[Official Trailer] The Detransition Diaries The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2026-09-18 | [Official Trailer] The Detransition Diaries
Kallie Fell at MAHA Institute: ART increases risks to mothers and babies The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-07-15 | Center for Bioethics and Culture Executive Director Kallie Fell appeared on a Pregnancy, Birth & Informed Consent panel at the Women's Health & Fertility Roundtable sponsored by the MAHA Institute and The Heritage Foundation. Her remarks eloquently break one very often overlooked issue with creating families using assisted reproductive technologies: the increased risks of severe complications, including mortality, to both mothers and babies. Ethics must be considered when attempting to address subfertility in healthcare, as the prevailing technologies are not only dangerous, they are often unsuccessful.
Jennifer Lahl to FTC: Fertility Preservation in Gender Affirming Care The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-07-15 | Jennifer Lahl, the founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, speaks to the Federal Trade Commission to share her the truth about fertility preservation for youth seeking gender affirming care. The evidence for the possibility of fertility preservation is based on its use in pediatric and adolescent cancer patients. There is scant evidence that fertility can be successfully preserved in minors, and no large scale or longterm studies to suggest that technology currently exists that can preserve fertility for those who will be sterilized by gender affirming care. This emphasizes the need for regulatory oversight and ethical considerations of technological interventions for youth people.
Shocking Surrogacy Scandal: Uncovering a Baby Trafficking Ring The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-07-03 | Kallie Fell, Executive Director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, sits down with Kayla, a former surrogate mother whose harrowing experience exposes the dark underbelly of the surrogacy industry. Like many women drawn to surrogacy, Kayla’s intentions were pure—she wanted to help a couple build a family. But lacking a full understanding of the process, she missed critical red flags and signed on with an agency that appeared legitimate but was anything but.Kayla shares her shocking story of becoming a surrogate mother and discovering that the intended parents hired multiple surrogate mothers; ultimately ending in an FBI investigation with numerous children taken into protective custody. Now, Kayla is fighting to protect the baby she grew and gave birth to. Her story uncovers the dark side of surrogacy and the urgent need for regulation in the industry.Her testimony is a chilling reminder of how vulnerable children are in an industry that commodifies the womb and puts a price tag on babies.You can donate to Kayla's Go Fund Me to help her win custody of the baby she birthed at: gofund.me/0f9d6bcb
Surrogate mothers travel restrictions The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-06-12 | Erika's surrogacy contract stipulated she could not travel more than 30 minutes from home. That seemed strict, but when health crises struck her family, it was completely untenable.
The altruism of surrogate mothers is weaponized against them The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-06-12 | We get comments all the time on the "greed" of surrogate mothers. Many, like Erika, are motivated out of not only financial need, but also altruism, and Big Fertility exploits this for their profit, downplaying risks and the costs to the mother.
Surrogacy lawyers stop working for you once you sign the contract The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-06-11 | Surrogate mothers often don't realize this, but the lawyer that helps them sign the initial contract works for the agency, not them, as soon as the ink is dry.
Erikas Surrogacy Story: From Altruism to Exploitation The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-06-11 | Erika, like so many surrogate mothers, came to her surrogate pregnancy out of altruism. The intended parents' story of tragedy--losing a brother who had wanted children, and making the decision to create a child with his DNA through surrogacy--really spoke to her. Soon however, issues with the contract made her realize that the generosity in the agreement went one way, with the intended parents insisting on restricting her movement to within a certain radius, and preventing her from seeking supportive medical care, among other violations. Meanwhile, Erika's health was rapidly deteriorating, as her surrogacy was not at all like her two prior healthy pregnancies. The arrangement ended in financial desperation and complete collapse of her health, with hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, outcomes which are more common in surrogate pregnancies, although of course no one in the fertility industry warned her of these risks. Listen to Erika's story in her own words.
