Speaker 0
Into the wild, I'm going into the wild, I am. It's been a wild freedom child, since I left my roots back home. Into the wild I'm good. Into the wild I am. It's been a while, freedom child, since I left my roots back home.
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Free Birth Society podcast. This is a radical space for women who are ready to celebrate their autonomous choices in birth, motherhood, and beyond. Together, we'll learn about wild birth through personal narrative, we'll explore the politics of birth, and we'll analyze everything that relates to our lives as women from a feminist perspective. Here's your host, Emilee Saldaya.
Speaker 0
It's been a wild freedom since I've left my roots back home.
Speaker 2
This week, I have return guest filmmaker and whistleblower, Jennifer Loll. Jennifer was on the show a few seasons back tackling the harmful nature of surrogacy. And today, we get into the shadow side of IVF that no one is talking about. We discussed the incredibly low success rates of IVF, the high risk to mother and baby, and how much of this information is highly suppressed. Before we get into it, I wanna remind you that we are currently enrolling for the Blood Mysteries School, our coveted sixteen week immersive program for becoming a sovereign cycle and fertility coach that this world obviously needs. As Jennifer and I will get into more in just a moment here, women need an alternative. They need a holistic option for support when things get confusing or imbalanced in our cycles. So many women are fed into the medical system as young teenagers through hormonal birth control and have no idea how to actually care for themselves when it comes to menstrual health, fertility, and hormonal wellness. With infertility rates rising and the insidious IVF industry profiting more and more off of our lack of holistic support and education, we need educated wise women who are committed to sharing the truth about fertility and helping women escape the system. With our expert blood mysteries guides, Nancy Lucina and Kristen Hauser, who blend the scientific and the sacred so beautifully in this school, you will learn the intricacies of menstrual cycle health, including how to support women in physiological fertility journeys beyond the medical system. You will learn everything you need to become the sovereign cycle coach and women's initiation facilitator for your community. If you wish to bring honor and reverence back to the rites of passage of womanhood, the sacred blood mysteries, this school is for you. If you wanna see more women walking away from big fertility and claiming their natural fertility, I urge you to please be the solution, be the alternative. If you or the women in your life are struggling with hormonal and menstrual disease like PCOS, endometriosis, PMS, and infertility, the Blood Mystery School is going to provide you not only with the path to self healing for yourself, but the abundant, fertile career path to becoming the healer for others as well. We begin February twenty first. Enroll today at blood mystery school dot com. Alright. Here's Jennifer
Speaker 0
Law.
Speaker 2
Alright. Welcome back to the show, Jennifer Loll. I so appreciate you being here.
Speaker 3
Yeah. I'm glad to be back.
Speaker 2
So let's just get right into it. We are here today to talk about IVF and the shadow side to IVF, the side that is harder to find. You know, I did a preliminary Google just out of curiosity, and the first three pages of Google are how amazing it is, the clinics, all their takes on it. It really painted a very rosy picture for three pages of resources. So as I said to you, I I'm coming today with a list of questions to prompt you with. And for anyone joining us, the intention here is to just explore what is it, what's what's what do we need to know, about it? How are how is it showing up in society? What are the risks? What are the dangers? And, yeah, kind of the the whistle blowing, you know, element to all of this big fertility, is just so critical because it is hard, I think, to find a lot of this information.
Speaker 3
Yeah. It is buried, deep, deep, deep, because, you know, that's just the way that Google Analytics work. Right. You can pay to come up top on the search engines.
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, I was gonna tell you we're doing a screening of exploitation in, the membership later this month.
Speaker 3
Oh, great. Great. Well, let me know how it goes.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Alright. So maybe first, let's just pretend that none of us know anything. And what is IVF? When would someone use it? And and, you know, maybe describe the steps to
Speaker 3
it? Yeah. So for our our discussion, we're gonna think about the individual woman who she herself is struggling with infertility. You know, I I speak a lot on surrogates, you know, surrogacy using other women, egg donors using other women. But in the context of our conversation today, we're just and we're gonna assume a heterosexual couple. So it's a woman and a a man, a husband, a partner, whatever, that are trying to make a baby. IVF is relatively new technology. We had the first test tube baby, which was Louise Brown, born in the United Kingdom in, nineteen seventy eight. And for your listeners who like to read books, I would commend them to read Jenna Kuria's The Mother Machine And Jenna is was brilliant in her looking at what was going on, with women's health, women's bodies research, and the promotion of what I call big fertility. So when we look back at Louise Brown, the first test tube baby being born, that was like a everybody in the world was all over the front page of the newspaper. However, in in Jenna's book, we all know that many, many, many women have been used, oftentimes, not even with their knowledge, in experimental, you know, procedures to try to get to the birth of Louise Brown. So I think just historically, women don't realize that there's been so many women that have been, you know, used as guinea pigs in order to make the the first test tube baby. Their the IVF is under a larger umbrella term called assisted reproductive technology. The acronym is art, you know, like artwork. I have beautiful artwork on my wall. And and so assisted reproductive technology involves any anything that requires the eggs to be out of the woman's body, the sperm to be out of the man's body, the embryos to be made in the laboratory, and then implanted, frozen, discarded, you know, whatever. So IVF is one form of Assisted Reproductive Technology So in the larger umbrella of Assisted Reproductive Technologies women that are pursuing IVF are offered a lot of what we call add ons Right? Because the goal is not just to get a baby, but to get a perfect baby or a baby that we want, whatever that means. So we have all that different add ons. I call them the p's, you know, the preimplantation genetic screening. So once the eggs are out of the body, the sperm, the little embryo is made, then we start testing it. Right? Because we wanna know, is it a boy? Is it a girl? Does it carry a genetic disease that's in our family history? Because we don't wanna maybe pass on that genetic disease. So these are all the add ons. ICSI, ICSI is an add on, ICSI, which is Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection Whenever you see, like, in the scientific journals or sometimes you'll or even the newspaper, even like the Daily Mail You'll see this big picture of an egg You'll see this needle poking in the side of the egg and they inject the sperm into the egg to control, conception to control fertilization So ICSI is an add on, pre implantation genetic screening is an add on Obviously, preimplantation genetic diagnosis. We're screening so we can diagnose. There's a new one that's called PES. I have to read it. PES, which is polygenic embryo selection, and that's a newer technology where they're showing that we can predict probability probability that this child will have diabetes, probability that this child will have. So these are all it's just not old school Louise Brown, test tube baby, one egg, one sperm, you know, let the sperm naturally fertilize the egg, so it's more of, you know, control, control, control It's making sure that egg gets fertilized. It's making sure the embryo gets tested. It's making sure that we can predict what this child might be. So those are all under the umbrella of assisted reproductive technology. But I say that because women undergoing IVF, overwhelmingly offer these animals because we know IVF has a very, very high failure rate. IVF is very, very expensive. You know, like, we one IVF cycle with all the add ons is, you know, often a five figure cost. It's not cheap. It's not available to poor women who are struggling with infertility. And so that's, kinda maybe I'll stop there, and we can kind of go on from there if there's any follow-up questions or new question.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I'd love to hear more about what you know about the embryo genetic testing. Like, just why wouldn't somebody want that? You know? That sounds that sounds like just a smart way to optimize the process. If you if if you're gonna do it, you may as well.
