IVF is a dystopian fraud

From CNN: Alisyn Camerota: What I learned about the 'baby business' more than 15 years after undergoing IVF

Approximately one in every 50 kids born in the United States today is conceived in a fertility clinic or lab, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

[The fertility field has] also been the source of occasional horror stories and tragic mistakes. Now, as the multi-billion-dollar fertility industry booms, there are people calling for more oversight, regulations and legislation.

In our reporting for the documentary, "CNN Special Report: The Baby Business," we spoke to remarkable people with stunning stories: donor-conceived children searching for siblings, an egg donor with 27 known genetic children, as well as families devastatingly affected by what they claim is a lack of oversight of the industry.One in 50 children in the US conceived via IVF? 

One in 50 children in the US born via IVF? That number is incredible and devastating to learn. Leave aside the danger to the women seeking this assistance, the degradation of the men, and the death of the children who don't make it. Leave aside the lucrative side hustle in fetal tissue research. Leave aside the evidence of metaphysical disturbance on the psyche when the knowledge dawns that one's very existence is contingent on manipulation performed in labs.

You must know something, something borne out by this (secular and basically positive towards the practice) article, contra the author's touching faith in rules: Fertility clinics are and will continue to be unregulated. And think about the process -- how *could* they be regulated?

The "horror stories" reported in this article far understate the reality. Stories abound of clinic directors impregnating their clients themselves and children conceived this way discovering siblings in unlikely places, including their own significant others. 

And why are we talking about "donors"? People get paid for their gametes -- unless those "biological products" are outright stolen. How would anyone know? Once the vial of sperm leaves the man's hand, how can he trace where it goes? Once a woman's ova are harvested, who is to say where these valuable objects end up? The incentives are high, very high, to deceive.

The monetization of sexuality -- the untethering of the act from its sanctuary in marriage -- has convinced people that it's impossible either to have a baby (if unwanted) or to not have a baby (if wanted). 

I'm not minimizing infertility issues. Couples suffer from being unable to conceive and I understand that suffering. 

But I am saying that if a couple don't get pregnant right away, that's not abnormal. I know from my own observation that today's couples panic if, after flipping the mental switch from baby avoidance to baby yearning, results are not immediate. They have been taught since earliest youth to consider every step of their lives to be plannable and controllable and that success must be pursued and paid for. As a society we run to experts when our experiences don't live up to some invented statistical average, and guess what! Those experts shore up each other's scams. Very few scams are as scammy, untraceable, undignified, and immoral, as IVF. 

I am also saying that the general population having been sold on contraceptives and abortion pretty much guarantees a market for these charlatans.

We've somehow taken the most natural process in the world -- the reproduction of our species -- and turned it into a nightmare. We have forgotten that children are a gift and not a commodity. We need to step away from this dystopian fraud.

*For details on the horrors and injustices of IVF and surrogacy, follow Them Before Us

For Catholic infertility support, follow Springs in the Desert.