As a gynecologist, I’m with you 100%. Great topic … from metabolic issues that nobody wants to discuss including the infertility docs that want your cash to the impatience of the patient , and some of these drugs are horrible… side note lets talk about the kids waiting to be adopted . The topic is endless and very controversial . Thanks Mark 🌼
Thank you. I could not have said it better. Right from the start it made me think of Brave New World, 'embryos' flushed down the toilet, human life created, as if doctors were Gods - we know how well that works ! And so many children indeed, living in poor conditions without parents or even relatives, waiting for adoption. Brandon thank you for speaking out!
I remember you from another site, Ingrid! Excellent comment, but I will add it is painful to read the stories of women essentially forced to give up their babies. Many of them spend their lives yearning for their children and regretting their decisions, which they were often pressured into.
well, I was not thinking of children taken from mothers, but about all the orphans that have no parents or even grandparents to take care of them I know a lady who adopted 2 girls orphaned in Korea, and one who adopted 3. There are also lots of orphans here and in Europe for those that do not want asian kids. My late husband was a given up child, and never got over the fact, that his mother, from whom he only knew she was very young, gave him up. So that goes both ways.
Exactly! There is an incredible bond that is formed in the womb that society thinks can just be broken, no big deal. The problem with a lot of those foreign adoptions is that some of them were not voluntary on the women's part. And then there are the issues with older adoptees who may have been neglected and / or abused.
I had a foster daughter who was horribly abused and not taken away until she was 11, though when she was 3 the state was called in, found her and her brother malnourished with distended bellies with a mother who threatened Laura right in front of the caseworker. I tried my best, Laura and I were starting to get attached to each other (she suffered from severe attachment disorder like many orphans who are not newborns), and then the social workers stepped in and allowed Laura to walk away from a 6-day school suspension (undoubtedly behavior provoked by the beginnings of attachment) and my home. And that's when I washed my hands of DHHS, bunch of lousy creeps with an institutional ethos of destruction.
I think foster care is a very bad solution. I know of some kids who were to be adopted and then the birth mother came out of an institution and wanted them back, only to abandon them a few weeks later. I am rather thinking of children who are in a home, like we used to have in Europe. Foster care is rather new there, May be the last 30 years. Before that, children were in a home with caretakers.
We had group homes here as well, and some of them were abysmal. But there was a place near me that had cottages with house parents, and it was quite good from what I have heard. It no longer takes in children who need placement, but I think they are running an alternative school program -- agriculturally based -- for kids who don't do well in regular school.
Many foster parents are amazing! I figured out after what the caseworkers did to Laura that it took one of two qualities to be a super foster parent: You either had to fight DHHS constantly as one woman I met did -- she had adopted and her sons needed special services, which they are supposed to receive even after adoption, but she had to continuously go to court to get them -- or just lie and tell the DHHS workers what they wanted to hear. This latter woman had amazing success with violent teenagers, and that takes a special person!
You’re a very good writer and your essays are both entertaining and informative. I hope you will continue to write on topics beyond coronamania. There are many topics in modern society that could benefit from your searing logic and intellectual honesty. This was a great essay.
Sorry for the late reply. I was out of the country and have had to tend to much stuff since I returned.
Thanks for your encouragement. One has to say what one knows/believes and not be deterred from doing so b/c of what others might think.
This topic is an elephant in the room; but not exactly. b/c while everyone sees the elephant, most people don't know what reprotech entails.
IVF resembles the Covid overreaction in the broader sense that most people have very little sense of the linkages between short-term, small scale actions and wider, longer-term effects.
"Yes, let's shut down society to save a life!"
But what about the effects of doing so on others?
As to continuing to write, we'll see what happens. I don't have a strong opinion about everything and feel somewhat uncomfortable letting everyone know what I think about everything.
