Charlie Kirk Assassination Fallout: U.S. Reps Call for Censorship; Do Graphic Videos Serve the Public Interest? Plus: WIRED Reporter on the Dark Side of Surrogacy
U.S. representatives call for extreme censorship measures in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, going against the free speech principles he stood for. Plus: WIRED reporter Emi Nietfeld discusses her revealing article about the dark side of the surrogacy industry. ----------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
It's Thursday, September 11th, a date which I generally find to be not worthy of much note, but I'll make an exception for tonight for reasons that you'll see.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the ramifications from Charlie Kirk's assassination continue to unfold, even as the FBI seems to have no idea who the killer or killers were, let alone what their specific motive was.
We devoted last night's show almost entirely to laying out my views on why I think it's reprehensible to even attempt to justify Charlie Kirk's murder, let alone to celebrate his death.
We're not going to repeat those arguments very much here tonight.
So those interested in my view who didn't watch last night's show and want to hear that can do so.
But part of what we also discussed last night were the very grave dangers of exploiting the anger and rage, the understandable anger and rage and emotions surrounding Kirk's assassination to crack down on core civil liberties, including free speech and political organizing, as many people, principally on the American right, were already doing last night.
Today, members of the GOP House caucus are echoing that by explicitly demanding, among other things, censorship and even threaten to legislate online censorship, doing it in Charlie Kirk's name, even though everything Charlie Kirk ever said about such matters was vehemently opposed to such measures and the ideas that justify censorship of any kind.
Part of what they are calling for, these House members, is that big tech be forced, compelled by government power, to ban all videos of Kirk's murder, leading to an important question beyond the obvious censorship one, which is, is it important for public understanding and in the public interest to see videos of even the most violent and gruesome events that are in the public interest?
I think absolutely it is, and we'll examine the reasons why.
And then Wired magazine recently published a fascinating story by the journalist Emmy Nietfeld on an extremely disturbing and abusive case of paid surrogacy where an extremely wealthy woman and her husband are now persecuting their surrogate because they're blaming her for the death of the baby before it was born.
The Wired article raises profound and difficult ethical and moral questions about what is now a very booming industry, one that's growing in leaps and bounds, namely paying fertile women to carry children and then having to give them up upon birth to what's called the intended parent, meaning the parent who pays for that woman to carry their child to Turban.
We'll talk about this article and what it raises with her.
Before we get to all that, a couple of quick program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
So, as I noted at the top, today is September 11th, the 24th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
Exploiting Emotions After Crisis00:04:56
And in general, I find the obligation to commemorate this day, to walk through all the events of it to be kind of dreary and even a little bit exploitative.
But I do think it's notable that today is September 11th, because when I do talk about September 11th, as I do sometimes, not just necessarily on the anniversary, The thing I try to focus on, what I think is most important, are the lessons that I hope we have learned, not just from September 11th, but from our reaction to them, our collective reaction as a country, as a world.
And the 9-11 attack was truly cataclysmic, truly traumatic, and created a lot of, engendered a lot of very deeply held rage and anger.
And I know that because I lived in Manhattan on September 11th.
I was there on September 11th.
I shared all the same emotions everybody else did.
Rage and deep sadness and a desire for vengeance.
I actually remember, I was thinking about this this morning, that six days after 9-11, I think on a Sunday, I went to a movie to see a movie just to try and get my mind off of what was happening.
And at some point in the movie, I had paid attention to the movie for like five minutes.
And then suddenly I stepped back and I realized, wow, that's the first time I was able to not think about September 11th since six days ago.
When it happened, everywhere you walked, you saw and smelled the rubble.
You saw desperate signs from family members with pictures of their loved ones, hoping beyond hope that they weren't dead, but in some hospital or amnesia, it would say lost.
And of course, you knew that they were actually dead under the rumble, all those same emotions.
And a lot of people at some point got control of those emotions, understood that while valid, they could override your reason, and slowly started realizing, the country did, that our political leaders were exploiting the emotions around 9-11 to induce us to acquiesce to a whole variety of authoritarian assaults on our basic rights and liberties that would previously have been unthinkable.
