Season two of Live Action’s “Face to Face” video series continues, this time bringing together doctors who used to practice IVF — but do so no longer — and two mothers who have children through IVF but now oppose the practice. Together, they discussed the little-considered dark side of IVF, exposing the reasons why they no longer believe IVF should be promulgated as a path to parenthood.
The speakers included Dr. Lauren Rubal and Dr. Craig Turkzynski, both former IVF doctors, and Ericka Anderson and Katie McMahon, mothers who have conceived through IVF.
THE FINAL STRAW
When asked why they no longer practice IVF, both Drs. Rubal and Turkzynski give poignant answers. Rubal described how she started feeling uneasiness within her practice as she was seeing patients who were selective about gender or who were quick to destroy an embryo deemed “abnormal.”
“My soul was at stake. It’s what I tell everyone, and it’s true. I could feel the spiritual darkness I was in,” she said, adding:
When I started looking around—and like I said, the scales finally fell from my eyes—I was horrified. I felt like there’s so much I haven’t been helping people with or healing them or actually addressing the root cause of what they’re dealing with. Let alone that in the lab, we’re talking so flippantly about the number of cells that an embryo has, and the appearance, and you grade them under a microscope.
And I remember the day I had the realization—my goodness, I was watching a life. It was growing cells into different organs. That is life. How could I not—I just couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it.
Turkzynski had a similar experience, describing the “disorder and harm” that he saw IVF causing, and explaining that his “final straw” came after a patient would not allow him to freeze her excess embryos, instead insisting that he destroy them.
“After that happened, I just had a repulsion, and I knew that I needed to leave the field,” he said. “Obviously, I had a family. I had to find work. It didn’t happen immediately, but that was the final straw that led me to move away from the field.”
Also central to much of the discussion was the fact that so many families who undergo IVF still have frozen embryos. In explaining how cryopreservation — freezing embryos — works, Dr. Turkzynski said he estimates there are at least five million embryos currently frozen, with another five to ten million that have been destroyed or used for research.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Anderson said that her frozen embryos are the “heart” of why she now wants to speak out against IVF.
Explaining that she has always been pro-life, she said that the only way she could undergo the IVF process with all those frozen embryos was to “block” out the reality that those embryos were all her children.
Though she has decided on embryo adoption, the fact that she has created so many embryos is very difficult for her.
“These kids suffer identity issues. There’s so much trauma that goes into that,” she said. “And then all of a sudden, something I’d never thought about—I thought, ‘I’ve just done this. These are like my children. I’ve done this to them. I can’t have all these children. And now I’m stuck’ … And it’s honestly the most heartbreaking thing to deal with, because I’ll never get to know them, and I can’t give them life. And someday I have to tell my kids what I did,” she said, adding, “I don’t want people to go through this.”
Summing up a fruitful discussion which touched on many other problems with IVF and the industry surrounding it, Anderson said, “We didn’t know. And if we had known, we would have made different choices. And we want other people to know before they go down this path. Not to scare them, but to give them the dignity of making an informed choice.”
