Conservative Opportunity Society Caucus Breakfast

Kallie Fell recently presented at the Conservaitve Opportunity Society caucus breakfast. What follows are her remarks from the event.

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I want to talk about something that touches on a very sensitive and deeply personal experience for many families—infertility- and about how a large unaccountable commercial industry, what I call ‘Big Fertility,’ has capitalized on the pain infertility causes. 

The desire for children comes from love, hope, and commitment to family—and nothing I say today is meant to dismiss that. This is not an argument against families or against medical innovation. It is an argument for drawing moral, medical, and market boundaries where they are desperately needed.  

To put it bluntly, human reproduction has become a commercial enterprise, with decisions often driven more by profit and efficiency than by human dignity or long-term human well-being. What began as experimental medicine with little oversight has matured into a vertically integrated, multibillion dollar industry. One that convinces young women they must freeze their eggs—and offers those with enough money a made-to-order baby.

Most of us believe markets can do tremendous good. But markets fail when incentives are distorted, risks are hidden, and accountability disappears. This is not a free or transparent market- it’s a textbook case of market failure. When human life, women’s bodies, and children’s futures become products, we have to ask an honest question: is this system truly serving families? 

The fertility industry often presents itself as innovative medicine responding to consumer demand, responding to the heartbreak of infertility.  But in reality, it operates in a regulatory environment that prioritizes market access over medical accountability. In my work at the Center for Bioethics and Culture, I have heard countless stories from women who sold their eggs or rented their wombs, testimonies from adults born from these technologies, and other accounts from family members who have been harmed or deceived by players within Big Fertility. These stories – some documented in our peer reviewed research and free documentaries – are the voices the industry doesn’t want you to hear. 

What can we expect from an industry that grew out of ethical gray zones, minimal oversight, and a “success-first, questions-later” culture? Fertility medicine grew faster than the rules meant to govern it. Even today, there is no comprehensive national system tracking injuries or the long-term health of women who rent their wombs or sell or freeze their eggs, there is no long-term outcome tracking for children born from these technologies, and no meaningful oversight comparable to what we require in other areas of medicine. Clinics and agencies can aggressively market success stories while the risks are largely hidden from view. 

When we talk about ‘Big Fertility,’ we’re referring to a multibillion-dollar network of fertility clinics, pharmaceutical manufacturers, egg and sperm brokers, surrogacy agencies, cryogenic storage companies, genetic testing and screening firms, and the legal infrastructure that profit from every stage of human reproduction. Like Big Pharma, it is vertically integrated, highly influential, and largely insulated from accountability. 

A baby is created by an egg and sperm. In the fertility industry, eggs are the rarest and most critical resource—the rate-limiting step in virtually every IVF cycle. In normal ovulation, one egg is released from a woman each month. For industrial-scale reproduction, that won’t do. 

Women undergoing IVF for their own pregnancy, egg “donors” selling their eggs to others, or egg freezers hoping to preserve their own fertility all require ovarian suppression and hyperstimulation with the hope to retrieve dozens of eggs at once—this is not a minor intervention. These interventions carry serious, documented risks: including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, internal bleeding, organ damage, emergency surgeries and hospitalizations, loss of fertility, and potentially increased long-term cancer risk.

Women pursuing IVF for infertility accept these risks in hopes of conceiving. Egg donors and social egg freezers, by contrast, are typically young and healthy. Egg donors undergo these risks with no medical benefit at all. Yet long-term safety data for this population is virtually nonexistent.

Unlike women undergoing IVF for their own pregnancies, egg “donors” feel like patients because they are seen by providers in clinics, but they are treated as means to an end. Once the eggs are retrieved, their role in the process is over, and so is the industry’s sense of responsibility to them. In one case, Kylie suffered a severe stroke. After experiencing severe abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting, Kylie called the doctor who had removed 45 eggs from her. Her doctor told her that she’d be OK, to drink Gatorade, and to sleep it off. But when she woke up from her brief nap Kylie found herself suffering from a massive stroke. Another woman, who is pursuing a class action for the harms she experienced during egg donation, told me how her complaints were ignored. When she called the clinic concerned, she never had the opportunity to speak to a medical provider and was never advised to seek medical care. Both women still have lasting effects from selling their eggs as healthy young women. 

Despite these risks, there is no national adverse-event reporting system for fertility clinics. If a woman has a negative outcome after egg retrieval, it’s often lost in medical history. Many are bound by contracts limiting liability. The industry profits whether women are harmed or not. If any other medical sector operated this way, Congress would already be investigating.

Egg donors are often young women in financial need—they are often students that are recruited through social media with promises of easy money, oftentimes with payment tiered by intelligence, race, or physical appearance. This is not empowerment; it is the monetization of inequality. These young women are rarely told that long-term health effects are unknown, that their future fertility may be compromised, or that there is no requirement for follow-up care. 

The newest and fastest-growing “tactic” the fertility industry used to secure eggs, often packaged as empowerment or reproductive choice is social egg freezing. Healthy young women are told that to succeed professionally and have families later, they must undergo invasive procedures now. From a business standpoint, egg freezing expands egg supply and creates recurring revenue by turning healthy women into lifelong fertility consumers. It also serves as a workforce-management tool that shifts biological costs onto women while employers and clinics benefit. 

