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Nov. 21, 2022
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Revolutionary advancements in biotechnologies has created a massive industry known as 'third-party reproduction' which has moved the process of procreation out of the domain of womanhood and into the hands of medicine and commerce. Women, or their eg...
Revolutionary advancements in biotechnologies has created a massive industry known as 'third-party reproduction' which has moved the process of procreation out of the domain of womanhood and into the hands of medicine and commerce. Women, or their eggs and wombs, are still needed however, which has given rise to a global market in which these biological functions are sold and rented - and used and controlled.
Award-winning filmmaker and bioethicist Jennifer Lahl has studied this "brave new world" since her days as a clinical nurse in pediatric critical care, and now she tells the real stories of the women who sell their eggs and rent their wombs in films like "Eggsploitation" and "Breeders", which shows a much darker side to this unique human trade than what the fertility industry's marketing campaigns will have us believe.
In this episode we talk about the fraught ethics and very real physical realities around egg harvesting, surrogacy, as well as the new frontier of "gender medicine".
Jennifer Lahl links
Center For Bioethics & Culture
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Jennifer Lahl
Founder & President of The Center for Bioethics & Culture
Jennifer Lahl is founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, which seeks to to educate and inform members of the general public, thought leaders, and lawmakers on ethical issues in healthcare, biomedical research, and biotechnological advancement, through a variety of media platforms—documentary film, writing, speaking, interviews, & social media.
Lahl couples her 25 years of experience as a pediatric critical care nurse, a hospital administrator, and a senior-level nursing manager with a deep passion to speak for those who have no voice. A sought-after commentator, Lahl appears regularly on radio and television including ABC, CBS, PBS, and NPR and her writing has been published in publications such as Cambridge University Press, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the American Journal of Bioethics.
In 2010, she made her writing and directing debut producing the documentary film Eggsploitation, which was awarded Best Documentary by the California Independent Film Festival and has sold in more than 30 countries. Other films include Anonymous Father’s Day, about anonymous sperm donation, as well as two films on the ethics of third-party reproduction Breeders: A Subclass of Women and #BigFertility. Shot during the pandemic, the documentary TransMission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender? was released in 2021 and her most recent film The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters came out fall of 2022. All of her films are available for FREE on The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network’s YouTube channel.