Obviously, to justify invasions and wars and lengthy bombing campaigns and warrantless eavesdropping and other forms of surveillance and detention that were completely un-American.
And gradually, year after year, and polls show now that a majority, a large majority of Americans see this, people reached the point where they concluded that they should probably not have that happen again.
That in future incidents where something terrible happens, where violence is brought to us, the rage and anger that we're feeling can be righteous, it can be valid.
I talked last night about my own emotions from having seen the Charlie Kirk video.
I knew Charlie some.
I wasn't a close friend of his by any means, but I didn't know him.
But I think the more important effect was watching, as I said last night, a 31-year-old father and husband and son and friend who has never started a war, never implemented violence, never attacked anybody.
He went around the country defending his ideas, encouraging people who disagreed to debate with him.
And regardless of what one thought of his ideas, that was the extent of what he did.
And then you just watch him sitting in a college campus in a chair, engaging with people who disagreed with him, inviting them to come up and engage with him.
And suddenly you see a bullet enter his neck and his life ends.
And of course, I think any decent person should feel at least some emotions from seeing that.
I'm not saying everybody has to stop and mourn and grieve the way everybody else does.
You can criticize Charlie Kirk.
I think there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't believe in whitewashing somebody's record, but the idea of celebrating it or justifying it is horrific for the reasons they let out last night.
But I also understand that there are a lot of emotions.
The problem is within those emotions comes the opportunity for people to exploit those emotions to usher in a whole wide range of repressive and authoritarian measures, like we've seen after 9-11 and every other crisis that we go through.
It's just a repeated pattern.
And we're starting to see that.
Here was President Trump last night, part giving a four-minute address or so from the Oval Office, and part of it I thought was a very nice tribute to Charlie Kirk and condolences to his family and lamenting his death, but other parts seem designed to lay the framework to take official government measures to repress an entire political movement or an ideology that he blames somehow for having led to the violence that ended Charlie Kirk's life.
Dangerous Demagoguery00:13:48
Here's part of what he said.
It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.
All right, now, let me just say that theory that if you say enough demonizing things about your political opponents, you become responsible for any violence carried out against them or in the name of your cause is exactly what the liberal left has embraced as a theory over the past 30 years, not just in the United States, but the broader West, to justify censorship.
Go talk to any of them and they'll tell you exactly this.
They'll say, look, we're not censoring people's political views, but if somebody's going to demonize trans people and gin up hatred against them, they're going to be responsible for inciting violence against them.
Or if somebody is speaking disparagingly about immigrants or Latinos or black people, we have to ban that because that's an ideology that demonizes people and leads to their endangerment.
That's exactly the theory that has been propounded on campuses to justify all kinds of hate speech restrictions.
It's the same theory, by the way, that Trump has used to demand greater hate speech restrictions in the name of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism.
If you criticize Israel, if you protest Israel, if you say these sorts of things that I deem anti-Semitic, it means you're going to spawn anti-Semitism and put things in danger.
Not only is this the theory used by every censor in history, regardless of what ideology they are invoking, but it's also applies to every single group.
Does the American right not demonize their political enemies?
Does Donald Trump not demonize his political enemies?
Please.
Is it not common on the American right to hear people like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi described as evil communists and killers and threats to all things decent?
Are they not compared to some of history's worst monsters?
Political discourse is often extremely coarse.
It's often extremely aggressive.
It's designed to demonize.
Every political group does it.
And the idea that somehow now we're going to accept this theory that was actually created by leftists on college campuses, that it's a form of scholastic terrorism, that if you speak against a group, you subject that group to violence.
And that it's not just the person pulling the trigger, but the person who's expressing views in the name of which the shooter is killing somebody who's responsible.
As I said, this was the attempt to criminalize basically the entire MAGA movement.
To blame every person on the right for massacres in Buffalo and Charleston and at the El Paso Walmart, all done in the name of the dangers of immigrants, shooting randomly black people or Latinos.