In egg freezing, success rates are overstated, costs are high, and the primary beneficiaries are not women.

In fact, at best, only 1 in 10 return to use their eggs. Those who do face higher pregnancy risks with age.

Cost has become one of the biggest barriers for young women. In response, new business models have emerged to make egg freezing feel more “accessible.” One of the newest is offered by a company called Cofertility. The pitch is simple and enticing: a woman can freeze her eggs for free—if she agrees to donate half of them.

Because egg freezing is a numbers game, that sets women up for one of two outcomes—neither of them good. Either she undergoes multiple retrieval procedures to compensate, increasing her cost and medical risk. Or she proceeds with fewer eggs and faces a higher likelihood of disappointment and failure later. This model capitalizes on financial need while downplaying the full significance of what is being given away. These are not excess tissues—these are her potential children.

Once eggs are extracted and embryos are created, the industry doesn’t stop there. When pregnancy itself becomes the next bottleneck, the solution is to outsource gestation altogether. That brings us to surrogacy. I know you have had someone already speak on surrogacy, so I will be brief.

Surrogacy reduces pregnancy to a service contract. Contracts that supposedly protect the parties involved from negative outcomes. But medical harms are not avoided by legal agreements.  We found, in our own peer-reviewed research, that medically, surrogate mothers face elevated risks for high-risk pregnancies, pre-eclampsia, postpartum depression, and hemorrhage. Surrogate mothers are more likely to have c-sections and have a higher risk for long-term complications.  

When pregnancy is reduced to a contract and babies to deliverables, abuse is not an anomaly—it is a predictable outcome. In 2025, the Center for Bioethics and Culture exposed a surrogacy operation in Arcadia, California where women were deceived and babies were managed like inventory. This occurred here, under U.S. law.

Recent investigations reveal an even more troubling pattern. Wealthy foreign nationals—particularly from China—are exploiting America’s permissive surrogacy laws and birthright citizenship rules to mass-produce American citizens without ever entering the country. Genetic material is shipped in, surrogates are contracted, and babies are delivered through lawyers and nannies. 

In one case, a Chinese billionaire sought dozens—possibly over a hundred—American-born children to build a dynastic business empire. Children were treated as inventory. This is not innovation; it is the exploitation of American women, American law, and American sovereignty.

Closing our borders to international surrogacy arrangements is not about hostility toward families. We already restrict international adoption when trafficking risks are high. Reproductive trafficking deserves the same seriousness.

Children are the most overlooked stakeholders in this whole industry. When we talk about third-party reproduction—whether it’s egg or sperm donation, embryo donation, or even IVF or surrogacy—it’s important to remember that children are directly impacted.

Children are more than desired or designed outcomes – they are human beings with rights of their own.  Children conceived through assisted reproduction face higher rates of stillbirth, premature birth, low birth weight, congenital abnormalities (including heart defects), fetal anomalies, musculoskeletal and central nervous system malformations, and rare genetic disorders.  

But beyond medical risks, there are deeper harms built into the system itself. 

IVF intentionally creates excess embryos—its success depends on it. Excess embryos are frozen indefinitely, discarded, or used in research. Right now, millions of children exist in suspended animation with no legal protection and no plan for their future.

Increasingly, clinics screen embryos for sex, physical traits, and even intelligence or behavioral markers. This market-driven selection creates inequality before birth, pressures parents to “optimize” their children, and risks discriminating against disability. 

Many children conceived through assisted reproduction are also denied access to: their biological identity, accurate medical history, knowledge of siblings or other relatives. We would never design a child welfare system this way. Children should never be the collateral damage of an industry or be treated as a designer good to be sold to those who can afford them. 

The point of all this is not to reject medicine or innovation. It is to ask what kind of medicine we want to support.

Right now, our system rewards technologies that bypass infertility by extracting eggs, outsourcing pregnancy, and managing children as outcomes. There is another approach: Restorative Reproductive Medicine, which treats infertility as a health condition, not a business opportunity. It is often lower risk, lower cost, and more respectful of women’s health and children’s lives.

Restorative Reproductive Medicine works with the body rather than around it. It diagnoses and treats underlying causes rather than defaulting to extraction, substitution, and contracts. 

We should be restoring fertility—not industrializing reproduction.

Congress has the responsibility to draw lines where the market will not with basic accountability, adverse-event reporting, long-term outcome tracking, transparency for children, guardrails against reproductive trafficking, and investment in restorative reproductive medicine. 

This is not anti-family. It is pro-woman, pro-child, pro-family, and pro-human dignity.

I’ll leave you with the words of a woman the industry promised would be “just fine:”

“Even though I suffered immediate life-threatening complications from the process, it wasn’t until many more years of medical training that I was able to understand the full scope of how I had been taken advantage of, misled, and abandoned by the [egg harvesting] industry.” – Sindy, punctured ovarian artery and PTSD