Wow. Unexpectedly off-topic (at least from what I've come to expect), but such a great piece of writing. I appreciate the depth of your essay. I'm not a writer, but one another point I might add is the long-term health harms to moms (and egg donors) who self-inject with all sorts of hormones to make this process happen. I've read in the past about the blind-eye that is turned towards the health risks of young women who are financially incentivized to donate eggs multiple times. The health implications of this are not known or even addressed. And on a personal level, I know a young adult born of a donated egg who grew up with such a yearning to know her "other" mother, the egg donor. While this is a topic more typically considered with adopted children, I wonder if it's less frequently addressed with respect to children born of donated eggs. Thank you for addressing this topic in such a well-researched and thoughtful manner.
Thanks, Mama. I've read thousands of pages on these topics b/c they're important.
I didn't want to go off topic but IVF was in the news and, as Robert George said, the world has never really considered the effects of commodifying life.
Thank you Mark! It is incredible how for decades the moral aspect of this common procedure was ignored by society. IVF often involves donor gametes. With the advent of Ancestry.com I imagine many people are gob-smacked to learn of the existence of half-sibs living hither and yon. I wonder how many people are never told they are the product of a donor gamete. Just another level of evil piled on.
exactly! there might be a lot of incestuous couples already! Remember that song, your daddy ain't your daddy but your daddy don't know - it must he 100 times worse by now!
I've read that some in the industry have "fathered" 75 kids by using their sperm on unwitting women. And some sperm sellers are extra "popular," thus fathering dozens of offspring in the region of a given clinic.
Years ago a “gynocologist-obstetrician” in Idaho, a diabolical narcissist, artificially impregnated numerous women with his sperm. That case made the evening news. Seems he was a trusted Mormon patriarch and his victims were vulnerable Mormon women.
I recently found out about an organisation called We Are Donor Conceived that campaigns on behalf of people born from sperm and/or egg donors. There is definitely a gap to fill, as there are more and more such people and society does not really acknowledge their specific emotional struggles.
If you go to the We Are Donor Conceived website they have some interesting results of survey data they ran. A majority of donor-conceived people have mixed emotions about it.
Thank you for a very thoughtful and informed essay about these points that nobody wants to think about or discuss. Just one of the many shifts in what people take for granted, that has manifested over the past few decades. Losing sight of the sacredness and gift of life will lead us astray in so many ways!
instead of accepting our infertility and respecting life, IVF is exactly the contrary! Not to think of the burden on a woman's body by having to inject hormones... what does all this stuff do in your body! A cousin of mine who has had health problems all her life is now trying this horrible thing. I haven't said anything, it is their body, but disapprove greatly.
One of the issues that does not seem to be discussed by fertility doctors: fertility drugs raise the risk of reproductive cancers. How could it not, when they are turbo-charging hormone levels to achieve ovulation?
Thank you for the insightful, crisp clarity of your article Mark. You must have been one heck of a lawyer if you prepared for, and articulated, every case as you did this incredibly important but emotional subject.
Treating children as a commodity to satisfy the happiness of the “adults” is a horrifying concept. It makes my heart fairly shriek with the utter wrongness of the notion. Not only gamete donors, but women turned into incubators to grow the baby for a couple is just another way of cheapening life and turning it into an industrial commodity. What happens when this child is an inconvenience or a disappointment, a “not what we expected”? (Sounds like another Huxwellian industry waiting in the wings to me.)
My God-parents were childless. I know it was a private sorrow for them - they looked forward to having a family that never came. They had no one to leave the family farm to. But they accepted their lot with humility, and aimed to live kind, good lives. I am most fortunate that they have been my mentors in my faith (Orthodox Christian) and my life.
Thanks again Mark. I hope that you will keep writing essays.
I realize infertility is painful to many people. But we have restructured society and relationships, largely via contraception and abortion, in a way that has made infertility far more common.
One might compare efforts to control births to the use of the CV vaxxes, which, instead of boosting immunity, suppress it and cause deaths from "other causes."
I do agree with you about IVF being immoral. However I’m also a totally natural “old mom”. I had my first child naturally at 36, my third naturally at 42. My friend had her first surprise baby at 42. It’s actually totally possible to have a baby in midlife. No technological intervention. I asked my midwife who the oldest women was that she had delivered for and she said 52 also conceived naturally. A woman in our homeschool group had her last of 9 children at 45. All conceived naturally. If you believe efforts are in place to control population growth then it would make sense to impose an idea of a short fertility window and make risky “geriatric pregnancy” a taboo. Eliza Hamilton had her last child in her late 40s I believe 47. This is not a new phenomenon.