Or even just a few weeks ago, when an evangelical pro-life fanatic went and shot four people, two of whom were prominent Democratic politicians, and according to the FBI, had a list of 45 other names of people in politics he wanted to murder.
All of them were Democrats.
And it'd be like saying, look, people who go around railing against the evils of abortion inspired this violence.
It's an extremely dangerous theory to accept regardless of where it's coming from, including when it comes from the American right, essentially now trying to say violence isn't just the trigger, people who pull triggers or stab people.
Violence are words.
The persons responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk isn't just the person or people who pulled the trigger and who organized the assassination.
No, we're going to now expand violence to include people who criticize those on the right, have criticized Charlie Kirk.
Not only is this an extremely dangerous theory, no matter what political faction you're in, it's one that Charlie Kirk himself, as we're about to show you, vehemently rejected over and over.
I mean, it was one of his primary causes.
Carrying out censorship in the name of Charlie Kirk would be like arming Hamas in the name of Ben Shapiro.
It couldn't be any more antithetical to Charlie Kirk's view what is being done here.
And he made that clear over and over and over in every context.
Here's the rest of what Trump said.
Must stop right now.
My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.
I think he meant who brings disorder.
Now, if what he means there is we're going to go after everybody who has paid for other people to go murder people or kill people or to use violence, I would hope the government would be doing that anyway.
Those are criminal acts.
But what he means is what's being said among huge numbers of people on the American right, as we showed you last night, that it's not just the violence itself, it's the Democratic Party or the liberal ideology or the the left liberal ideology that is responsible for this, and that's what needs to be crushed violently or repressed or imprisoned.
That's exactly the kind of theory that will lead to political repression of every kind.
I always try telling the left, if you would support censorship, it's going to come back at you.
And I can tell people on the right as well, these theories have already led to the attempted criminalization of the populist right in many different countries.
Tomorrow we'll cover the verdict that came down today in Brazil from a part of the Supreme Court that was very hostile to former Brazil President Jair Bolshnara that concluded he was guilty of attempting a coup by a four-to-one vote and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison, essentially a life sentence in a very serious prison.
We've seen that attempt all over the populist West.
I've been all over the Democratic world against the populist right.
I've been covering it continuously.
So you can't be heard to complain about it if it's done to you if you're going to turn around and support the same theories to do against your political opponents.
But that's exactly what's happening.
Here's a Republican member of Congress, Congress, Clay Higgins from Louisiana.
And this is what he announced today.
Quote, I'm going to use congressional authority, congressional authority, and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
If they ran their mouth with their smartness, smart ass hatred, selling the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclaves, universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone in a constitution, those profiles must come down.
So I'm going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content.
The user to be banned from, quote, all platforms forever in all capital letters.
I'm going to go after their business licenses and permitting.
Their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively.
They should be kicked out from every school and their driver licenses should be revoked.
I'm basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these sick, evil animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination.
I'm starting that today.
That is all.
I made very clear last night what my views are of people justifying Charlie Kirk's assassination or celebrating it.
I think it's reprehensible.
I talked about the danger of society.
I talked about the coarsening and corrosive effects on one's own spirit and internal life.
But there's no question it's protected by the First Amendment.
These statements are not, let's go murder Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's already dead.
After the fact they're saying, I think the killer was justified.
I think the world's better off without him.
I'm celebrating the fact that he was killed.
These are disgusting sentiments, but they're unquestionably protected political speech.
I mean, I heard conservatives for the last six years vocally complaining, and I joined them in every way, about the dangers of the Biden administration pressuring or coercing big tech to censor dissent from their policies, things they thought were dangerous, like questioning vaccines or questioning masks, or in general, in their view, trying to do things that subject people to violence.
What happened to the whole view that that was unconstitutional for the government to coerce big tech to take down ideas that the government finds offensive?
When Jimmy Carter died, a lot of people said, I'm glad he's dead.
He hated Israel.
He was an anti-Semite, whatever.
I found that disgusting.
But obviously, that's protected speech.
You're allowed to speak ill of the dead.
You're even allowed to say the world's a better place without them.
You can condemn it.
