In-vitro fertilization is sold as a cure-all for those struggling with fertility issues — but not only does it rarely work, it also can cause a myriad of issues in the mother and child when it does.
Jennifer Lahl, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, is one of the leading voices sounding the alarm.
“IVF is fraught with risk. It’s risky to the woman’s health; it’s risky to the health of the unborn child,” Lahl tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.” “You can just follow the CDC data, and for the last 10-plus years, overwhelmingly, all IVF cycles fail.”
Data is now coming out that IVF increases the chance of pregnancy-related complications, like preterm labor and birth defects.
“My grandson was born with a heart defect. And when his care was transferred to a big university hospital in California, two independent pediatric cardiologists there said, ‘Is he an IVF baby?’ He’s not, but in the medical literature, IVF babies have much higher rates of congenital heart defects at birth,” Lahl explains.
“Shouldn’t that be something that at least could make us pause and think? We know that pregnancy is risky; I know that, you know, any child that’s born healthy, praise God, because there’s a lot of things that can go wrong to make children born with all kinds of defects, but knowingly doing it, I think, is problematic,” she continues.
Stuckey has also done her research on the issues associated with IVF, and one of them is a higher prevalence of the child being diagnosed with autism.
“Specifically because there was a fertility problem on the father’s part. So that is because say a dad has basically immobile sperm. They’re just not fast enough, strong enough, to do what they have to do in the natural fertility reproduction process,” Stuckey says, noting that in IVF they “take the sperm and put it on the egg.”
“There is a reason that that sperm isn’t working. There’s an underlying issue there that will affect the baby that is born, because those sperm weren’t supposed to re-create, and when you force them to re-create, then the baby is going to inherit a lot of problems,” she adds.
“People like to say, ‘We’re playing God,’ and I always say, ‘Well, no, because God doesn’t play that way. We’re playing naughty people,’” Lahl agrees.
“There’s a natural order to how things are supposed to work and how our bodies are supposed to work, and even though the human body is incredibly resilient, our fertility is very fragile,” she adds.
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