A frustrated mother turned to the internet recently asking for help to give birth to a son after years of struggling with infertility.
A New York City actress and mother of one, she suffered a miscarriage, and her husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer, adding to their family troubles, according to the New York Post.
But their appeal for a child is no ordinary one.
The couple already has a second child – an embryo in storage who is a girl. But they do not want a girl. They want a boy. And they are willing to trade their child for someone else’s.
The mother, “Lisa,” whose name was changed to protect her privacy, said they spent $12,000 in May to create another embryo for in vitro fertilization.
“I was surprised and sad [it was a girl,]” she told the Post. “I made up my mind as a reaction to losing the $12,000. Now I have a commodity — something I can leverage.”
Though Lisa’s embryo is in the earliest stage of life, she already is their daughter and an individual human being who deserves a right to life. Her characteristics already are mapped out in her own unique DNA – the reason her parents know she is a girl. Yet, they also treat her and label her a “commodity.”
Lisa tried to claim her request to swap children is a noble one, saying, “I’m doing this for my son.”
“He’s our world and a beautiful child,” she said. “But, as soon as he could talk, he was asking for a sibling. Every time he sees other kids — there’s a lot in our family and in our neighborhood — he is like: ‘He has a brother. Why don’t I have a brother?’
“My husband grew up with sisters and wants a boy too. This is the way we want to complete our family,” she said.
Here’s more from the report:
Last Wednesday, Lisa took drastic action, sitting down at her computer and writing a message: “Hello, we have been trying to give my child a sibling for three years . . . we want to complete our family with a son. We have a great quality female embryo. Would you like to consider a trade?”
She posted the plea to a number of Facebook support groups for IVF couples — and the outrage was immediate. Although no hateful comments were visible to Lisa, enough people complained to forum moderators that her post was removed from one group’s page.
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However, Lisa was contacted by a forty-something California woman interested in a potential swap.
“She already has a toddler, and she has two male embryos left over,” said Lisa. “Her husband . . . has six sons from another marriage and then they have a boy together.
“Her husband said: ‘If we are going to go through this again, it’s going to be a girl!”
Legal experts told the Post that the situation is troubling, but “the United States is one of the most lax countries in the world when it comes to the creation, storage and donation of embryos.”
For years, American courts have been wrangling with problems involving human embryos. Most involve parents who divorce and disagree about what to do with the embryos. Typically, one parent wants to give them the chance at life and the other wants them destroyed.
Lisa said she has received a lot of criticism since posting her request online. Her response has been, “They aren’t walking in my shoes.”
She said people have offered to adopt her daughter, but she and her husband do not want that. They want a trade.
“That is not going to work,” she said. “We want a boy.”
As repulsive as the situation is, in some ways, it is difficult to blame Lisa and her husband alone. Children in America have been devalued for almost 50 years through legalized abortion. Pro-abortion laws and Roe v. Wade have led to a society where children’s lives are treated as commodities, as things to be celebrated if we want them or thrown away if we don’t.
Our society now encourages women to “shout” proudly about their abortions. And in most states, it is completely legal for a woman to abort an unborn baby girl because she wants a boy. If killing an unborn baby because they are a girl is not wrong, why is what Lisa doing getting so much criticism? It’s a disconnect that society does not want to address. Gender discrimination is ok except when it isn’t. Unborn babies’ lives matter except when they don’t. It does not make sense. Americans must address this problem at the root: Are babies in the womb valuable human beings or are they not?
