Moms and Dads: Are you looking for a great gift idea for that young single woman in your family? Comedian/actress Mindy Kaling has an idea! Why not, Mindy says, instead of just wrapping a pair of earrings or a new summer shirt, splurge on the gift she really needs – and offer to have her eggs frozen?
Mindy Kaling is a six-time Emmy Award nominee who is perhaps best known for her role as Kelly Kapoor in “The Office.” In the August issue of the French-British monthly magazine Marie Claire, Mindy talked about her career, her family, and her personal experience with reproductive technology.
“I wish every 19-year-old girl would come home from college,” Mindy said, “…and that the gift—instead of buying them jewelry or a vacation or whatever—is that their parents would take them to freeze their eggs…. They could do that once and have all these eggs for them, for their futures…to focus in your twenties and thirties on your career, and yes, love, but to know that when you’re emotionally ready, and, if you don’t have a partner, you can still have children.”
Where to begin? Mindy’s vision is wrong on so many counts:
- She imagines that it is she, not God, who should decide when or whether to bear children.
- She wants to separate baby-making from love, from relationship, from marriage.
- She talks about “having a partner” – signaling that marriage isn’t particularly important.
- She imagines that raising a child alone, without a father, is no problem – and she hasn’t even considered whether that’s fair to the child she may have.
The list of problems grows from there:
- The sperm required to fertilize an egg in a laboratory are obtained by masturbation – so Mindy’s project requires that the male engage in a sinful action.
- And since there’s no guarantee that the egg and sperm will develop into a living, growing human being, the laboratory will bring together many gametes (male and female germ cells), resulting in many frozen zygotes (fertilized ova). Many of those tiniest humans will never be implanted in the womb of a woman, but will instead remain frozen in a laboratory, being denied the opportunity to live a full life, or will be used for research or destroyed.
- And often, doctors will implant several fertilized eggs in the mother’s womb, then remove all but one of the developing embryos – killing living, growing humans before they reach fetal viability, that point at which they could survive outside the womb. In the end, over 90% of the embryos created in the laboratory perish at some point in the process.
Those who participate in egg harvesting and in vitro (test tube) fertilization – the mothers, the fathers/sperm donors, the medical staff and the researchers – are all “playing God,” taking upon themselves a role in creation which is uniquely reserved to God alone. At every level, egg harvesting and egg fertilization and egg implantation are mortally sinful.
Naomi Schaefer Riley of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the Deseret News, cited statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to show that Kaling’s proposal is a bad idea. “Only about a fifth of cycles among patients using their own frozen eggs,” Riley wrote, “ultimately end in live births. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology says that the odds of a live birth are closer to 11%.”
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, director of the Ruth Institute and best-selling author, called Mindy Kaling’s advice to teens “appalling.” Morse wrote in an email: “The best advice you can give a 19-year-old woman is to take her time and make the effort to find the type of man she will want to marry and have children with. But, of course, in a teen fashion magazine, that advice would be ‘uncool.’”
What does the Catholic Church teach about egg harvesting? Of course, the words “egg harvesting” never made it into the Bible. The very concept would be an impossibility at the time that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote thier Gospels. Only later, when science began veering into what is called “reproduction technology,” did such questions emerge.
In 1987, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith addressed the morality of many modern fertility procedures in Donum Vitae (“The Gift of Life”). Donum Vitae recognized that some methods of treating infertility are morally acceptable, while others – those which do violence to the dignity of the human person and to the institution of marriage – are immoral. Dr. John Haas, in an article on the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, explains the difference:
Donum Vitae teaches that if a given medical intervention helps or assists the marriage act to achieve pregnancy, it may be considered moral; if the intervention replaces the marriage act in order to engender life, it is not moral…. Obviously, IVF eliminates the marriage act as the means of achieving pregnancy, instead of helping it achieve this natural end.
In the words of Donum Vitae:
The connection between in vitro fertilization and the voluntary destruction of human embryos occurs too often. This is significant: through these procedures, with apparently contrary purposes, life and death are subjected to the decision of man, who thus sets himself up as the giver of life and death by decree.