Paul Ramsey Institute - A Broader Frame for Bioethics The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-05-05 | What does it mean to be human, to live, to die, and to care for one another? These are the basics of bioethics, a field too often neglected in our fast-paced, pragmatic technological landscape.The Paul Ramsey Institute is a rare space where scholars from diverse backgrounds in academics, law, and medicine come together to explore the most pressing issues of our time.Discover how the Institute creates a community of future leaders, fosters deep moral reflection, and challenges mainstream narratives in medicine and ethics.
New Class Action Lawsuit: Justice for Egg Donors The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-03-28 | Sana Al Bidri is a two-time egg donor. The second time she donated, the clinic recognized the profit potential of her eggs and, without her informed consent, gave her twice the usual amount of hormones, and extracted more than double the typical amount of eggs. She suffered severe complications like ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. Now, she's seeking justice for herself and others who had no idea the health risks they were exposing themselves to.Here are the criteria to join the class action: -Woman that “donated” their eggs in Ontario, CA in the last 10 years….-The clinic retrieved more than 20 eggs-Suffered from OHSS (e.g. abdominal swelling,pain, nausea or worse)-Other complications post retrieval or neglectfultreatment-Being part of a guaranteed-programme withoutprior consent/knowledge-Being given too many hormones-Having to administer yourself 2 trigger shots Visit eggdonorsjustice.com to learn more and contact CBC Executive Director Kallie Fell if you'd like to share your story.
A Textbook Story of All that Can Go Wrong in Surrogacy The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-03-19 | CBC Director Kallie Fell received a story from a surrogate mother who, for legal reasons, needs to stay anonymous. In this story, Kallie details what went wrong for this mother, who all in all, was hospitalized over 100 times over the course of her pregnancy. She suffered pre-eclampsia, placenta previa, membrane rupture at 27 weeks, severe hemorrhage, and worse: she required an emergency hysterectomy. With all she went through, it's no surprise she suffered severe post partum depression. And after all of this, the purchasing parents, who had promised they would follow up with her about the wellbeing of the baby, have never spoken to her again. Meanwhile, she is left to pick up the pieces, and fight with insurance companies and the surrogacy agency to repay thousands of dollars in medical debt.
Paul Ramsey Institute Applications Now Open The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-02-17 | "The kinds of questions that we will have to answer and the issues we'll have to address in the coming decades are going to be beyond anything we've seen as a human community." The Paul Ramsey Institute was founded to bring together leading thinkers and scholars in the field of bioethics to ask these challenging questions. The Paul Ramsey Institute is a two-year program where scholars and fellows gather three times each year for leading edge discussion and collaboration in bioethics.
Blood clots and Profound Grief: Mandys Surrogacy Story The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-02-11 | Like so many, Mandy wanted to be a surrogate because she had easy pregnancies and thought it would be a great way to make money while being with her own children, while also helping out a family who couldn't conceive on their own. Just eight weeks into her surrogate pregnancy, doctors found life-threatening blood clots in her lungs caused by the synthetic hormones she took for the pregnancy. After recovering from embolism and passing a battery of tests, she was able to move forward with this high-risk pregnancy.Other than induction, her delivery was pretty normal. But Mandy could not believe the pain of separating from the baby she grew in her womb. Although she was told she wouldn't get attached, since genetically she was not related to the baby, Mandy was heartbroken from the minute the baby was born, declining even to hold the baby she knew she couldn't keep. She wept for two months and couldn't leave her house. In this interview, you'll hear this and so much more of what Mandy survived under the false promise of "helping a deserving family."
Sara Big Fertility Whistleblower The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-02-03 | Today CBC Director Kallie Fell speaks to a Big Fertility industry whistleblower. Speaking under an alias to protect her identity, Sara worked for a surrogacy agency in a Latin American country. This country, like so many countries that lack fertility industry regulation, contracts poor women to serve as gestational carriers for rich buyers in Israel, North America, Asia and Europe. Sara reports that the agency had virtually no medical requirements, background checks, or any other type of gatekeeping between the women contracted to carry and the buyers they call “intended parents.” The agency had no qualms contracting illiterate women, who could not possibly give informed consent. They even contracted heroin addicted women. But the exploitation was not limited to the mothers — even the agency workers were taken advantage of, being asked to work overtime or do the company favors. Workers were paid in cash and never given pay stubs, so the agency could keep everything under the table and avoid the scrutiny or regulation of multiple international governments. Sara’s testimony is crucial evidence of the human trafficking scandal that is surrogacy.This interview has been lightly edited to remove any identifying details and protect Sara's identity.