Speaker 3
Right? Yeah. I think because, none none of the IVF add ons that I've just mentioned have ever been studied to prove that they actually, one, help you I mean, the goal is to help people get pregnant. Right? Mhmm. The other things that add ons have proven that they have been successful in helping people get pregnant. They have not successful in helping people have a baby, and they've not been proven to be safe. And as we get into more and more of our discussion, I will talk about how we know that IVF is unsafe to the embryo. We know that ICSI is unsafe, you know, the the actual pushing the sperm in with a needle in the measured by what? Measured by outcome. You know, a healthy baby, a healthy pregnancy, a successful live birth. No. There there's just been no studies that have proven that these, even though they're called add ons, add any benefit, by by research, by data. And they're very expensive once you start adding on these to just regular old nilly vanilla idea, which I'm not a fan
Speaker 2
of. So what about this high versus regular stim like, or sorry, high stimulation protocols versus low stimulation where there's significantly less medication? What do you what do you think about that or know about the long term effects of or success even of those two options?
Speaker 3
Well, I think for one, the fact that they they when I say they, I'm speaking of reproductive endocrinologists, which is the specialty of the doctors that do fertility medicine. I think it's important to know, well, why did they come up with a less is better approach? One is because they know it's this harmful. You know, these high dose powerful hormones are are harmful and and, you know, damaging to the woman. Just the woman alone is her body. So, you know, there it's still there's no guarantee. Yes. It's a it's a lighter touch. You know, it's like I only smoke five cigarettes cigarettes a day instead of a pack a day. You know? I only drive ten miles over the speed limit instead of fifty miles over the speed limit. So, you know, it's this notion that if I do it this way, it's safer. But, again, that's not Is it not? It's not improve it's not improving. I can't convey it. So I mean, I wanna say, yes. If I only eat three Oreo cookies versus a package of Oreo cookies, that's not very bad for me. That's less bad for me. So it's it's it's that kind of calculus where, in my mind, you're still playing with risks. You're just trying to either naively convince yourself that this is better for me or less harmful, but but the reality is it's still harmful. It's still harmful to stimulate a woman's ovaries to produce eggs to then surgically extract those eggs and then mechanically, you know, fertilize those eggs and then transfer those eggs back into your your womb. That's a lot of steps. That's a lot of intervention where things can go wrong along the way. Yes. There's people that have had successful diapers and have happy healthy babies, but the question is how are those women's health long term and how are those children's health long term and we now since nineteen seventy eight first test tube baby we've now been at this long enough that we have quite a lot of really good research with you know, that's has large sample sizes because there's lots of children running around the the planet now that have been made this way that show that the risk to women's health and to the children that are born through these technologies is not guaranteed to be fine.
Speaker 2
So what what is the harm?
Speaker 3
Well, let's look at, I'm gonna look at my notes just to keep myself straight. So I talked about ICSI, and ICSI used to be, the scene of, you know, like, just benign. Because the reason, ICSI came about was to address male infertility. And male infertility usually looks like poor low sperm count and or poor motility so the sperm aren't really the greatest quality and they poop out or don't get to their destination So we'll help them by just isolating one and then just, you know, shooting it into the egg. We now know that there's something about the way those little like, if you see fertilization in a microscope and you just see it, like, happen naturally, and it's not really natural because it's in a it's in a pee pee. But you know what I mean. I mean, they all just kinda swim around. And, you know, it's like they know whether they have an, you know, an antenna or there's some kind of a chemical thing, but they they know which one's gonna actually burrow in and make it into the center of that egg and, boom, you're gonna have to go see the cells start to divide, because you're gonna have that, you know, very beginning blastocyt, zygote, fetus, embryo. You know? But we now know that technique is harmful. Actually puncturing the wall of an egg and shooting a sperm into the egg, though we don't know, yeah, why is that harmful. You know, we haven't said, oh, because x, y, and z is happening in the wall of the egg or the wrong sperm that shouldn't have made it in. We we decided which one. You know, we don't yet know. So we're learning that that's harmful. And so it's harmful in that we've now seen that the children that are used with ICSI have higher rates of, chromosomal abnormalities. So it's an issue of chromosome development, which makes sense because that's when the DNA strands unravel, and they start raveling into you know, the DNA is where all the chromosomes are. Higher rates of birth defects in kids that use ICSI. And so we backed off on using ICSI because it used to be again, it was for male infertility or male subfertility. And then it became like, well, let's just expedite and we'll just always use ICSI on, you know, any IVF. We'll just use ICSI because we can control fertilization. We can, you know, make we can get an egg fertilized. And now they backed off on, again, just trying to use ICSI to address male subfertility or infertility because we found out these problems that come come about in children.
