Does our culture have a love/hate relationship with babies? Is Captain James T. Kirk captive to the culture of death? And what does Pope Francis mean by an “ecumenism of blood?” I had a good time talking about all of the above on the Mike Allen Show yesterday with the ever-awesome Jason Hall, who is the associate director of the … Read More
A Saint for the Infertile
This isn’t just another infertility story. This one includes a miracle from an obscure Medieval saint. Over at Catholic Lane, Amy Bonaccorso writes about living with Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome worries for years and then finally being told by her doctor that she had only a 5-10% chance of ever conceiving. Before going in to discuss possible treatment for her condition, … Read More
The Catholic Church Embraces Science and Those Struggling with Infertility
In case you missed it the first time around, I’ve re-published my article The Catholic Church is No Enemy of Science or the Infertile over at Ignitum Today: Because of her opposition to third party reproduction, the Catholic Church is often accused of being anti-science and insensitive to those who suffer the pain of infertility. Last year’s CNN Belief Blog … Read More
News Flash: It’s Not Just Eggs and Sperm That You’re “Donating”
The Tablet has an excellent article from Simi Lampert who explains why donating her eggs seemed like an easy way to make money — until she thought about her family and the fact that she was not only selling her eggs, but also, potentially, her biological children. She begins: I decided to sell my eggs. The notion got into my … Read More
One Man Has 74 Offspring and More Donor Conceived Children Speak Out
Last month the New York Times reported on a man in California whose donated sperm was responsible for the lives of 150 young men and women. Shortly after, there was a lot of buzz over an episode of Style Network’s documentary show Style Exposed in which Ben Seisler confessed to his fiance (see video) that through the sperm he donated … Read More
Catechism: Gestational Carriers “Gravely Immoral”
On my post this week about Nicole Kidman’s new baby via “gestational carrier” a reader reminded me that Kidman is Catholic. She and husband Keith Urban are married in the Church, their first daughter is baptized Catholic and according to this Catholic News Service article she once told the Philippine Daily Enquirer, “Catholicism guides me. I certainly have a strong … Read More
Nicole Kidman Thanks “Gestational Carrier”
Two weeks ago I did a post highlighting Melanie Thernstrom’s ode to surrogacy in which she repeatedly referred to the women who gave birth to her children as “gestational carriers.” That was a first for me and at the time I said: Sounds like something from a horror cloning movie. Well…maybe that kinda fits after all. Yesterday I noticed a … Read More
Mother Wants to Freeze Own Eggs for Her Infertile Daughter to Use
Oh, my. The UK Daily Mail reports that a woman wants to freeze her own eggs so that her daughter Mackenzie, who is two years old and was born with Turner Syndrome and doesn’t have ovaries, can can use them one day to have babies by IVF. The Daily Mail rightly points out: If this happened, the ethical implications would … Read More
Eggsploitation, Surrogacy and the Business of Making Babies
Celebrities and wealthy columnists paint a smiling, rosy picture normalizing, even championing, egg “donation” and surrogacy, meanwhile the fertility industry has a dirty little secret: Eggsploitation is a documentary from the Center for Bioethics and Culture. Regarding surrogacy, the BioPolitical Times blogger Marcy Darnovsky, commenting on last week’s NYT “Twiblings” cover story by Melanie Thernstrom and relating it to a … Read More
Pro-Life Fertility Care
TheCatholicSpirit.com has a good article on two men of science and their very different approach to fertility. Dr. Josef Roetzer, the Austrian doctor whose work led to the development of the sympto-thermal method of natural family planning, died this year on October4. That same day British biologist Robert G. Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for developing the … Read More