Leah, what you say is true. But these cases are in the tail of the normal curve (and much more common for women who have been having babies for years). There is also no doubt that a woman wanting to conceive for the first time in her 40s typically has more problems doing so than one in her 20s.
The moral problem is not with older women having babies.
I also think that the same media that propagandized us into fear over COVID has put forth similar propaganda to scare women into thinking we will all have fertility problems beginning at age 30. I know that I was scared by what I was hearing, and that pushed me into "rushing" to try to get pregnant asap once married (early 30s) but as it turned out, I had ZERO trouble getting pregnant. My point is that the decisions I felt compelled to make about marriage and children were influenced by fear-based propaganda about women's declining fertility. I love my kids, absolutely, but I felt this pressure.
My mother was 37 when she bore me (and lost 25 pounds at my birth!). I was a very healthy baby and did well until my mother decided to have a midlife crisis (one possible reason for not having children late in life?), and in essence abandoned me. Yes, I had a roof over my head and food to eat, but that was it; at age 12 after she yanked me out of my home and school, I was basically on my own. People need to be honest with themselves about how prepared they are to care for children until (at minimum) age 18.
Yes I know… I thought I was going to be a statistic as well and know just as many women in that camp. probably more that aren’t sharing their stories with me. Obviously since I’m an old mom I’m looking for old moms to be friends with! My point is just that it’s possible. If it’s possible to do naturally then it’s not a new notion.
I had my first at 35 and second at 38. Miscarried my first pregnancy at age 33. I did do amniocentesis testing to check for birth defects and Downs Syndrome, fortunately both sons are healthy. I’m now 60 with two boys in their early twenties. It’s a little weird being an older mom, most of my friends are grandparents now!
Awww, thanks, Mark! 🥰. I FEEL old when I complain about my two sons still acting like 12-year-olds, though. I swear they’re aging me faster than normal. I guess I’m not alone, so many people I know with kids in their 20’s and even 30’s who have “failed to launch”. The overly expensive housing market in San Diego hasn’t helped, and neither of them seems interested in dating toxic liberal women. 🤷🏼♀️
My mother had me at 54. I came after 17 years and had three sisters. I had my only child at 36. She is now 37 and hopes to be pregnant with her first at the end of this year. (She is getting married in November.) lots of babies are born to middle-aged women.
Perhaps you Mom breastfed for extended durations, thus preventing ovulation and preserving her eggs. Statistically, womens' fertility declines after 32.
excellent. Human trafficking is in the news and movies but IVF and surrogacy are human trafficking too and it needs to stop. Our society is so messed up-we have to teach our children that this is wrong and don't do it.
It’s all just another symptom of the disrespect for human life and life in general planet wide. Allowing this is just more disrespect. Even this just adds to the evil forms of child sacrifice prevalent today.
Interesting timing for me to “hear” this. One of my sons (who fortunately needed no encouragement to not follow 🇨🇦government orders around jabs) mentioned in a heartfelt conversation recently that if he and his wife are not successful at starting a family he wouldn’t want to do IVF. I was curious as I hadn’t thought about it much before other than it all felt a bit lab like and distasteful to me on a gut level… but I have successfully become pregnant whenever I wanted and have tried to imagine the distress of not having that monumental life shift. He said it “didn’t feel right to him and we could discuss it more later”…. Thought provoking article Mark, and well put together. I see a lot of what you are saying and it resonates and gives me more to think on. Thanks.
Another thing that almost nobody talks about is what having the ability to choose to eliminate certain disabilities right at the start will do down the road to those who end up being born with disabilities. Take Iceland, for example. Not too long ago its government announced that it had eradicated Down's Syndrome from the island. They did this through prenatal testing and abortion. Now I don't know if this was a voluntary choice on the part of those women who found themselves carrying a Down's Syndrome fetus or whether they were pressured in one way or another to make that decision. I suspect the latter. All right now, let's say that a pregnant woman gets tested, learns she is carrying a Down's Syndrome child, and decides NOT to abort. Do you for one minute think that the Icelandic school system, just to name one, will be sympathetic to the special needs of such a child? Do you think Icelandic taxpayers will be willing to subsidize such needs?
