Texans for Life

Lance Bass and his partner, Michael Turchin, used IVF and surrogacy to obtain a little boy and a little girl. But their own words reveal something disturbing about the fertility industry. The women hired as surrogates and the children created are treated as disposable objects—not human beings with inherent worth and dignity. Here are just a few shocking statements from Lance and Michael on the process of hiring egg donors, surrogates, and creating children… 1. “We got all the way down the path of about to retrieve their eggs… Some just wouldn’t produce enough eggs, some weren’t good genetic matches.” — Michael Turchin 2. “Not only did we need to get a new egg donor now because we found out she had early lupus, but on top of that, when we did our egg retrieval, we only had two healthy embryos... once she miscarried, we had to start all over from scratch again.” — Michael Turchin 3. “[W]e found a new donor and we love the donor, so we have our embryos ready to go right now. Unfortunately, we just lost our surrogate that we’ve had for over two years. And so now begins the process of finding a replacement surrogate...” — Lance Bass Notice the language: new donor, replacement surrogate, healthy embryos, genetic matches. This is what happens when human reproduction becomes a commercial process. Women are treated like breeders, selected and replaced according to whether they meet the desired specifications. Children are treated as products of a system that screens, selects, and manufactures them according to their parent’s wishes and not just embraced for who they are. The women involved deserve better than to be treated as means to an end. The children involved deserve better than to be treated as products designed to fulfill adult desires. Every child has inherent dignity. Every woman has inherent dignity. IVF and surrogacy undermine that dignity by turning human reproduction into a marketplace where adult preferences come first and children's rights are ignored. We should reject these practices and work toward ending them.