You can find it morally reprehensible.
There's no question it's constitutionally protected.
And Charlie Kirk not only would have said that if he were here, but has said it many times.
Here's another member of the Republican House, Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida House Republican, who said this: quote, I've just been notified that Roblox has a game on their platform referencing the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I'm going to be asking Apple and the app store to remove their app if they don't immediately remove this, as well as contacting the FCC to take down their website.
And she went on, I have just been notified that Roblox is working immediately to remove content featuring the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Thank you to their CEO for not allowing this nasty and vile content to stay on their platform.
One of the things I covered at great length was the attempt after January 6th to destroy the social media site.
What?
Parlor.
Parlor, right after January 6th, Donald Trump got banned from Twitter and Facebook and Google platforms.
They all united to ban Donald Trump.
They'd been banning huge numbers of other conservatives.
And their argument was exactly this: it was that the views and statements of these people on the right were criminal.
They were insurrectionary.
They had invoked an insurance, they had incited an insurrection.
They were a danger to democracy.
And as a result, Parlor, which had been created by libertarians as a free speech platform, much like Rumble was, immediately became the most popular platform, the most popular social media app in the country.
It was number one on Apple stores.
And liberal politicians, beginning with AOC, demanded that exactly what Anna Paulina Luna did here, that Apple remove them from their Apple store and that Google did too, and they immediately complied because the Democratic Party was in power in Congress and they were petrified of their demands.
And so they prevented anybody from downloading Parlor or getting the updates that were necessary to make it function.
And then the day after, once Apple and Google acquiesced, they also demanded that Amazon remove the site from their website, their web hosting services.
Amazon immediately complied.
So through government pressure, they destroyed the number one app in the country because they claimed that it was allowing speech, which was dangerous.
That January 6th had been planned there.
In reality, there was a lot more planning for January 6th on YouTube and Facebook than there was on Parlor.
But AOCs of the world are never going to have the courage to try and get Google or Facebook, which funds the Democratic Party off of Apple, but with Parlor they did.
And this is what Anna Paulina Una is trying to do as well.
Based on the same exact theory, we're going to use our government force over Apple and Google to take this site down off the Apple store if they don't immediately remove the content we dislike.
Here's something else she said, the same congresswoman from Florida, who pranced around like a big speech, free speech advocate for many years until Robinson got into power.
Quote, I am calling on Elon Musk, FinKD, well, I'm not sure what that is, and TikTok, U.S., to remove the horrifying videos of Charlie Kirk's murder.
Why Graphic Videos Matter00:08:55
He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relieve this tragedy online.
These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating.
At some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity.
We must still value human life.
Please take them down.
And then she updated her demand by saying, quote, there has been full cooperation from every company I've contacted so far regarding the enforcement of their social media policies in terms of service on the gross exploitation of Charlie Kirk's assassination, as well as posts inciting violence against other conservative leaders and our president.
I want to thank TikTok, Roblox, the FCC, and others who are working to ensure dignity and respect during this time.
I will say here that I understand this sentiment.
I understand the sentiment.
If, I don't know, if I were brutally murdered, I wouldn't want my kids to see the video because I'd be concerned about how traumatized they would be.
I wouldn't want them, if I got shot in the neck, watching me get shot in the neck and basically die immediately or bleed out and barely make it to the hospital with a pulse.
I get that impulse.
But I would submit that when a major event like this happens, it's important for us to confront the truth, the hardcore, unvarnished truth of what it really is.
I want people who are defending and celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to have to look at what it is exactly that they're cheering, the barbarism and savagery of it.
It prevents it from being abstract and presents it in its truthful form.
And I absolutely believe that one of the reasons Charlie Kirk's assassination had such major repercussions, not just in the United States, but all over the world, was because of the extremely horrific nature of watching that video.
I mean, it's traumatizing to watch.
It's horrific.
Anybody mentally healthy, again, whatever your views of Charlie Kirk are, can only watch that video in horror.
That has to be the natural human reaction.
And if there were no video of it, if we just heard about it or read about it, I would strongly suggest it would not have the same effect because it becomes abstract and clinical.
