Egg-freezing boomed during the pandemic. Precipitated by the pause on dating life that many women in their late twenties counted on to find a husband, and facilitated by an aggressive new marketing push on social media, women took their gnawing fear to Big Pharma, who promised an alchemical peace with little to no side effects.
Of course, this wasn’t the only thing pharmaceutical companies lied about at the time or any time before. But as experimental fertility procedures become a more “normal” option for women, the mendacious secrecy about its effects on the female body will catch women off guard. Nobody thinks that the procedure marketed to “preserve your fertility” might kill your fertility. But, as my most recent guest on Girlboss, Interrupted explains, it can and, not infrequently, it does.
Jennifer Lahl is the 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.
In 2009, Lahl was associate producer of the documentary film Lines That Divide: The Great Stem Cell Debate, which was an official selection of the 2010 California Independent Film Festival. In 2010, she made her writing and directing debut producing the documentary film Eggsploitation, which has been awarded Best Documentary by the California Independent Film Festival and has sold in more than 30 countries. An updated and expanded version of Eggsploitation was released in the fall of 2013.
She is also Director, Executive Producer, and co-writer of Anonymous Father’s Day (2011), a documentary film exploring the stories of women and men who were created by anonymous sperm donation. In 2014 she completed what is now a trilogy of films on the ethics of third-party reproduction with Breeders: A Subclass of Women? which focuses on surrogacy. In July 2015, she released a documentary short Maggie’s Story, which follows one woman’s egg donation journey. Compassion and Choice: Denied (2016) is a short documentary on physician-assisted suicide. Lahl’s next feature film, #BigFertility was released in the fall of 2018. Her most recent film, Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender? was just released in June of 2021. Always using film as a way to communicate and educate, her forthcoming film, The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters, is set to release Fall 2022. All of her films are available for FREE streaming on The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network’s YouTube channel.
