because the only alternative is for kids to do hard things for adults, whether it's losing their life, losing their mother or father, or being treated as a designer product and a commodity. So the best interest of the child is for us to recognize those fundamental rights and then everybody — single, married, gay, straight, fertile, and infertile — conforming to those rights because the only alternative is the kid sacrifices for the adults, and that actually is the definition of injustice.

When you're forcing the weak to sacrifice for the strong, there really is not ethics involved in that, in my opinion."

Mason argued:

"I don't think we always know what's best for the child. I mean, my first thing that I would point out is that no child consents to be born. No child gets to decide what family they're born into.

And you know... I think even in all those statistics, it's not super clear what is the best family structure beyond the fact that children deserve to be born into a loving home that wants them."

She called third-party reproduction "an empowering choice for families and for the child."

Faust questioned how it could be empowering for the child, especially in an instance where the "father masturbated during college [and] sold the rights to raise you for $200."

"Maybe empowering is not the best word," Mason admitted.

Research has shown that children raised by their married, biological parents experience better academic, emotional, financial, and physical outcomes, including having fewer behavioral issues.

The most 'wanted' children

Mason argued that children whose mothers "jumped through these extra hoops" using IVF to have them "are often the most wanted children in the world, and I think that is something important."

Faust disagreed, saying that her organization collects the stories of donor-conceived children, "And every single one of these children, when they voice, 'Where is my mother? I'd really like to know who she is' ... a lot of times what they're met with is, 'You should be grateful to be alive. Do you know how much trouble we went through to have you? You are so loved and wanted.' ... It's almost a form of emotional gaslighting. And a lot of time the 'loved and wanted' and 'wanted and loved'... means 'shut up.'"

The research speaks

While Mason did not present studies to support her position, Faust referenced the study, "My Daddy's Name is Donor," which compared outcomes between children raised by heterosexual, biological parents, children created through sperm donation, and adoptees raised by neither biological parent.

The study, she said, noted that:

• "Children created through sperm donation fare worse than the children created and raised by their biological parents."

• "On many measures, they also fare worse than even the adoptees."

She added, "... there is really something distinctly anti-child about this technology...."

Mason argued that this could be explained away by the modern shift from dishonesty about the child's biological parents and anonymous sperm donation to "identified" sperm and egg donation, yet the knowledge that your father gave up his rights to you for $200 is still a part of the equation.

'They aren't my children'

When asked if the children born from her egg donations feel like her children in any way, Mason said she doesn't consider them to be her children, even though the child "shares my biology and shares my genetics, and biology can be important... parenthood is about intention, and my intent was never to be the parents to those children."

Faust then asked Mason:

"What if the child comes to you when he or she is 18 or 22 ... you may not think of yourself as the mother, but according to the surveys of children created through sperm and egg donation, they themselves would say, 'Obviously, that is my mother. That is my biological mother.' ... So what happens if your idea about this transaction is different from your biological children's idea about this transaction? ... What would you say to them?"

Mason admitted she didn't know what she would say, but "I feel that I have made a decision that I feel comfortable with by being a known donor, by leaving those options available to the child, even if that admittedly may put me in a situation that I'm not completely prepared for one day... That's the true answer."

Faust pointed out that having biological children out in the world has a ripple effect on relatives who don't know they are related to each other.

In addition, while Mason may say that parenthood is about "intent," not biology, stories of children being switched at birth or as embryos prove that biology does matter as long as the adults want it to.

When does life begin?

Toward the end of the conversation, they discussed their thoughts about human life in the womb.

Mason said she believes "giving embryos the same rights as humans is a very scary slippery slope," then compares a human organism (the embryo) to human cells like eggs and sperm, since "they're the potential for a life." She then added, "Embryos are often just a byproduct of this process."

Faust noted, "We actually don't have to wonder when life begins," adding:

"Embryology is a valid science. It's been around for a while.

And we know that unlike egg and sperm, which are not a full human, a human does come into existence when sperm and egg fuse together to create that new, never-before-seen strand of DNA and chromosomes. And that is the earliest stage of human life.

And really, the only difference between those frozen embryos and you and me is time. Time and the ability to develop.

So we do have quite a human rights crisis on our hands."

The future of reproduction

Fisher asked what Mason and Faust thought about the efforts to create robot wombs, and while Mason simply said she thinks it's better for humans to grow humans, Faust had a lot more to say that was eye opening:

"The baby assembly process needs three things: sperm, egg, and womb. Sperm is plentiful and cheap. Eggs are harder to get and more expensive, but we've figured out a way to access them on a pretty significant scale. Wombs? Much harder to find. We need to pass commercial surrogacy laws because there are not enough women willing to do this altruistically, because... it's a risky process.

And so Big Fertility is always looking for ways to drop the price. The best way to do that will be when they can cut women out of the process altogether. ... They are doing two things to cut women out of the reproductive process...

The first one is robot wombs, right? Artificial wombs. That would be so good for Big Fertility. [Surrogates] are the most expensive part of this process. ... And sometimes the woman is the thing standing between you and the product that you want."

Faust also discussed the horrific technology that artificially and intentionally creates motherless and fatherless children at a genetic level:

"The other thing that they're working on is figuring out a way to eliminate the need for eggs. And so there is this process called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) where they will create a human egg cell out of skin or saliva or blood or hair and create a human egg that then they can fertilize with sperm.

... You can do generational compression where you create a child through this IVG process, make an embryo, then do IVG on the embryo, make another embryo. And in essence, you could make a great, great, great, great grandchild within a couple."

Read more here about IVG.

The Bottom Line:

The conversation also touched on adoption vs. third-party reproduction and how building families should be child-centric, not adult-centric. Faust also discussed embryo adoption, forced abortion in surrogacy, and the massive issue of frozen embryos.

Artificial reproduction has long-term negative effects on the children created, who have rights that are being ignored in favor of adults' desires.