Disability rights advocates here in the United States have fought hard for the recognition that some people need more accommodation than others. They have fought hard for inclusion. When I was growing up, special needs children were often institutionalized or otherwise segregated from society and they certainly were not expected to achieve much of anything. They were often belittled and put down, which is why I strenuously object to the word "retard" being used as an insult. Do you REALLY realize what you are saying about people with Down's and other special needs when you are throwing that word around? You are saying that they are less than, that they don't deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and increasingly, that they shouldn't even exist. Right now, the special needs population is exploding, mainly due to the increase in autism diagnoses. This puts stress on schools especially schools which are located in poor communities, because these schools are required by law to provide individualized educational development plans--and all this takes money. What have we been hearing a lot of lately? Cities are broke. Governments are broke. Social Security is going broke. Not enough people are entering the workforce and paying into the system. Yes, we are being told this over and over. Also, at the same time we are being told that there are too many people on this planet.
Right now we do not know what causes autism. If it turns out to be genetic so that it can be caught prenatally, what do you think will happen once parents are allowed to have a choice? And once they are allowed to have that choice, what will happen to all these services I have mentioned above? I can very well see a school system say to a parent whose child requires intensive services, YOU made that choice, NOW that is YOUR problem, not ours. Don't ask us to fix it. Because you see, these decisions are not as private as you might want to believe.
There are an awful lot of American families whose WW2 soldiers were saved by the use of the nuclear bombs in Japan. Probably countless Japanese citizens as well.
"This did not convince me."
That's because God gave you a functioing brain that doesn't trust a Godless Communist like Hochul
My initial thought as well, but only because just two weeks ago a woman in my Bible study, truly a believer who loves the Lord, told her story of invitro and that she promised God upon implantation that if it was successful, the child would be His, and that is exactly what she did. Her daughter, now in college, is a true lover of the Lord, influencing others all her life for the good. God is in control. Even what is "meant for bad" will be turned to good because that is who God is. Satan currently runs this world, with ALL THE PROBLEMS, but God bestows blessings until the end comes.
As a side note, in late college or early after, my daughter thought about being an egg donor, and I vehemently discouraged her and thankfully she didn't. Poor college kids want cash but aren't mature enough to understand all of the ramifications.
I'm not really friends with her, more like acquaintances and I have no idea. I get what you're saying below as well (nuclear weapons). All I know, Mark, is that God is sovereign and knows much that I'll never figure out. (Me worm brain, He rocket scientist) He's ultimately in control and even though it is so horrible for so many reasons, we are still living in that time of grace and not judgement so as many that will choose Him can do so. He'll only wait so long though.
As a gynecologist, I’m with you 100%. Great topic … from metabolic issues that nobody wants to discuss including the infertility docs that want your cash to the impatience of the patient , and some of these drugs are horrible… side note lets talk about the kids waiting to be adopted . The topic is endless and very controversial . Thanks Mark 🌼
Thank you. I could not have said it better. Right from the start it made me think of Brave New World, 'embryos' flushed down the toilet, human life created, as if doctors were Gods - we know how well that works ! And so many children indeed, living in poor conditions without parents or even relatives, waiting for adoption. Brandon thank you for speaking out!
I remember you from another site, Ingrid! Excellent comment, but I will add it is painful to read the stories of women essentially forced to give up their babies. Many of them spend their lives yearning for their children and regretting their decisions, which they were often pressured into.
well, I was not thinking of children taken from mothers, but about all the orphans that have no parents or even grandparents to take care of them I know a lady who adopted 2 girls orphaned in Korea, and one who adopted 3. There are also lots of orphans here and in Europe for those that do not want asian kids. My late husband was a given up child, and never got over the fact, that his mother, from whom he only knew she was very young, gave him up. So that goes both ways.
Exactly! There is an incredible bond that is formed in the womb that society thinks can just be broken, no big deal. The problem with a lot of those foreign adoptions is that some of them were not voluntary on the women's part. And then there are the issues with older adoptees who may have been neglected and / or abused.