Speaker 2
If if they got the ICSI add on and did the genetic testing, wouldn't they then be able to rid out the embryos?
Speaker 3
Well, not necessarily because the adults haven't been proved to do what they say that they do. You know, and you how many times have you heard a story of a woman being told she's having a baby that has x, and then she has a perfectly healthy baby? Totally. Or she's or she's having a baby that has you know, it it's perfectly healthy. Everything looks good, and then she delivers a baby with Down syndrome or something. Mhmm. I mean, you know, so we just know in reality that a lot of testing is false, inaccurate, you know, misses things.
Speaker 2
So, So women are getting getting the ICSI and the genetic testing and then still birthing babies with chromosomal disorders and and birth defects, etcetera.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Or or healthy babies because it's just you know, again, use the example of the person who smokes who never gets lung cancer.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 3
And the person who never smokes and gets lung you know, some of it is just a roll of the dice. You could live your life just perfectly a okay fine. Yeah. And then, you know, things happen. So, I mean, it's a gamble. So it's a roll of the dice. It's you know?
Speaker 2
But So taking away the add ons, although I think the genetic testing is pretty par for the course these days. Is that true?
Speaker 3
Genetic testing.
Speaker 2
Is is it is it true? I I have this idea in my head that I don't know if it's accurate or not that genetic testing is standard with most clinics that you you're not that that putting the the fresh embryo into the woman isn't as common anymore and the freezing in so that you can test it is more standard. Is that true?
Speaker 3
I don't think so. I think what's true this is what I would say is true. Every step of the way is quality controlled. So the minute they, harvest I don't like these words. They harvest the eggs out of the woman's body like she's a chicken and you're going out to harvest. They grade them. Eggs are graded. The minute sperm is collected, it's not it's analyzed and it's graded. You know, spa swimmers, horse swimmers, not enough. You know? Everything's great. Then they make the embryos. The embryos are graded because they always make many embryos. Even in the lighter touch fertility medicine, even in the less is better. They still are gonna end up with, say, four or five or six embryos. Those embryos get graded because they're gonna implant the best one first. Now whether in the grading process, they actually choose to do genetic testing, which think about it. Okay. You've got a an early embryo's eight cells, sixteen cells, you know, and that's how the cells divide. And at the early stage of, like, five to six days of development, they go in with the needle again in this little embryo, and they extract a cell. You know? Because they have to have a genetic material to test. Mhmm. And you have to wonder, is that a necessary cell that's been removed from this early developing it'd be like baking a whole cake and you, you know, you remove the eggs and you didn't put the eggs in it. You know, you that's a very necessary ingredient. So it's just quality control from the minute egg and sperm are out of the bodies because the game, which is why back to your Google search, it's all about success. It's all about how great, how wonderful. They don't talk about the high, high failure rate. I mean, why do they make so many embryos, and why do they put the best one in and freeze the other ones that are suboptimal? And all of this grading is subjective. Of course. It's based on who's looking through the microscope and says, oh, this looks like a good egg. And then Joe comes on duty the next day, and he goes, oh, that looks like a bad egg. You know, it's very subjective.
Speaker 2
Okay. So I wanna get back to the harm because we covered the the some harm of the add ons. But what about, like, just your light touch, most no add ons, just like your, you know, tried and true IVF process with, you know, if someone like, I know, you know, I know women who are more holistically minded who will try to optimize their IVF journey for minimal risk, minimal medications, which is almost laughable because the whole thing is is that, of course. But, let's speak to that. Like, what what are the things that what does it look like, first of all? Because I still feel like, you know, a lot of a lot of us are very ignorant about what even the process of IVF is, and then what are the harms, what are the dangers that that you want women to know about?
Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, the the, you know, the less is better approach is new. So the studies that we have is not, overwhelmingly gonna be capturing those women. So, you know, I I think because back to, again, in nineteen seventy eight, you know, for seventy eight, ninety eight, you know, two thousand eight, two thousand eighteen, it was your standard old IVF kind of procedure. So a lot of the studies will will be of those women and the children that were born from that, you know, that subset. So I am not aware. I'm not saying they don't exist, but since it's not been around for that long, this this less is better approach, I'm not aware of any really good studies that have been done to specifically looking at that category of women. So a lot of the studies that I will use today in our discussion might have included those women, but it will not separate them out. These are just women that used IVF. So when you think of your your group of women that are considering IVF, they wanna do it the the best way, the good way. And I get those people all the time. And a lot of times they're religious people. You know, we're not gonna do genetic screening because we'll take whatever baby that we want. We're not gonna create, you know, fifteen embryos because we don't want any of them to go in the freezer. We're just gonna make one or two and then plant whatever those ones are and do none of that testing. But I still say, you know, you're still required to take fertility drugs, perhaps lower doses. You're still gonna undergo the harvesting procedure, you know, the needle lapisoscopic or up transvaginally, you know, to puncture your ovaries to remove, you know, the the eggs. You know? You're still gonna put them into the petri dish and, you know, get them to maybe naturally let the little sperm do their thing and the the the winner gets to pick who who wins on their own. But, you know, here's one study. If you'll just bear with me so I can read it, and it's called the effects of chemical and physical factors on embryo culture. Culture is what they're in, the little petri dish, the medium that they're cultured in. And it says, the development of the embryo outside the body means that it is constantly exposed to stresses that it would not experience in vivo in vivo in the body. So you've already got this little embryo that has no no sense of where the hell am I? Why am I out here in this cold, cruel world? I'm supposed to be in my mother's womb. Sources of the stress on the human embryo include identified factors such as pH, temperature shifts, exposure to high percentage of oxygen, which is not gonna get in the womb, buildup of toxins that are in the environment, and on and on and on. And these factors play a significant role in influencing the development of that embryo because it's not in a natural environment. Even if you do the less is better approach, you're still taking that process of conception, fertilization, whatever you wanna call it, into, you know, a laboratory, an open environment.
