Them Before Us

Real Talk with Zuby Verified account @ZubyPodcast · 2d

Zuby is joined by Katy Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, a global nonprofit defending children's rights in every debate about marriage and family, and co-author of Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement. They discuss why the child-centred lens is suddenly landing with people who always felt uneasy about IVF, surrogacy and same-sex parenting but lacked the language to say why, how Katy's love for her mother and her mother's partner of 40 years kept her silent for years, and how progressives won the culture war by casting adults as the victims. They also dig into the historically unprecedented shift of young men wanting marriage more than young women, the online meltdown over Katy's dating advice for women, why you become what you behold, the case for ending no-fault divorce, a live debate on prenups, and Zuby's practical playbook for young men looking for a wife.

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Timestamps:
(00:00) Trailer
(01:02) Introduction
(04:35) Three revolutions that hurt kids
(19:38) Why "kids first" lands now
(23:36) Her mother and the "hate" smear
(30:00) Fewer parents, more selfishness
(35:04) Why young men want marriage
(46:12) The yoga guy dating row
(50:28) Is the West cooked?
(55:07) You become what you behold
(1:04:15) No fault divorce and prenups
(1:17:46) Dating advice for young men
(1:36:38) Outro

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Josh Wood Verified account @J_K_Wood · 2d

In 2023, a manufacturing error at an IVF supplier left hundreds, maybe thousands, of embryos dead at clinics across the country.

One embryologist estimated as many as 20,000 IVF patients could have been exposed. At even three embryos each, that's up to 60,000 embryos in the defective fluid.

More than 1,500 people filed claims. The company set aside $324 million to settle them.

Every IVF embryo spends its first days in a lab fluid like this one. It's doctors' attempt to recreate the safest place in the world for a child: the mother's body. In nature, a child spends those first days traveling down the fallopian tube to the womb, surrounded by fluid the mother makes. The lab fluid is designed to copy it.

Each brand's recipe is a trade secret. The clinics using it don't know exactly what's in the bottle.

In late 2023, embryologists across the country noticed embryos dying at much higher rates than normal. The common thread was fluid from CooperSurgical.

Cooper recalled about 1,000 bottles that December and later confirmed that magnesium, a nutrient embryos need, had been left out.

Cooper told the clinics, not the parents. Many families found out by reading about a lawsuit.

Lawyers for the families say Cooper was warned the fluid had failed a quality test before it shipped, and sent it anyway. Cooper denies its testing was inadequate.
No one has ever published how many embryos died.

You could call this a one-time factory mistake. But research shows that conditions in the lab shape how many embryos survive.

Start with the fluid. In a randomized trial, switching brands changed how many embryos survived, how many implanted, and how much the babies weighed at birth.

Then oxygen. Labs long grew embryos in normal air, about 20% oxygen. The mother's body runs at 2% to 8%. Lowering lab oxygen to about 5% could raise a clinic's live birth rate from 30% to as high as 43%.

Then light. One clinic covered its equipment in foil and filtered its lights, and the share of embryos reaching day five jumped from 27% to 47%.

When you do IVF, you place your child in an incredibly risky situation: a fluid whose recipe is secret, in a lab whose conditions decide how likely your child is to survive.

The same embryo, in two clinics in the same town, may face radically different odds of survival.

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