I had a foster daughter who was horribly abused and not taken away until she was 11, though when she was 3 the state was called in, found her and her brother malnourished with distended bellies with a mother who threatened Laura right in front of the caseworker. I tried my best, Laura and I were starting to get attached to each other (she suffered from severe attachment disorder like many orphans who are not newborns), and then the social workers stepped in and allowed Laura to walk away from a 6-day school suspension (undoubtedly behavior provoked by the beginnings of attachment) and my home. And that's when I washed my hands of DHHS, bunch of lousy creeps with an institutional ethos of destruction.
I think foster care is a very bad solution. I know of some kids who were to be adopted and then the birth mother came out of an institution and wanted them back, only to abandon them a few weeks later. I am rather thinking of children who are in a home, like we used to have in Europe. Foster care is rather new there, May be the last 30 years. Before that, children were in a home with caretakers.
We had group homes here as well, and some of them were abysmal. But there was a place near me that had cottages with house parents, and it was quite good from what I have heard. It no longer takes in children who need placement, but I think they are running an alternative school program -- agriculturally based -- for kids who don't do well in regular school.
Many foster parents are amazing! I figured out after what the caseworkers did to Laura that it took one of two qualities to be a super foster parent: You either had to fight DHHS constantly as one woman I met did -- she had adopted and her sons needed special services, which they are supposed to receive even after adoption, but she had to continuously go to court to get them -- or just lie and tell the DHHS workers what they wanted to hear. This latter woman had amazing success with violent teenagers, and that takes a special person!
You’re a very good writer and your essays are both entertaining and informative. I hope you will continue to write on topics beyond coronamania. There are many topics in modern society that could benefit from your searing logic and intellectual honesty. This was a great essay.
Melisa,
Sorry for the late reply. I was out of the country and have had to tend to much stuff since I returned.
Thanks for your encouragement. One has to say what one knows/believes and not be deterred from doing so b/c of what others might think.
This topic is an elephant in the room; but not exactly. b/c while everyone sees the elephant, most people don't know what reprotech entails.
IVF resembles the Covid overreaction in the broader sense that most people have very little sense of the linkages between short-term, small scale actions and wider, longer-term effects.
"Yes, let's shut down society to save a life!"
But what about the effects of doing so on others?
As to continuing to write, we'll see what happens. I don't have a strong opinion about everything and feel somewhat uncomfortable letting everyone know what I think about everything.
Second this!
Once again man thumbs his nose at God in a contest to prove who is master of the universe, combining DNA, altering DNA, tampering with creation.
What a time to be alive.
Thanks Mark for throwing haymakers at ideas that desperately need knocking out.
Wow. Unexpectedly off-topic (at least from what I've come to expect), but such a great piece of writing. I appreciate the depth of your essay. I'm not a writer, but one another point I might add is the long-term health harms to moms (and egg donors) who self-inject with all sorts of hormones to make this process happen. I've read in the past about the blind-eye that is turned towards the health risks of young women who are financially incentivized to donate eggs multiple times. The health implications of this are not known or even addressed. And on a personal level, I know a young adult born of a donated egg who grew up with such a yearning to know her "other" mother, the egg donor. While this is a topic more typically considered with adopted children, I wonder if it's less frequently addressed with respect to children born of donated eggs. Thank you for addressing this topic in such a well-researched and thoughtful manner.
Thanks, Mama. I've read thousands of pages on these topics b/c they're important.
I didn't want to go off topic but IVF was in the news and, as Robert George said, the world has never really considered the effects of commodifying life.
thinking how it might end up, that brothers marry their sisters unknowingly! Is anyone keeping track of all these 'donated' eggs?
Thank you Mark! It is incredible how for decades the moral aspect of this common procedure was ignored by society. IVF often involves donor gametes. With the advent of Ancestry.com I imagine many people are gob-smacked to learn of the existence of half-sibs living hither and yon. I wonder how many people are never told they are the product of a donor gamete. Just another level of evil piled on.
exactly! there might be a lot of incestuous couples already! Remember that song, your daddy ain't your daddy but your daddy don't know - it must he 100 times worse by now!