Speaker 2
Okay. And then keep going. So then they what what is harmful for the woman and mother once it's been fertilized? It's an embryo. They've decided which one's gonna go. Now what happens?
Speaker 3
Well okay. So let's say she gets pregnant, and, you know, then that leads us back to, well, the raw data, that shows it's a very high failure rate. I Which is
Speaker 2
yeah. Do we have I I was curious about more specific stats.
Speaker 3
It and, again, it's you know, your Google search is hard to find. And what you can find is really it's the only place that's tracked in the United States is the CDC.
Speaker 2
Well, I was gonna ask you that because I have gathered that IVF clinics and even doc individual doctors will inflate their success rates. And so is there a place that we can see real reported success? And and that is gonna be
Speaker 3
on the CDC website. So every single fertility agency in the United States is is obligated to report their data. The problem with the CDC data is it's very, it's just a minuscule amount of data. So they will tell you, like so this the most recent report that's on CDC website because they so say, okay, it's two thousand twenty three now. So everybody's out there collecting their data blah blah blah blah. Two thousand twenty four, they have to submit their data to the CDC. And then in two thousand twenty five, the CDC issues a report. So the most recent data we have now is from twenty twenty because that's just the way the process works. In the United States alone, there was three hundred and twenty six thousand four hundred and sixty eight IVF cycles performed, just IVF cycles. And of that, seventy nine thousand nine hundred and forty two resulted in a live birth. That's a twenty four point five percent success rate. So that's just raw data of how many cycles were done and how many resulted in the live birth. And by definition, a live birth means the baby was delivered alive but could have died one minute later. Right. It still gets it still gets registered as a live birth because it wasn't born deaf. It was born alive. So and and back to, you know, the the risk. You know, one of the risks is these children are compromised because of the way they've been produced. So but when we look at those, how many number cycles, it's really hard to get down in the weeds. You don't know how old was the woman. Exactly. What was her what was her underlying fertility issue? Don't know. Was the live birth of surrogate pregnancy? Was the IVF psych cycle performed using your eggs, but then put in Debbie's womb? What it's you know, it breaks down fresh or frozen eggs, fresh or frozen donor eggs. So it's really hard to just parse out. But I still think when you look at this big huge number of, you know, three hundred and, you know, fifty thousand cycles, and you've got less than eighty thousand just live births, more of those twin births, with those triplet births, with those you know? It's just and now you've been tracking the CDC data for ten years. And even with new and improved, less is better. We're gonna do it this way. We're not gonna do exi. We're not gonna do this. Those numbers stay at, you know, a seventy five percent failure rate. That's really high. And, you know, and for the woman who's deciding I I'm gonna refer your maybe you can put this in the show notes. My partner, Callie Fell, who works with me at the CBC, she did a very, very comprehensive report, and she's a labor and delivery nurse. So she, you know and she was a bench research scientist in a previous life studying women endometriosis in women. So she knows the science. You know? You know? And she did a comprehensive report on the state of the landscape of assisted reproductive technologies. And she's got, like, one part of it is, you know, for the woman thinking about selling her eggs, for the woman thinking about being a surrogate, for the woman thinking about doing IVF for herself, for the woman thinking about doing IVF with a donor egg. You know? So it's it's really parsed out, and it's heavily resourced with with the studies. So, for people that really wanna, like, zero in and and we actually tell people if there's a new study that comes about, let us know because we want this to be a living document that's constantly being updated with new new research. But, you know, for the woman who's thinking about using her own eggs, I just tell her, at a high failure rate, this is incredibly hard on your body. You know, there's plenty of studies out there on, you know, like, Clomid and being associated with thyroid cancer and non lymphoma Hodgkin's cancer. I think the verdict is still not out yet on breast cancer or other reproductive cancers. I mean, I always use the case of Gilda Radner. Some of your people are much younger than I am, but I, you know, grew up on Gilda Radner, the comedian on Saturday Night Live. And she was married to Jean Wilder, and they went through six rounds of IVF. Never were able to conceive, and, you know, she died of, ovarian cancer. And when you you have to be sort of savvy when you read the studies because, you know, we know that women typically, say, get breast cancer in their forties and fifties. And so there's a lot of studies out there that say fertility drugs don't cause breast cancer, but when you dig down in, you see that they only studied they only follow the women till they were in their thirties. You know, and you really have to follow women over, you know, to to when women normally get this cancer to be able to say that definitively. We know that a woman who does IVF and uses donor eggs is has high rates of preeclampsia, you know, gestational diabetes, things like that because she's got foreign eggs in her body. Like, who's got a foreign embryo on her body. The same thing applies.