Mindy Kaling talks about “gift”, but instead offers advice to young women that is contrary to nature, goodness, and the true gift of self and love found in the marital union.
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Not mentioned here but equally objectionable is treating human persons as a commodity. It’s ownership of human persons as one would own a car or a new dress. “Oh, a baby, I’ll have to get me one of those.” And, as far as securing this precious commodity for your own, it won’t be long before the government wants to get its hands on the child so they can mold the child into a faithful Democrat voter.
As the long lyrics told us, “What love got to do with it?”
As a Democrat and a practicing Catholic, yours is a far reaching, paranoid, and prejudiced opinion.
This woman is clearly an idiot. This is the first time I have ever heard her name, and after I send this I will forget her.
They might as well set up a family foundation for surrogate mothers and money for Hazel like domestic servants; every girl can have that option of working nonstop while creating and raising offspring! At the same time, no father to have to put up with.
You know, beyond the appalling moral implications IVF is very expensive & doesn’t have that great a success rate -decreasing as a woman ages. It’s also thought that IVF treatments increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy. And ectopic pregnancy risk is also linked to STD’s which are easier to acquire through the use of hormonal contraceptives which lower a woman’s immune system in a similar way that pregnancy does. IUD use is another ectopic pregnancy risk.
So, if a woman uses any of these methods to avoid pregnancy for a couple decades & then assumes in her late 30’s she’s ready for motherhood she may be disappointed.
All around, a new pair of earrings would be a much safer gift to one’s daughter & it won’t decrease your odds of becoming a grandparent.
Among the many stupid and insulting ideas in Ms. Kaling’s rant… she assumes parents buy a 19 year old COLLEGE STUDENT “jewelry and vacations”? what planet is she living on? she means “rich people”, I guess. Most 19 year olds WANT vacations (maybe not jewelry) but are more focused on college loans, expenses, grades, etc. Most parents worry about money, they are not dreaming about spending $10-$15K on a painful, risky egg extraction procedure on a TEENAGER. (Most folks don’t have that kind of cash around, and if they did… they’d need for THE BLEEPING COLLEGE TUITION!)
On top of that… Ms. Kaling has been relatively affluent since her 20s with a paycheck from “The Office”, then years ago with her own TV series. She did not have to wait until age 43 and to be a multi-millionaire for this! If it requires $35million to have a child… well, that immediately excludes almost everyone since only about 0.01% of the population will ever have that kind of wealth.
On top of THAT… did she freeze HER 19 year old eggs? it doesn’t seem so. So why tell others to do this? Frozen eggs only result in a baby about 11% of the time, meaning an 89% failure rate and this is after you spend $10-$15K to freeze the eggs, plus several months of taking hormone shots and painful egg extraction procedures. And you have to pay to freeze the eggs for… 20-25 years? what does THAT cost? who pays for THAT? and some labs have had “accidents” where eggs were thawed and ruined.
There is also a nasty implication in all this — very UN-feminist — that only single woman can succeed and mothers are too dense and stupid to attend college or have careers… something WE KNOW is not remotely true. (Famous actress/director/producer Reese Witherspoon married and had her children in her early 20s!)
Frankly even with the suggestion, I don’t see in the articles about Ms. Kaling that SHE froze HER eggs, only that she tells OTHERS to do this. Freezing eggs when you are 37-42… not so good. Those are not premium eggs, which is why it is harder to get pregnant at that age. When we are speaking of a $35milion wealthy actress/producer who is 43… let’s be blunt. She is using DONOR eggs, which do NOT need freezing at all and the cost is about $8000 or half the cost of freezing and far more successful.
Even simpler solution? invest the time and energy into meeting a great guy and getting married, and then you have a baby the normal natural way.
“The implication… that only single women can succeed”? I am certain NO ONE thought that. And it certainly isn’t the worst idea to complete an education before marriage. A wife and mother can certainly succeed in college but you cannot deny that it will certainly be more challenging.
My daughter in law was married during medical school & had her first child while she was in residency. It’s challenging for sure, but if women continue postponing marriage & children our birthrates will keep falling. There is no perfect time to have a child but there comes a time when it’s too late.