Recent NY Post article on this. https://nypost.com/2024/02/14/lifestyle/i-dated-my-half-brother-in-school-i-was-lied-to-about-my-dna/
I've read that some in the industry have "fathered" 75 kids by using their sperm on unwitting women. And some sperm sellers are extra "popular," thus fathering dozens of offspring in the region of a given clinic.
wow this is stunning! this is more of an abuse case, but still shows what can happen in the dark world of human fertility clones
Years ago a “gynocologist-obstetrician” in Idaho, a diabolical narcissist, artificially impregnated numerous women with his sperm. That case made the evening news. Seems he was a trusted Mormon patriarch and his victims were vulnerable Mormon women.
True, thanks for the reminder about the abuse - I hadn't remembered the details.
I recently found out about an organisation called We Are Donor Conceived that campaigns on behalf of people born from sperm and/or egg donors. There is definitely a gap to fill, as there are more and more such people and society does not really acknowledge their specific emotional struggles.
If you go to the We Are Donor Conceived website they have some interesting results of survey data they ran. A majority of donor-conceived people have mixed emotions about it.
Thank you for a very thoughtful and informed essay about these points that nobody wants to think about or discuss. Just one of the many shifts in what people take for granted, that has manifested over the past few decades. Losing sight of the sacredness and gift of life will lead us astray in so many ways!
instead of accepting our infertility and respecting life, IVF is exactly the contrary! Not to think of the burden on a woman's body by having to inject hormones... what does all this stuff do in your body! A cousin of mine who has had health problems all her life is now trying this horrible thing. I haven't said anything, it is their body, but disapprove greatly.
One of the issues that does not seem to be discussed by fertility doctors: fertility drugs raise the risk of reproductive cancers. How could it not, when they are turbo-charging hormone levels to achieve ovulation?
Mrs. "the Knife"
True.
100% totally agree with this.❤️
Excellent iteration of all aspects of this horrible practice. Thank you.
Thanks, Deborah.
Painful to write. But all true.
Thank you for the insightful, crisp clarity of your article Mark. You must have been one heck of a lawyer if you prepared for, and articulated, every case as you did this incredibly important but emotional subject.
Treating children as a commodity to satisfy the happiness of the “adults” is a horrifying concept. It makes my heart fairly shriek with the utter wrongness of the notion. Not only gamete donors, but women turned into incubators to grow the baby for a couple is just another way of cheapening life and turning it into an industrial commodity. What happens when this child is an inconvenience or a disappointment, a “not what we expected”? (Sounds like another Huxwellian industry waiting in the wings to me.)
My God-parents were childless. I know it was a private sorrow for them - they looked forward to having a family that never came. They had no one to leave the family farm to. But they accepted their lot with humility, and aimed to live kind, good lives. I am most fortunate that they have been my mentors in my faith (Orthodox Christian) and my life.
Thanks again Mark. I hope that you will keep writing essays.
Thanks, Shirley.
I realize infertility is painful to many people. But we have restructured society and relationships, largely via contraception and abortion, in a way that has made infertility far more common.
One might compare efforts to control births to the use of the CV vaxxes, which, instead of boosting immunity, suppress it and cause deaths from "other causes."
I do agree with you about IVF being immoral. However I’m also a totally natural “old mom”. I had my first child naturally at 36, my third naturally at 42. My friend had her first surprise baby at 42. It’s actually totally possible to have a baby in midlife. No technological intervention. I asked my midwife who the oldest women was that she had delivered for and she said 52 also conceived naturally. A woman in our homeschool group had her last of 9 children at 45. All conceived naturally. If you believe efforts are in place to control population growth then it would make sense to impose an idea of a short fertility window and make risky “geriatric pregnancy” a taboo. Eliza Hamilton had her last child in her late 40s I believe 47. This is not a new phenomenon.
Leah, what you say is true. But these cases are in the tail of the normal curve (and much more common for women who have been having babies for years). There is also no doubt that a woman wanting to conceive for the first time in her 40s typically has more problems doing so than one in her 20s.
The moral problem is not with older women having babies.
A woman's fertility begins to decline at 32.