Speaker 2
Yeah. There's we were talking about IVF in the private membership, and and there's a nurse, I guess I don't know what type of nurse she is that she was interacting with this, I guess, an ICU nurse because she said that I posted the question, why wouldn't you do IVF? I just kinda wanted to see what people had to say. And this nurse said, on the sole experience of watching how many women have come into my ward with serious complications. And I asked her to elaborate and just, like, stroke and cancer and the the amount she said the amount of stroke that she saw women coming in with. I mean, what?
Speaker 3
And they were There was a new study that was just published, in the Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA, on stroke and women who, who did IVF, and, you know, for people that wanna read that. And it's not a surprise. I mean, this this one particular study because, you know, you have to read the limitations of the study, which is, again, I'm a little nerdy that way. And one of the limitations was that they kind of back to the CBC data, they didn't separate out what kind of fertility medicine treatment the woman had, which is problematic because you you don't know what was the strain you have or what which which technique they use. And then the other limitation was just encoding. And I see that all the time, like egg donors who have complications go into the ER, and they're coded as, abdominal distension. Right. Versus ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. Oh, that's that's what she said. She saw a lot of presenting themselves is because their belly is full of fluid. Mhmm. So the doctor writes, you know, diagnosis, you know, abdominal distension, bloating, you know, fluid in the belly, whatever. So that doesn't get coded. So you can't go back and, like, pull out everybody every woman who came into the ER Right. Had ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. So So anything to
Speaker 2
say about the increased medicalization of the pregnancy, the increased NICU, you know, stays of IVF babies. I mean, that anecdotally, as a as a doula in the system for so long, anecdotally, it it was the case. You know, the IVF moms were they had more everything, and their babies had more time in the NICU. But but what is kind of, like, definitely true
Speaker 3
about that? And, again, back to our our document on our website, there's two very good studies, that were done in California where I live, which is important to me because we're I think I no. I I say we're the reproductive tourist state of the country. And they were done at Loma Linda Hospital, which is a, you know, a good academic university teaching hospital. So they, you know, they see the worst of the worst often in those kind of hospitals. But it was, a perinatologist who was one of the authors on the two different studies at Loma Linda. And one was sort of a snapshot of, just assisted reproductive technology pregnancies at Loma Linda for one one, you know, year bracketed. So it could have been just women doing IVF on their own, just with them. It could have been surrogates. It could have been women who use egg donors, but just a snapshot of that. And then he did parse out, another study, which looked just at surrogacy pregnancies. And you're right. These are women that are in high risk pregnancies. They're in high risk pregnancies, which means they're admitted to the hospital weeks, if not months, before their due date because, you know, they're trying to they're trying to keep this mom, you know, pregnant for as long as they can so that the baby can be delivered and be viable. And then, of course, because the mother has been in this high risk pregnancy, these children are overwhelmingly spending weeks, if not months, in the in the NICU. That is if they they make it. And he said that they had a four to five fold increase in stillbirth, c section, and hospital stays were up because of these high risks. And and he also did a really good job of just parsing out. Like, what happens when a regular woman who's just pregnant the old fashioned way comes in, delivers her baby, and goes home versus this, and then, like, the financial is just off the charts for what it costs in this high risk pregnancy.
Speaker 2
A clinic told my friend that having an IVF pregnancy does not label her high risk. And I was like, of course it does. Of course it does that they're not telling you the truth.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah. They don't wanna label her high risk. You know? But, yeah, I mean, I'm that's great that they're not telling her that she's high risk. You know, we just
Speaker 2
But I mean, when she goes to
Speaker 3
the Jillian sterility, which is the industry's journal. I mean, it's the journal of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. People I call the back guys, even their own study show that, you know, these IVF pregnancies are high risk. You know, high risk with preeclampsia, maternal hypertension, gestational diabetes, premature birth, low birth weight infants, on and on and on and on. Yes. You you you again, you may roll the dice and that might not be you, but you are naive, if you think it's not high risk.
Speaker 2
Woof. Right. Yeah. I agree. So what do you think about the collateral damage from all these abandoned frozen embryos?
Speaker 3
Oh,
Speaker 2
collateral damage. Well Like like, is it true I I gathered that there's over a million abandoned embryos? In the US. In the US. Yeah. And and I just wonder
Speaker 3
your thoughts abandoned. There's a million frozen embryos. Okay. One of them have not yet been abandoned.
Speaker 2
So what is the process if a family freezes fifteen, they go on to have a child. What happens with the agreement with these embryos? If they don't want them, do they just, like, dump them? How does all that work?
Speaker 3
Yeah. So the h so they are working obviously with an agency that has is storing them and keeping them frozen. And that's one of the areas where there's regulation because you have to regulate what's the temperature and, you know, what happens if power goes out, is there a generator? Because there's been incidences where frequently agencies lost power, and that means embryos go out. So Oh, it's The parents, have to pay a storage fee, and that's usually a monthly. It's not cheap, but it's it's not crazy expensive, but it's not cheap. And if you've got your embryos frozen for five or ten or fifteen years, you know, it adds up. Right. But it's the parents that get to make the it's called the disposition decision. What happens to their, you know, frozen children? So they can make the disposition decision to keep them frozen indefinitely and just keep paying storage fee. They can, donate them to scientific medical research to, you know, do which I'm not a fan of, because that's a whole another problem of ethics. They can opt to get that get them adopted, you know, through these embryo adoption, programs. So people are, oh, with embryos, or they can let them die. That's kind of the poor fortune. Well, I guess they can choose to implant them. They could they could have fifteen kids. Right. But the reality is because back to the the research on the exposure of the embryo in this unnatural environment, a lot of embryos don't survive being frozen. They don't survive the thaw. They don't survive being thawed. They don't successfully implant. So there's a lot of embryo loss in that process. But there are people out there. Just last year, I think it was a couple donated their frozen embryos, and the couple that adopted the frozen embryo had been frozen longer than this couple had been alive. So say this couple, they were in their twenties, the embryo had been frozen for, like, twenty five years. So they adopted an embryo that had been frozen longer than they've been walking on the planet, which just makes me crazy because I just think, what is the long term effect of freezing a human embryo for twenty five years and then bringing it to life? And will there will we see negative health complications or you know, when I look back at, like, Dolly the sheep, when they clung Dolly the sheep and everybody thought, oh, she looks just like a sheep. However, she got really old really fast and, you know, very obese and had to be euthanized. So you kinda wonder the what kind of damages.
