I am so pleased with the response to our new film, #BigFertility: It’s All About The Money!

At the premiere, audience comments included, “a complex issue but it’s hard to justify treating children as a commodities,” “I didn’t know how exploitative surrogacy was,” and “a gripping horror story.”

We’ve also received a number of official endorsements from people all over the world, which are below.

Long story short, #BigFertility is a #BigHit!

If you haven’t watched it yet, set aside 45 minutes this weekend to watch it and see for yourself what all the noise is about. And then be sure to spread the word about this important film — share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, or the social media platform of your choice!

Thank you in advance!

Watch #BigFertility: It’s All About The Money at
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bigfertility
 

ENDORSEMENTS

Julie Bindel#BigFertility is one of the most important films you will ever see. Think surrogacy is a ‘right’ for the women doing it? Believe that everyone has the ‘right’ to their own biological child? Convinced that surrogacy can be regulated? Watch this dystopian tale and be horrified and educated to the realities of this human rights violation.
— Julie Bindel, journalist, feminist campaigner, and author of The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth (2017)

 

The fertility business is, well, a business and anyone who think it runs on altruism instead of dollars and cents is fooling themselves. #BigFertility exposes the dark and seedy underside of surrogacy that treats human infants and the mothers who bear them little better than widgets in a supply chain.
— Scott Carney, New York Times bestselling author of The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers (2014).

 

Renate KleinExploiting a couple’s financial troubles by having a woman sell her body as an incubator so rich people can buy children, is a human rights violation. Kelly’s heartbreaking and infuriating story exposes the lies, bullying, and blackmail by the Fertility Industry, but also the life-threatening dangers for both egg providers and birthmothers.

#BigFertility is mandatory viewing for anyone who thinks surrogacy is just about beautiful babies and selfless women. It is about a ruthless industry whose coffers swell from human misery, deceit, ill health, and children as commodities who never consented to become take-away babies. Surrogacy needs to be stopped NOW.
— Dr. Renate Klein, author of Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation (2017) and a long-term women’s health advocate

 

#BigFertility is a moving and shocking documentary at the same time. It sheds light on the new slave-market in the reproductive industry where embryos, babies, mothers, and women are treated like commodities.
— Regula Staempfli, Doctor of Philosophy, Consultant, and Political Scientist, author of the bestseller (in Switzerland/Germany), The Algorithmic Perception of Women/ Die Vermessung der Frau

 

Surrogacy is not about creating families—it is about enforcing a lifelong separation between mother and child. The surrogacy industry sees women as mere vessels and children as products. The result might be happy buyers, but the consequences for women who undergo surrogacy are dire. Trauma, dissociation, infertility, and in documented cases even death. #BigFertility is about what the surrogacy industry does not want you to know.
— Kajsa Ekis Ekman, journalist, activist, author of Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self (2014)

 

#BigFertility exposes what many won’t admit about surrogacy—it’s all about the money. When you look beyond the glossy photos and celebrity headlines, the commodification of women and children through surrogacy is undeniable.#BigFertility tells the story of one surrogate who details three of the thousands of ways that surrogacy can go terribly wrong. Of course, for the babies who lose a relationship with the only parent they know upon birth, surrogacy can never go right.
— Katy Faust, Founder & Director, Them Before Us

 

Women and girls should not be forced to live in a world where the only way they can make a sustainable income is to sell their bodies, either as prostituted women and girls or surrogates for the rich and the privileged. Sexual and reproductive slavery assaults the dignity and worth of women and girls. It is humiliating, dangerous to their health, and leaves lifelong physical and emotional scars. Surrogacy, like prostitution, must be illegal and abolished.
— Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, author of America: The Farewell Tour (2018)

 

#BigFertility exposes the deception and greed behind the business of surrogacy, and the harm knowingly and unknowingly inflicted on women who function as surrogates for people who want babies and can pay for them. This brave and shocking film must be seen if you want to learn about a cruel practice that is increasing wherever women are in economic stress and where there are no laws preventing surrogacy.
— Melissa Farley, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, researcher, founder of Prostitution Research and Education, San Francisco, CA

 

Kelly’s powerful and heartbreaking story demonstrates how the trade in human babies is just as unethical as the trade in human organs. It demonstrates Big Fertility’s success in hiding the legal, medical, ethical, and emotional minefields that endanger the women who become involved in this frighteningly uncertain and dangerous process. Kelly’s journeys expose surrogacy as a human rights violation, fraught with potential tragedy and fueled by dishonesty, threats, and exploitation of the financially vulnerable. This compelling documentary gives a voice to one of Big Fertility’s many traumatized and re-traumatized victims, and exposes the human misery caused when vulnerable people are treated as mere commodities.
— Gary Powell, gay and lesbian equality campaigner and public administration activist, UK.

 

There is no way, out of the blue, that “surrogate mothers” can conceive of themselves as wombs for hire without other social conditions reducing women to objects to be used in exchange. For a woman to be able to think of her body as a carrier of someone else’s baby, women must dissociate from their bodies, thus allowing their bodies to be used separate from their own humanity. This fact is fundamental to all aspects of male domination of women, including rape, prostitution, sexual harassment and assault, pornography.

In #BigFertility we see Kelly Martinez victimized by sleazy corporations who appropriate her body for their profit, and customers for whom baby-buying is nothing more than another acquisition of merchandise at the expense of the birth mother. No doubt that Kelly and her husband would have rejected the entire premise of surrogacy had they known the exploitation on which it is built.
— Kathleen Barry, Ph.D., author of Female Sexual Slavery and The Prostitution of Sexuality 

 

#BigFertility should serve as a warning to all those considering surrogacy as an option, whether as a surrogate or as hopeful parents. This is yet another industry that relies on the ‘have nots’ to risk their health, humanity, and lives for the ‘haves.’
— Meghan Murphy, Founder & Editor, Feminist Current

 

 

 

 

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.