Life isn't fair, according to Western norms. But the body doesn't care about norms.
I also think that the same media that propagandized us into fear over COVID has put forth similar propaganda to scare women into thinking we will all have fertility problems beginning at age 30. I know that I was scared by what I was hearing, and that pushed me into "rushing" to try to get pregnant asap once married (early 30s) but as it turned out, I had ZERO trouble getting pregnant. My point is that the decisions I felt compelled to make about marriage and children were influenced by fear-based propaganda about women's declining fertility. I love my kids, absolutely, but I felt this pressure.
My mother was 37 when she bore me (and lost 25 pounds at my birth!). I was a very healthy baby and did well until my mother decided to have a midlife crisis (one possible reason for not having children late in life?), and in essence abandoned me. Yes, I had a roof over my head and food to eat, but that was it; at age 12 after she yanked me out of my home and school, I was basically on my own. People need to be honest with themselves about how prepared they are to care for children until (at minimum) age 18.
That is sad, Susan.
Peace to you.
Anecdotal, I tried in my early 40’s without success. The statistics don’t support your view.
Yes I know… I thought I was going to be a statistic as well and know just as many women in that camp. probably more that aren’t sharing their stories with me. Obviously since I’m an old mom I’m looking for old moms to be friends with! My point is just that it’s possible. If it’s possible to do naturally then it’s not a new notion.
Yes it is possible and I’m glad it happened for you. The best!
I had my first at 35 and second at 38. Miscarried my first pregnancy at age 33. I did do amniocentesis testing to check for birth defects and Downs Syndrome, fortunately both sons are healthy. I’m now 60 with two boys in their early twenties. It’s a little weird being an older mom, most of my friends are grandparents now!
By today's standards, you're not an old mom.
I'm happy for you.
Awww, thanks, Mark! 🥰. I FEEL old when I complain about my two sons still acting like 12-year-olds, though. I swear they’re aging me faster than normal. I guess I’m not alone, so many people I know with kids in their 20’s and even 30’s who have “failed to launch”. The overly expensive housing market in San Diego hasn’t helped, and neither of them seems interested in dating toxic liberal women. 🤷🏼♀️
My mother had me at 54. I came after 17 years and had three sisters. I had my only child at 36. She is now 37 and hopes to be pregnant with her first at the end of this year. (She is getting married in November.) lots of babies are born to middle-aged women.
Perhaps you Mom breastfed for extended durations, thus preventing ovulation and preserving her eggs. Statistically, womens' fertility declines after 32.
Are you kidding? My mum put all of us straight on to Nestlé’s formula. 😊
This is the best, THE BEST article I have read on this subject in recent years. THANK YOU. Sharing the link WIDELY.
Thanks, Dawn.
I appreciate you sharing this b/c most people have no idea what reprotech entails. They have neither read about it or thought about it.
excellent. Human trafficking is in the news and movies but IVF and surrogacy are human trafficking too and it needs to stop. Our society is so messed up-we have to teach our children that this is wrong and don't do it.
It’s all just another symptom of the disrespect for human life and life in general planet wide. Allowing this is just more disrespect. Even this just adds to the evil forms of child sacrifice prevalent today.
Interesting timing for me to “hear” this. One of my sons (who fortunately needed no encouragement to not follow 🇨🇦government orders around jabs) mentioned in a heartfelt conversation recently that if he and his wife are not successful at starting a family he wouldn’t want to do IVF. I was curious as I hadn’t thought about it much before other than it all felt a bit lab like and distasteful to me on a gut level… but I have successfully become pregnant whenever I wanted and have tried to imagine the distress of not having that monumental life shift. He said it “didn’t feel right to him and we could discuss it more later”…. Thought provoking article Mark, and well put together. I see a lot of what you are saying and it resonates and gives me more to think on. Thanks.
Thanks, Sam.
As with the CV overreaction, one must consider the larger effects of what we do.
