As Minnesota celebrated the sanctity of human life this week, Minnesota Family Council was honored to cohost the leaders of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, to educate Minnesota lawmakers on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy. Jennifer Lahl founded the CBC and continues to lead on bioethical issues with her experience both as a pediatric critical care nurse and her background in bioethics. Kallie Fell serves as the Executive Director of the CBC along with her work as a perinatal nurse. Their free documentaries provide insight on a variety of issues related to bioethics.
We also were honored to host Minnesota’s Dr. Amy Fisher from Allina who helps women and families restore reproductive health by addressing underlying diseases which manifest in the symptom of infertility. Even as Minnesota Family Council seeks to address the concerning practices of the fertility industry, we recognize the painful trial couples face as they walk through infertility. Restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) seeks to help families restore health by working with the body to achieve health rather than causing more harm to the body through the common practices of the fertility industry.
In IVF, sperm and eggs are collected from “donors” by fertility clinics, and fertility doctors seek to successfully create multiple embryos by fertilization in a petri dish. When the individuals providing the genetic material are not going to parent the child, those individuals are selling their own eggs and sperm.
After successful fertilization, the doctor tests the embryos to determine which embryos appear to have the healthiest genetic material or the desired characteristics by the individual(s) who will parent the child, once born.
Women who undergo egg extraction, whether for the purpose of having their own child or for a child whom another person will parent (through a surrogacy arrangement), are often not told the risks this process will pose to their own health. Risks include hyperstimulation to the ovaries due to superovulation, loss of fertility, and stroke. Since these women are not considered patients by the industry, there are no long-term studies associated with the impacts to women’s health which comes from subjecting women to high-dose fertility drugs.
For the embryos, the nascent lives undergoing IVF, it’s estimated based on limited reporting from the CDC that just over 2% of embryos created result in a live birth, and that between 7 and 8% of embryos created will even be transferred to a womb. For the vast majority of fertility clinics, life in its earliest form faces three paths: discarding as “unfit;” indefinite freezing; freezing for future implantation or research (and subsequent death); or eugenic testing to determine whether to implant.
In the context of surrogacy, IVF begins the process of the surrogacy transaction. Often surrogacy involves at least one party selling genetic material for fertilization, before fertilized embryo(s) are transferred to an unrelated woman to gestate the child. She is called the gestational surrogate. The gestational surrogate faces health risks of which she is often not fully informed. Although research is limited, pregnancies with an unrelated embryo face significantly higher rates of pre-eclampsia and hypertension, among other risks.
Once the child of surrogacy is born, he or she is taken from the only home and person ever known (the gestational surrogate) and given to “intended parent(s),” who may or may not be biologically related. Minnesota’s House of Representatives passed a bill to legalize commercial surrogacy during the 2024 legislative session [1]. If this bill had become state law, people from around the world could have paid Minnesota women to carry children for purchase, earning U.S. citizenship upon birth, before taking those children back to the child’s new home country.
This is happening in America already. In January 2024, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine shared a report disclosing the demographics of the foreign nationals seeking to pay for children born from surrogacy in the United States. The largest demographic group in the report were Chinese men over the age of 42. Legalizing the for-profit trade of children comes with severe consequences, bypassing the adoption review process which was developed with the best interests of the child as the central focal point.
The one question avoided by the fertility industry at large is the one question which must be answered: What rights are owed to children?
Minnesota Family Council stands with many other family organizations in drawing a bright line at children’s right to life and the right of children and women’s bodies to not be bought and sold.
[1] Note: the bill was not voted upon by the Minnesota Senate and therefore failed to become state law.