Finding Cancer During Surrogate Pregnancy The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-01-29 | CBC founder Jennifer Lahl talked to Brit after her surrogacy went very wrong in 2023. Now she's back with part 2 of her story and updates on her journey of healing with cancer. After premature birth, the baby did not survive, and the "dads" disappeared overnight. #stopsurrogacy #surrogacy #ivf #fertility #bioethics
Update: Brits Surrogacy Story The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2025-01-18 | We first heard Brit's story of surrogacy gone wrong in 2023, wherein Brit was diagnosed with breast cancer midway through her second surrogacy, and ended up delivering prematurely. The baby did not survive, and the 'intended parents,' the men who bought the baby, simply disappeared with no apparent interest in what would happen to the woman who offered them a chance at a family, very nearly at the cost of her own family.Now Brit is back with an update to her story. While she does not know if the hormone and surrogacy drugs she was taking caused her breast cancer, she and her doctors have reason to believe the surrogate pregnancy accelerated and progressed her disease. She is now back on a round of chemo that is slated to continue through 2026. She is a single mother of four of her own children. You can listen to Part 1 of her story here: youtu.be/Ge_TAMwSHnE
Executive Director Kallie Fell Thanks Our Donors The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-12-18 | ...
Why should you donate to the Paul Ramsey Institute? The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-12-17 | ...
Your donation to CBC supports bioethics around the globe The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-12-03 | Learn how the Paul Ramsey Institute supports bioethics by mentoring academics and medical providers.
Katy Francisco on Friends as a Donor Conceived Person The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-09-10 | Watch the full episode on our Venus Rising podcast
No regulation for donor conception The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-29 | Big Fertility doesn't care if donor conception leads to hundreds of siblings. There is no sibling registry, no testing, no counseling provided. There are no laws on the books to penalize fraud or to provide donor conceived people with access to their health history. In fact, there's more regulation for breeding dogs than for human beings. Watch the full Venus Rising interview with Peter Boni on our YouTube channel. #bioethics #fertilityjourney #ivf #donorconceived #fertility
Donor conceived children and illegitimacy The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-28 | In 1945, having a baby by artificial insemination meant he or she was legally “illegitimate” and grounds for divorce. It’s no wonder then that donations were anonymous. But anonymity harms children, who have a right to know their medical history and their genealogical origins. #bioethics #fertilityjourney #ivf #donorconceived #fertility
Two-thirds of donor conceived people are opposed to anonymous donation The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-23 | 2/3 of donor conceived people are opposed to anonymous donation. Why don't we listen to them? Hear their stories in our documentary Anonymous Father's Day #ivf #fertility #fertilityjourney #bioethics #donorconceived
Donor Conceived adult looking for his dad The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-22 | Peter Boni searched for his biological father for years. He was conceived at a time when not only were sperm donors anonymous, but many doctors lied on medical forms about who the father was in the first place. Often, donors were students at the medical schools where fertility treatments took place. Get the full story on the Venus Rising podcast. #donorconceived #podcast #ivf #fertility #fertilityjourney #bioethics
Donor Conception activist - Im not a bigot The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-19 | "When I first started to do activism against donor conception, I thought that it would be so easy to, to arrive, state the obvious that children need their fathers and everyone would be like, Oh my God, thank you for reminding us. We'll just, we'll stop all that business." That's not what happened.
Donor Conceived Genealogical Bewilderment The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-14 | Peter Boni discovered his biological father was not the man who raised him. He raged for many years with "genealogical bewilderment," a deep distress from not knowing his lineage or biological family. Even people who are not donor conceived can relate to this -- it's why ancestry and DNA testing are so incredibly popular.