Another thing that almost nobody talks about is what having the ability to choose to eliminate certain disabilities right at the start will do down the road to those who end up being born with disabilities. Take Iceland, for example. Not too long ago its government announced that it had eradicated Down's Syndrome from the island. They did this through prenatal testing and abortion. Now I don't know if this was a voluntary choice on the part of those women who found themselves carrying a Down's Syndrome fetus or whether they were pressured in one way or another to make that decision. I suspect the latter. All right now, let's say that a pregnant woman gets tested, learns she is carrying a Down's Syndrome child, and decides NOT to abort. Do you for one minute think that the Icelandic school system, just to name one, will be sympathetic to the special needs of such a child? Do you think Icelandic taxpayers will be willing to subsidize such needs?
Disability rights advocates here in the United States have fought hard for the recognition that some people need more accommodation than others. They have fought hard for inclusion. When I was growing up, special needs children were often institutionalized or otherwise segregated from society and they certainly were not expected to achieve much of anything. They were often belittled and put down, which is why I strenuously object to the word "retard" being used as an insult. Do you REALLY realize what you are saying about people with Down's and other special needs when you are throwing that word around? You are saying that they are less than, that they don't deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and increasingly, that they shouldn't even exist. Right now, the special needs population is exploding, mainly due to the increase in autism diagnoses. This puts stress on schools especially schools which are located in poor communities, because these schools are required by law to provide individualized educational development plans--and all this takes money. What have we been hearing a lot of lately? Cities are broke. Governments are broke. Social Security is going broke. Not enough people are entering the workforce and paying into the system. Yes, we are being told this over and over. Also, at the same time we are being told that there are too many people on this planet.
Right now we do not know what causes autism. If it turns out to be genetic so that it can be caught prenatally, what do you think will happen once parents are allowed to have a choice? And once they are allowed to have that choice, what will happen to all these services I have mentioned above? I can very well see a school system say to a parent whose child requires intensive services, YOU made that choice, NOW that is YOUR problem, not ours. Don't ask us to fix it. Because you see, these decisions are not as private as you might want to believe.
I didn't express support for eugenic abortion.
If you have an interest read Turtles All the Way Down.
Sometimes you just shouldn't mess with Mother Nature.
I like the way Henry David Thoreau put it. Goes something like this: every material advance results in a spiritual loss.
Meh.... Can't find fault for either side on this issue.
On the one hand, as the old commercial declares "It's not nice to fool
Mother Nature!".
On the other, who are you or me to say that God didn't give us this technology for a reason?
The eugenics aspect is troubling, for sure, but infertile couples, at least, WANT the children the technology produces.
Then God gave us nuclear weapons, etc. for a reason?
And Covid shots, too. Kathy Hochul said "Jesus wants you to vaxx."
This did not convince me.
There are an awful lot of American families whose WW2 soldiers were saved by the use of the nuclear bombs in Japan. Probably countless Japanese citizens as well.
"This did not convince me."
That's because God gave you a functioing brain that doesn't trust a Godless Communist like Hochul
My initial thought as well, but only because just two weeks ago a woman in my Bible study, truly a believer who loves the Lord, told her story of invitro and that she promised God upon implantation that if it was successful, the child would be His, and that is exactly what she did. Her daughter, now in college, is a true lover of the Lord, influencing others all her life for the good. God is in control. Even what is "meant for bad" will be turned to good because that is who God is. Satan currently runs this world, with ALL THE PROBLEMS, but God bestows blessings until the end comes.
As a side note, in late college or early after, my daughter thought about being an egg donor, and I vehemently discouraged her and thankfully she didn't. Poor college kids want cash but aren't mature enough to understand all of the ramifications.
Did your friend's clinic sort and throw away embryos?
I'm not really friends with her, more like acquaintances and I have no idea. I get what you're saying below as well (nuclear weapons). All I know, Mark, is that God is sovereign and knows much that I'll never figure out. (Me worm brain, He rocket scientist) He's ultimately in control and even though it is so horrible for so many reasons, we are still living in that time of grace and not judgement so as many that will choose Him can do so. He'll only wait so long though.
What is our current world if not a series of armed camps that want to decide how we shall all live?
I don't use arms. I tell the truth.
It makes some uncomfortable.
You tell A truth, one I often agree with.
And that comment was not directed at you or your post.
Or die......
Indeed.
And when.