Speaker 2
So do you know any sort of update on that story about the physical or or mental health?
Speaker 3
It's I mean, it's it's the baby is probably a year old now, or if you're in China, you'd call the baby twenty six. Yeah. Because all those years are being frozen with count. But, you know, it was born you know, the the headlines were it was born a healthy, normal, appearing baby. But we don't know again at the cellular level. But, yeah, we just we know now that there's the children that are created through IVF, assisted reproductive technologies, have higher rates of heart defects. Like, you know, all obviously, all the preterm, low birth weight kind of stuff, which, you know, that has longer term complications if a baby's born a preemie. You know, they might have all kinds of complications. They have higher rates of high blood pressure, obesity, insulin resistant diabetes. These are just some of the studies that have have come out on, you know, cancers. We're now knowing that some of these children through IVF, have higher rates of cancer, but we don't find that out till after the children are older.
Speaker 2
Oh, and you pair that with the c section and the NICU stay and the formula bottle feeding, you know, the whole trajectory of of their, like, technocratic life.
Speaker 3
And it's just amazing that people would kinda go, I don't think it's risky.
Speaker 2
Or that it's a risk it's a risk worth taking.
Speaker 3
Taking. Yeah. And and I I am I'm incredibly sympathetic to people who, for whatever reason, can't have children. And that's why when people come to me and they say we're struggling with conceiving, I always say you need to get yourself to a really good practitioner that will give you a good diagnosis and really understand what's going on so they they can try to naturally heal and correct your body so that if you are able to conceive, you can conceive naturally. And the caveat is there still always will be people on the planet that for whatever reason won't be able to conceive. You know, infertility has been with us since the age of time. You know?
Speaker 2
There's that paired with the inpatient's I want it now. Five years of of work versus some medication and procedures now, I think, is a huge deterrent. And as we talked about in our other conversation, women are waiting until their forties to try to conceive. And then if it's gonna take some time or if years of healing is now needed, if they discover that they're infertile, they don't have that time. So they are facing a really challenging reality.
Speaker 3
Yeah. And the older woman who is successful in in conceiving through IVF is even more at risk of complications because of her age and because of the way in with which she got pregnant. And you have to you know, to me, a big ethical part of this is also finances. You know? I think it's problematic that we're impatient. I want it. I want it now. A couple with that is and I also have the money. I can afford to do this. I mean, if you're a low income couple that is struggling and you want it and you want it now. And they say, well, it's gonna cost you eighty thousand dollars to do, you know, all this stuff. You know, you're like, well, I don't have that money. So you're so I because I try to live my life more kind of just other oriented, you know, and and I I think it's problematic that these are bad technologies that people want, but they're only available to people that have the needs. I don't wanna make it cheap or free so the lowest company can have it. But it is that sort of entitlement. I want it, and I have the money to buy it. So And Or you
Speaker 2
have the health insurance that will cover it because that But
Speaker 3
health insurance is not gonna cover a lot of this. I mean, health insurance oftentimes will cover some diagnostic stuff. So, you know, do I have blocked looking tube? Do I have endometriosis? It might, you know, do some testing. It might provide, you know, some of the fertility drugs. But still, it's you know, it can get you know, most people don't have to one IVF cycle and take home a happy keloid. Right.
Speaker 2
I think, yeah, my friend who's considering it that inspired this conversation, her insurance will cover the first round.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah. And and it's, again, it's very rare that the first round and that's the first round involves fifteen eggs that end up with ten embryos, and so you have and and, again, that that encourages them to really aggressively get a lot of eggs so that they can make more embryos. You only have the money for one shot, And so let's try to get a lot of eggs so that we can keep trying it when it doesn't work. And we you know when you force ovulation, the eggs are crappy. They're not meant to be ginned up and super ovulated and forced out. You know, it's a natural process of how, you know, all the little egg molecules, I call them the little cheerleaders, and they all get together. And they're every month, the cycle, and they're cheering, and one makes it out. You know? And that's that's intentional. That's a design of our body. It's a function of our body. So when you're forcing all these embryo eggs, you're gonna get poor quality eggs. And poor quality eggs make poor quality embryos.
Speaker 2
Meaning they're poor quality because they are getting forced out, and they're not getting naturally selected to be the one that drops. Is that what you mean?
Speaker 3
Exactly. It's it's a it's a control. We're and and it's a false naive sense of control that we're we're in we're in charge here, and we know better than your body. We know better than your cycle. We we can just make all this happen. And we've seen that's you know, I always like to say mother nature bats last because we think we're you know, since the hubris of it all. And now, you know, thirty years later, we're going, oh my god. Women's health has been compromised, and the children health has been compromised. And we've got a million frozen embryos in the US.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I'm thinking about the kind of the stuff that would be impossible to track, like the nervous system of the IVF baby, you know, and developing the difference of of a frozen embryo versus a fresh embryo. Like, these things that we don't really have metrics to to track.