For most people, its meaningful information The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-13 | Does it matter who your father is? Your siblings? The fertility industry plays it both ways, on the one hand, you get to pick your donor, optimizing for intelligence and looks. On the other hand, they pretend it doesn't matter if you know who your siblings are, or how many there are, or who your father is.
How donor conceived people feel abandonment The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-12 | Alana is a donor conceived adult who describes the common feeling of abandonment and separation. She knows her mother wanted her, but feels unwanted and abandoned by the father who anonymously donated.
I only knew three things about my father The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-09 | Donor conceived people often don't know where they came from. Alana knew just three things about her father, that he was blond, blue eyed, and had a college degree. She made up a whole story about who her father might be, in order to feel like she knew who she was. Of course, none of it turned out to be true.
500 to 1000 half siblings The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-07 | Discovering you are donor conceived and the man who raised you is not your biological father is jarring enough. But imagine finding out your biological father was a serial sperm donor, responsible for fathering an unknown number of children. This man has 500-1000 half siblings, and through hard work has located 12 of them.
Estimates of donor conception in the US The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-05 | It's estimated that 30,000 to 60,000 children are conceived in the US each year through sperm donation. And there is almost no tracking or monitoring of donors or of the children conceived this way.
Surprising outcomes of study of donor conceived people The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-08-02 | In a study of donor-conceived people, 2/3 were against anonymous sperm donation. Find out a little bit about why in this short clip of our full-length documentary Anonymous Father's Day.
Riley Gaines on Learning who Lia Thomas Is The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-29 | After placing 7th and becoming an All-American, Riley Gaines knew she could do better, and decided to become the top female swimmer in the US. But that same year, the NCAA would allow a mediocre male swimmer, who ranked 554th in the men's, to compete as a woman. And the organization had no intention of telling the women that they were undermining the competition the women had worked all their lives to master.
Dont Wait to Stand Up Until It Affects You The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-26 | Riley Gaines had this to say in the closing remarks of her keynote speech at the 2024 Annual Paul Ramsey Award Dinner.
Riley Gaines Stance The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-19 | "The stand that I have taken as a woman. is a stand that is for something. It's not against anything...It's pro woman, is my stance."Riley Gaines at the Annual Paul Ramsey Award Dinner honoring excellence in bioethics clarified her "controversial" stance.
Riley Gaines Goes to Congress The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-18 | When Riley Gaines went to Congress to defend Title IX, she was name-called before she even got to the mic. Her testimony kicked off quite a bit of chaos, all for pointing out that men are not the same as women. She spoke at the Annual Paul Ramsey Award Dinner honoring excellence in the field of bioethics.
Parents called their surrogate baby a project?! The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-12 | Christian was a surrogate mother for a pair of intended parents who ended up not being who they said they were. In documents obtained during an international custody battle, she discovered that the biological father of the baby referred to him as a "project" and "an experiment" and other dehumanizing terms.
Surrogate Mother Was Embroiled in an International Custody Battle The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-09 | Christian signed up to be a surrogate mother in order to help a couple who couldn’t conceive. But after the baby was born, she found out that not only were the intended parents capable of conceiving, the baby they contracted through Christian’s agency was meant to go to their friend all along. Christian was then embroiled in an international custody battle. #stopsurrogacynow #surrogatejourney #surrogate #ivf #ivfjourney #fertilityjourney #radfem #stopsurrogacy
Surrogate Sisters hired to rapidly grow a family The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-02 | Surrogate sisters -- when baby buyers contract more than one woman at a time to have a surrogate baby. Carrying multiples can present more risk to the mother, but is this the solution? Watch the full interview on YouTube.
Christians Surrogacy: Why We Need a Global Ban The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-07-01 | Christian was inspired to become a surrogate after feeling deep empathy for families who struggled with infertility. She contracted with an agency that assured her that the intended parents were incapable of conceiving, but that the father would contribute genetic material to the baby. Everything she was told about the intended parents turned out to be a lie. Worse yet, she became embroiled in a custody and adoption battle where the baby she'd birthed figured as mere collateral damage in the legal argumentation for commercial surrogacy across state and international borders. * This interview has been edited to protect sensitive information.
