As I write, I am in the midst of a season of busy travel, showing our films Breeders and Eggsploitation, speaking about surrogacy and egg donation, attending and speaking at conferences, and meeting with allies and supporters.

All this comes on the heels of one of our best Paul Ramsey Award Dinners ever. Dr. William Hurlbut, a Scholar of our Paul Ramsey Institute, presented the 2014 Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics to Dr. Daniel P. Sulmasy of the University of Chicago. Dr. Sulmasy spoke of Paul Ramsey’s method of doing bioethics and encouraged those of us working in the field addressing its important topics to emulate Ramsey’s faithful, charitable work.

Alana Newman, founder of The AnonymousUs Project, spoke about her work and how it springs from her personal experience of being a donor-conceived person and egg donor. I gave a report highlighting some of our recent success and some of the ongoing challenges we face. As I’m sure you know, these challenges are particularly pressing with respect to the beginning of life (third-party reproduction: surrogacy, egg donation, sperm donation) and the end of life (assisted suicide and euthanasia).

These are the issues we engage. This is our work, carried out in the faithful and charitable spirit of Paul Ramsey. But only with your help.

In doing this work we go into the most diverse—and often times contentious—environments to promote the ethical, life-affirming use of new biotechnologies. People on the left and the right have gotten much of bioethics wrong. And some aren’t even thinking about these most important life and death questions.

We’ve rented the top movie theater in Chelsea, one of the most diverse and progressive areas of Manhattan, to address the surrogacy debate head on. We will be joined by women who were surrogates, a woman born out of a surrogate pregnancy, and pro-choice feminists—all speaking out against this practice.

We work with pro-choice feminists because we care about the children and the women used and exploited by third-party conception arrangements. We work with the disabled and progressive groups who oppose the euthanasia and assisted suicide of those society has deemed to have a life not worth living.

And we work alongside progressive groups who oppose human cloning and the new, en vogue 3-parent embryo technology because working alongside such groups helps advance a pro-human biotechnology agenda.

The CBC needs your support. We are operating a lean but targeted and strategic organization. We’ve proven that we can and are making a difference. Your investment in the mission and the initiatives of the CBC makes it possible.

In his remarks at the Ramsey Dinner, Dr. Sulmasy said, “The Center for Bioethics and Culture does truly excellent work in making it possible for the truth to be told again, in a new way, in this generation.”

We could not do this important work without your help!

Thank you,

Jennifer

You make our work possible

Author Profile

Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder
Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. 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. Lahl’s writings have appeared in various publications including Cambridge University Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and the American Journal of Bioethics. As a field expert, she is routinely interviewed on radio and television including ABC, CBS, PBS, and NPR. She is also called upon to speak alongside lawmakers and members of the scientific community, even being invited to speak to members of the European Parliament in Brussels to address issues of egg trafficking; she has three times addressed the United Nations during the Commission on the Status of Women on egg and womb trafficking.