Speaker 3
But And, really, I always say, would you, like, bring meat out of your freeze freezer that have been frozen for twenty five years and serve it to your family for dinner?
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 3
I mean, you know, when you kinda and you kinda go in this tiny little
Speaker 2
tiny little No. But we would we would do it if it was frozen for a year. Yeah. So Yeah. I mean, I think most most women I know aren't considering a twenty five year frozen embryo. You know? Yeah. It's like it's it's their own, most likely, and it's frozen just long enough for the genetic testing.
Speaker 3
Yeah. But, yeah, there's been plenty of really good books out there that have been written by women who have pursued what I call the superhighway of fertility medicine. You know, they get you on it. There's no off ramps. There's no exits. There's no slowdown yield. It's just, you know, well, we'll try it again. We'll try it again. We'll try it again. And, you know, and I'm thinking of Miriam Zoll's book called Cracked Open. She just felt like she'd been cracked open. And, you know, she she and her husband were not able to conceive. There's several other folks out there like that of women that just get put on this. And it's, of course, it's you know, again, it's Mary Lou Singleton. You can't say no to technology. If it fails the first time, well, the next time it's gonna work. It's like it's like the gambler at the casinos. Well, the next time I'm gonna win the next time, and you just and you you you've spent so much money in your Right.
Speaker 2
And you need it to work.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah. This person I know that works at a major university that doesn't wanna do IVF, they they get, they get flack from the hospital administrators because they're not bringing in dough. You're not bringing in the money. And, you know, if you're if you have a woman that has really, you know, severe endometriosis, that might involve very lengthy surgical procedure, you know, to try to clean up and clear out that endometriosis, which isn't a big money money grab for a hospital. So physicians who sort of push back on this method of helping people, take flat because they're not dragging in the dough. And I remember interviewing for exploitation. You'll see when you show it to your group, the doctor at Columbia Medical School, he told me that the fertility clinic at Columbia University in New York City makes so much money that it funds the whole entire OBGYN department. So the fertility medicine arm of hospitals or universities is kinda like their football team.
Speaker 0
Mhmm.
Speaker 3
You know, that brings in a lot of money. So if you're not a doctor that wants to get on that program and wants to do even the lesser light is light is better, lesser, you know, big gun drugs. You know? It's not it's frowned upon because it's not dragging in a lot of money. Sure.
Speaker 2
I wonder if we could touch on IUI real quick of just what is it? What what would you want women to know about it?
Speaker 3
IUI, again, is is where, you know, they take the sperm out of, you know, the man's body, intrauterine insemination. It's, you know, it's the old fashioned turkey basters and syringes. You know, they just, you know, a a a a man will masturbate, ejaculate in a cup, and then they just suck it up and shoot it up. You know? When I was a staff nurse at the University of California in San Francisco, a lot of the nurses I worked with with, you know, PALF, but a male nurse friend, you know, and say, hey. I wanna have a baby on my own. Will you give me some of your sperm? And, you know, they literally go home with a little, you know, piston syringes and can't do it. So it's you know, we call it low tech low tech fertility medicine because they're really Well,
Speaker 2
I've I've supported quite a few lesbian couples that just at home, they don't involve the medical, you know, world at all. They just have a male whoever donor come over.
Speaker 3
And it's an add on that, you know, my my OBGYN I mean, male infertility can be fixed too so that you can naturally conceive just through regular intercourse. And a lot of times, it's it's, you know, it's vitamins. It's, you know, it's stuff that you could go to CVS and buy. You know, it's it's things like, you know, changing your underwear, not sitting around the hot tub, maybe losing some ten or fifteen pounds if you're overweight, and some dietary nutritional supplements. So IUI, again, as an add on, has not been proven to be, necessarily successful in cases of dealing with male infertility. Now your lesbian couples, they're not dealing with a man who has a fertility issue, I'm assuming. You know, they're dealing with a man who's, you know so so then in that case, it works. But when you're thinking again back to the infertile couple who's considering IVF or IUI, a lot of things can be done just to naturally, improve sperm quantities, sperm quality, all those kind of things. And that's and that's the same thing with, you know, eggs. It takes one. You need one egg and one sperm. It's all you need. And it's amazing what these doctors who aren't willing to do the big guns fertility stuff, can do to actually improve, the chances of a man who's struggling with self fertility to become fertile.
Speaker 2
But in IUI, the woman still has to drop the egg at the perfect time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3
It's all and, again, it's, you know, it's mechanistic. You know? And that's for me, it's, you know, it's all about drawing lines. You know? Where where is my line? And for me, my line is what can be done in in keeping egg and sperm in the body to help a couple conceive. So for me, the line is what once the eggs have come out of the body with the sperm and the embryos made, you know, that's my line. Obviously, not everybody agrees with me. If they draw their line somewhere else, I won't use the surrogate. I won't use a donor egg. I won't do it more than three. You know, everybody has their lines. But for me, it's like what let's get medicine, fertility, health, naturopathic, whatever. Let's get people back to this is how the body is supposed to work. The body isn't working that way. Let's figure out that's a proper diagnosis. Why isn't the body working the way it's supposed to work, and what can we do naturally to get the body done? Yeah. And that's my line.
Speaker 2
What do you know or what have you seen around IVF affecting marriages?
Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, I've had, I can remember two gentlemen in particular when I've spoken at lectures come up to me afterwards in tears because their wife died, from complications of, IVF. You know? Oh my god. Three, four years later, you know, was diagnosed with raging cancer. You know, so so that obviously impacts a marriage when you when there's a spouse and it's dying. And I'm not laughing because I think it's funny, but, you know, it does it does impact the the marriage. Yes. Again, back to the women who have written books like Miriam Soult's cracked open. You know, your whole entire relationship all of a sudden is turned upside down. It's it's driven by the calendar. It's driven by when do we have to have intercourse. It's oh my god. I've I've started my period. I didn't conceive. You know? We failed again. You know? And that just it takes its toll. The finances, it takes its toll. You know? Fertility drugs and, you know, again, I'm a woman, so I can say this. You know? Sometimes it makes us look crazy. You know? It's just you've got these you know? You turn into somebody, you look at yourself in the mirror, and you kinda go, who am I? What if I become? You know? So there's just so many layers of stress. Children become a product or project. You know, you're working from this project, and and then and then that burden if and when you do have a child, you know, the the children are, under oftentimes under this we wanted you so badly. We wanted you so you know, we you know? So
Speaker 2
there's miracle baby.
Speaker 3
Yeah. So there's, you know, all that kind of you know? And that doesn't necessarily have to be harmful. I mean, our children should be wanted and loved and all that kind of stuff, but there's sort of this an added you know? Maybe even an expectation you have to perform a certain way because your parents spend so much money to get you. I did what was it? On way, way back, I did the Montel Wiggins show, and it was on, ex it was called extreme baby making. And there was this one woman that was on the panel with me that was, like, a very wealthy, like, New York City socialite who had spent, at that time, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars on her fertility treatment to have her children. And all I could think of on the inside was, oh my god. The pressure on those children. Knowing that they basically are, like, almost million dollar kids, it cost them. So, yeah, there's so many layers of, of this. And and then if you don't have a child I mean, I know several of my friends that have never been able to have children and a couple of them that did go down the IVF route. And just that sort of coming to terms that you're, you're a married couple and you don't have kids. You know, in a world that's you know, if you're married, you're it's just this is the package. And just having to come to terms with the fact that, you know, we can still have a really good, happy, productive, meaningful life without children. And there's just a lot of grief in the process that have to go through, when you've tried everything, you know, and it didn't work. Brutal. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Anything else do you feel like we've left out or that we should we should touch on before we wrap?
Speaker 3
Yeah. I guess I would just you know, I would speak to, again, your audience is overwhelmingly women. It better be.
Speaker 2
I said it better be.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, there might be some interlude for some men that that kinda eavesdrop. But, yeah, I just I just wanna end with really, really, really get a proper diagnosis, and see if there's things that you can do naturally and and to see if you can quickly come to terms if it's your story. With your life, it's not a death sentence if you don't have children. And I know I have children, and people go, you can't say that you have children. Oh, I can say, I was never raped, but I can say, well, rape's awful. No. You can't say that you were never raped. You know, just to come to terms of the you're a fallen complete human being, and you're here on this planet to do amazing, wonderful things. And if you have really strong mothering instincts, there's all kinds of ways to mother the world's children. And even if they haven't come out of your own womb, you know, there you can be an amazing aunt or a, you know, you can volunteer in your local back to school program. You know, there's ways that we can mother if for some reason, you know, we have not been given children. And to those up that have kids, you know, welcome those people into your circle. Mhmm. You know? Because we live in a world that's kind of puts us in groups. And, you know, you're the married with kids, and you're the married without kids, and you're the married that's trying to have kids. You know, you know, blend us all in together and and and be mindful that maybe your friend that's struggling with infertility doesn't wanna be invited to a baby shower. Quietly ask her. You know? I would like you to come. We're having a baby shower, but I understand that this might be hard for you. So you, you know, you make the call. Just have those kind of really personal conversations with people that you know and have that relationship with, you know, that you feel that you can have those kind of talks with. And that I want you to feel included in our family's life.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, thank you.
Speaker 3
You're welcome.
Speaker 2
Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 3
I like being with you. Mutual.
Speaker 2
And if anyone wants to follow-up with you and and look into your work, how can they find you?
Speaker 3
I'm on Instagram. I'm on Twitter. You just put in my name, jennifer law. You can follow us at the c b c dash network dot o r g where you can find the free download PDF of our comprehensive report. So yeah.
Speaker 2
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jennifer.
Speaker 3
Thank you.
Speaker 2
I hope you enjoyed the show today. You can support this podcast by donating to it on free birth society dot com and leaving an awesome review on whatever platform you listen on. The more reviews, the more visibility the show gets, so let's spread the word of Sovereign Birth. We've always got a lot going on at Free Birth Society, and you can find out about all of it at free birth society dot com, at free birth society on Instagram, and opt in to my newsletter below in the show notes. We offer courses on free birth, authentic midwifery, and the blood mysteries, as well as one on one coaching, in person retreats, and, of course, our annual women's festival. Our exclusive vetted private membership is definitely something to check out if you're looking for a community of wise sisters. Together, we rise. We must speak our stories, claim our lives, and support one another. This is the living revolution, and I am so grateful to be in it with all of you. I'll leave you with our epic free birth society theme song, Wild Woman by Aruba Red.
Speaker 4
I honor you for the wisdom you held, the ancient traditions eons upon light beams of survival, withstanding the Eons upon light beams of survival, withstanding the eradication of our power by design. I will not allow the separation of our young to be forced upon me. My sisters will no longer birth in captivity. The picket line redefined from burning our wild women to paralyzing us and drugging our babes. Strapped down in a clinical white bed, drying up the milk from our breasts, keep your needles. My family will never again be doomed to chase those dragons or your poison. We reject your fear. We choose love. Everything with intention. Death, ascension. I will fly and bring her back from the star.
