The Blog

Wacoal, a Thai lingerie company, has come up with a revolutionary advertising campaign for its products…without showing any skin at all! In fact, the ads have very little to do with women’s physical appearance. They are instead about the true beauty at the heart of every women — namely, her capacity to love and put the needs of others before her own.

All of these are so very well done. Superbly acted and quite moving. I hope you will check them out.

I was so pleased to come across these videos recently. Thailand is such a mess — politically, socially — (and could use our prayers!) but golly they do know how to tell a short, beautiful story!

This isn’t the first time I was moved by an ad from Thailand. If this ad for their True Move mobile phone service doesn’t bring you to tears, nothing will.

If you missed it, here is my interview on Real Life Radio last Friday. We discussed why biotechnology (IVF, cloning, etc…) is a “women’s issue.” I come on in the second segment:

The already difficult task of raising daughters and protecting them from a society that seems to degrade them at every turn (or convince them that they aren’t beautiful enough, that their bodies aren’t perfect enough) is not getting any easier.

Remember the good old days when we used to only have to worry about a billion dollar sex industry and horny boys taking advantage of our girls and using them for their bodies? Well, now we also have to contend with a fast-growing biotech industry that is dependent on them putting their bodies on the line in order to obtain the “raw materials” needed for their experimentation.

To help parents, the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network has made a list of Five Things Mom’s Should Tell Their Daughters About Their Eggs:

1. You are born with all the eggs you will ever have.

We’re not like the guys, who make new fresh sperm all the time.

The eggs you enter this world with on day one are all you get – so use them wisely.

Learn more

2. Every month you normally ovulate one egg…but about 1000 eggs are needed to get that one egg hatched.

Think of those 1,000 eggs as cheerleaders.

3. You have no idea where donated eggs will end up.

Since eggs aren’t tracked in the U.S. (unlike just about anything else that leaves the human body, which gets barcoded, labeled, tracked and monitored and lives forever in some NAS spy secret zone) you really have no idea where your eggs will land.

Learn more

4. There really is a biological clock.

And it’s ticking. So again, if you want to make babies, use your eggs wisely and on time. And don’t fall for those egg freezing schemes.

Learn more

5. As a result:

Helping someone else have a baby with YOUR eggs…

…really means helping someone else have YOUR baby.

Third-party reproduction operations and scientific researchers make a lot of money on words like “gift” and “hope” and “miracle,” often ignoring real medical and moral concerns to women. Do your daughters a favor. Teach them about biotechnology. Help them understand how valuable their bodies are so that hopefully they will not fall victim to exploitation in today’s Brave New World.

Learn more:
Eggsploitation
Breeders

Womb transplants are in the news again and I have seen a few posts in the Catholic blogosphere questioning what such a transplant might mean, ethically.

First, some background: A womb transplant is exactly what it sounds like. Women who were either born without a uterus or have had their uterus removed after suffering cervical cancer have a presumably healthy, normally functioning uterus transplanted into them. These can come either from living or deceased donors. In 2012, doctors in Sweden performed the first “mother-daughter” uterus transplants.

Last April Derya Sert from Turkey became the first woman to have an embryo implanted into a transplanted womb from a deceased donor. By May it was reported that the pregnancy had been “terminated” because the baby’s heartbeat had stopped.

Now, an unidentified woman in Sweden has had an embryo implanted into her transplanted womb which was donated by her mother. This woman is one of nine who received a uterus transplant last year.

My good friend and BioTalk partner-in-crime, Rebecca Taylor, has covered this a few times before, if you’re interested:
Mother, Daughter Uterus Transplants
Woman With Uterus Transplant Confirmed Pregnant

The main problems that I see are:

a.) that women who have these transplants must necessarily use IVF, which the Church condemns, in order to even attempt to become pregnant — which is the sole purpose for the womb transplant.

b.) as Rebecca points out, the only way to test to see if such transplants are “successful” is to implant a human embryo and see whether it will develop to term without any complications or not. Making the child an experiment. Not part of an experiment, but THE actual experiment. Consider these words from the professor who lead the transplant team in Sweden:

“The best scenario is a baby in nine months…A success would be an important proof of principle that a procedure is now available to cure uterine infertility.”

c.) and, of course, there is the fact that both the donor and the potential mother’s lives are being put at risk for a non-life threatening condition. Even the most routine surgery is nothing to sneeze at. Add in the fact that it’s for something that is not life threatening and the risks of such a procedure almost surely outweigh the possible rewards.

Some have wondered whether the ethics would be different if scientists were able to attach the fallopian tubes and the women could conceive naturally. It might make for a slightly better scenario, but I think even in that case b and c above would still apply. A successful birth would still be the measure for whether or not such transplants are “successful”, so the child would still be an experiment. And it remains a great risk for a non-life threatening condition.

As Rebecca said with the first successful embryo implantation, now is the time to pray for the life of this child in Sweden. Pray that he or she is born healthy with no complications. It’s tempting to not want this kind of experimentation to succeed so that it doesn’t become more common in the future. But failure, in this case, means the death of a human being.

I’ve posted this before, but it was in the Magnificat again today, appropriate for the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children:

Our life is not an invention. It is a gift from God. He had the courage to trust in us so much that he placed the gift of life, the gift of existence, into our hands life, existence, and gave us the necessary tools to live it well. Perhaps we never considered life as God’s initiative. Often times we think that we are born because our parents wanted us or by chance, or for other human and natural reasons.

This is confirmed by the fact that there are people who do not want to live. People who stay at the surface and do not enter into the essence of life …

We must convince ourselves, first of all, that God wanted to give to you, give me, and give to those around us the wonderful gift of life. It is a gift to be discovered, welcomed, protected, and loved. If we do not discover this in ourselves, we are not capable of recognizing and defending the lives of others, of our children, or of those we claim to love
…
We must believe that life does not come by chance. It is not ours; it is a gift from God, born from his heart, which is Love; it is a gift that we must begin to unwrap, just like when we are given a beautifully wrapped gift. With curiosity we tear open the package to find out what is on the inside and why it was given to us, a reason that undoubtedly will give us great joy….
…
We all love life for what we see, feel, and touch, but life does not belong to us; it belongs to Someone else, we belong to someone who wants to take care of us and who wants us to discover the true flavor of life, for he knows that only in this way will we be truly happy..

MOTHER ELVIRA PETROZZI
Mother Elvira Petrozzi is foundress of Comunità Cenacolo, welcoming the lost and desperate in forty fraternities in thirteen countries.

Related: The Task of Life