pregnancy

In the 22nd week of surrogate Brittney Pearson’s pregnancy, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Because the necessary treatment could harm the baby, her doctors recommended inducing labor early and allowing the baby to be cared for in neonatal intensive care while she started chemo. However, the gay couple paying Brittney Pearson to serve as their surrogate did not want a premature baby with potential developmental or health problems. They wanted her instead to have an abortion.

Pearson offered to put the baby up for adoption, but the men refused because, according to Pearson, they did not want a child who was genetically related to one of them somewhere “out there.” According to Pearson, the men threatened both her and her doctors with a lawsuit if she did not abort her child. Because of California’s radical surrogacy laws, which allow financiers of a surrogacy arrangement to be granted legal parental rights of the baby before he or she is born, they likely would have prevailed.

Last month, in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, philosophy professor Anna Smajdor from Norway proposed that the global medical community should consider what she called “whole body gestational donation.” Women in a permanent vegetative state or who are declared brain dead could be used, she suggested, as unconscious surrogate mothers for people who, as the paper states, either “wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to gestate.” According to Smajdor, though what she is proposing may sound shocking, it is really no different, at least not in any qualitative ethical way, from organ donation and other assisted reproductive technologies.

Christian author, podcaster and motivational speaker Sadie Robertson Huff recently announced that she is pregnant with her second child. She is due in May 2023.

Nearly one in four Democrats and more than one-third of white, college-educated female Democrats believe "men can get pregnant," according to a new survey.

Many Christians and pastors avoid talking about assisted reproduction, but the moral stakes are too high to remain silent. Embryos are abandoned in freezers right now with more added every day. Couples are hiring surrogates to carry their babies today. Some Christian women even think of it as their mission field. States are passing legislation to turn the practice into a full-blown industry. Christians are in church pews today, tempted, and even pursued by segments of assisted reproduction industries at risk of making uninformed but serious moral mistakes.

The CDC director is receiving pushback from conservatives for repeatedly referring to pregnant women as "pregnant people" in a brief speech Thursday about COVID-19 vaccines.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing on "America's Black Maternal Health Crisis", House Democratic leaders and their allies used the phrase “birthing people” – a term supported by some members of the LGBT community – instead of “women” or “mothers.”

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. Seven years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story told of a woman in her late 30s, single and successful in her career, who spent $19,000 to have her eggs frozen. She planned to focus on a career now and keep open the possibility of marriage and kids later. It didn’t turn out that way. Still single on her 45^th birthday, she decided to have a child with the help of a sperm donor. However, her eggs failed to produce a child. She was crushed.

Bindi Irwin announced her pregnancy on Instagram this week, asking her followers to send prayers and "good vibes" her way.

We’ve repeatedly pointed out the many ethical problems with surrogacy on BreakPoint: it assumes “children” are a right that God never promised; it assumes a Gnostic view of human bodies and relationships; it denies children the opportunity to be raised by their biological mom and a dad; it treats children as products instead of image-bearers; it poses a significant risk for women to be exploited financially.