Riley Gaines at the 2024 Paul Ramsey Award Dinner The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-06-28 | Riley Gaines, 12X NCAA All-American Swimmer, director of the Riley Gaines Center, ambassador for Independent Women’s Voice, and the host of the podcast, “Gaines for Girls” speaks at the 2024 Paul Ramsey Award Dinner by the Center for Bioethics and Culture. Refusing to be silent, Riley speaks about making real changes to defend women’s rights and women's only spaces.
I wanted to help a family that couldnt have kids The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-06-27 | Christian was a gestational surrogate, empathetic to the story she was told by the surrogacy agency, that the intended parents couldn't have more kids. She had no idea that the reason the intended mother couldn't get pregnant was because she was already pregnant.
I didnt know the risk of doing another surrogacy The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-06-24 | Kelly Martinez didn't know how risky it would be for her to do another surrogate pregnancy after her first, because doctors weren't clear with her, and the contracting agency she went through were hardly motivated to disclose them. With profit to be made at every step in the fertility industry, Kelly was collateral damage.
Falsified Information in Surrogacy The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-06-19 | Kelly Martinez was already in contract to be a gestational surrogate when the agency told her she'd have to put her own name on the birth certificate, although they had originally told her this would never happen. But the intended parents were a gay couple from France, where surrogacy is 100% illegal, and didn't want to have issues getting passports to get their babies back to France with no mother's name on the birth certificate. Kelly couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to fight for her, afterall she'd chosen surrogacy in the first place to get out of debt.
Surrogacy contracts hold women hostage The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-06-12 | Kelly Martinez signed a contract as a surrogate mother not realizing that her payments would be held hostage unless she fulfilled certain obligations that were never in the contract to begin with, such as putting her own name on the baby's birth certificate. Still, to fight the contract would have required hiring a lawyer with money she did not have, so she continued.
Surrogacy agencies advertise big payouts, but never the risks The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-06-11 | Kelly Martinez was working a waitressing job and her husband was between jobs when she started considering surrogacy as an option to get her finances to a more secure place. "In my mind, I'd be making money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," she says, but the problem is, that the agency did not tell her about the risks. They also didn't tell her that they'd expect her to pay back funds unless she agreed to their every whim. This is a clip from Center for Bioethics and Culture Network's film, #BigFertility, which you can watch now in its entirety.
Stacys Ovarian Torsion from IVF The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-05-29 | Due to hyperstimulation of her ovaries, Stacy experienced ovarian torsion. She had exploratory surgery at 30 weeks pregnant with twins, putting three lives in danger. She ended up losing the ovary.
IVF medications are used off-label and without any explanation of the risks The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-05-23 | The medications prescribed for IVF are "completely insane" according to our Venus Rising guest, Stacy, a mom who conceived her first two daughters through assisted reproductive technology. She was not informed of the risks of the medications she was taking, which were all prescribed off-label from their intended use. Most importantly, she was not informed of the risks of ovarian hyperstimulation, which can lead to ovarian torsion and even losing an ovary, an outcome she would soon face in her third trimester. Hear the whole story on our podcast, Venus Rising.
The Dehumanizing Process of IVF The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-05-22 | Stacy and her husband sought fertility treatment after difficulty conceiving. Doctors and specialists never attempted to address the root cause of their fertility struggles or support them in conceiving naturally. Instead, they offered solutions that were increasingly invasive and complicated, without informing Stacy and her husband of the risks to mother and babies. In the end, they found the experience to be dehumanizing.
Dr. Joyce on aneuploidy testing and genetic selection The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network 2024-05-09 | Aneuploidy is a genetic test that adds a huge expense to IVF, but doesn't actually increase live birth rate. It does, however, introduce grave ethical considerations, as this type of genetic testing allows parents to select for genetic predisposition to disease (susceptibility not guarantee), height, eye color, and as we come to better understand the genome, even more specific traits.
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