I think the same exact thing is true of that horrific, brutal murder of that young Ukrainian refugee who came to the United States as a refugee fleeing the war, who was sitting on the subway minding her own business, working, believe as a waitress to support herself.
And a man who has been through the criminal justice system many times, he's black, that became part of the discourse.
Just for no reason, picked up a knife and had no idea who she was, just randomly chose her to stab her in the neck.
And it cut her carotid artery, which is probably what happened to Charlie Kirk.
And she just slowly bled out and died on the train.
And you look at those pictures, you look at the video, and again, you can't help but understand.
It's like the savagery of it becomes inescapable.
And it has much more of an effect than if you just read in the newspaper that it happened.
You'd be able to just go past it.
There goes some other tragic murder in a country that has many.
And I've talked about this in many other contexts, the importance of actually confronting the things that we're supporting or the things that we're causing.
I think one of the reasons why one of the major propaganda successes of why American wars can go on for so long and people don't march in the street because of them is because we so rarely see the video of our victims.
How much video did you see of the carnage we created in Iraq or Afghanistan?
How many names of the victims do you know?
Or in Libya or in Syria?
I mean, one of the things that caused so much sympathy for what was happening in Syria was the photograph that captured the small Syrian baby washed up on a shore, highlighting the horrors of the migrant crisis.
And the same in the Vietnam War.
Obviously, there was no internet then.
There wasn't the prevalence of cell phones, but photos of certain massacres became iconic, became very important in the public imagination to understand the horrors of the Vietnam War.
These images are very important.
And it's the reason, I mean, power centers know that.
It's the reason they want to prevent it.
It's the reason we don't ever see or rarely see video of the carnage we create in awards.
It's the reason that the war in Gaza has captured so much attention because of all the video we see of it.
We see the video of the children being blown up into little pieces or massacred in aid lines or people starving.
And it makes it impossible to escape.
You're forced to confront it, which I think is a very good thing, as horrific as it is.
There were video used of October 7th for that same reason, to make it not clinical and abstract what happened October 7th, but to really show people some of the cruelty that happened there.
And there's a reason for it.
It helps people understand what they're talking about, what they're seeing.
And I think it's absolutely vital, even if it's graphic.
There's no way to get rid of these videos.
Charlie Kirk's children are small.
When they grow up, if they want to see it, they're going to be able to find it.
And they should.
Obviously, they shouldn't be forced to see it or subjected to it, but it's something that's in the public interest.
And it pervades a lot of different societies.
I've run a lot of work on the absolutely filthy, repulsive conditions inside factory farms that have replaced family farms, that have made our food supply industrialized rather than organic and naturally grown through family farming.
The amount of disease in there, and for me, worst of all, the amount of utter torture of sentient beings, just unspeakable horrors.
And the people who own factory farms like Smithfield and JBS understand that if you see images of what's going on inside of it, there will be a lot more people disgusted and horrified by it.
It was the images that actually working with animal rights groups have snuck inside or got undercover jobs in there and filmed it.
That's what made me understand the truth of what was going on in there, much more than just reading studies.
And that's why these factory farms use their influence in many state legislatures where they pour tons of money into the campaign coffers of people to criminalize getting into these places and filming them because they understand the importance of videos and images to understanding the truth of what's going on there.
It makes it much more difficult to minimize or dismiss.
Here's a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 2025 that kind of like an information sheet, and I have studied these laws and written about them and reported on them for years.
I understand exactly what they are, so it's not, I'm not just blindly relying on it.
What is agag legislation?
Quote, over the past decade, the animal agriculture industry has been behind the introduction of, quote, ag gag bills in more than half of all state legislatures across the country.
These dangerous bills are designed to silence whistleblowers revealing animal abuses on industrial farms.
Ag gag laws currently exist in six states penalizing whistleblowers who investigate the day-to-day activities of industrial farms, including the recording, possession, or distribution of photos, video, and or audio at the farm.
Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans favor humane treatment for animals.
2012 poll revealed that 71% of American adults support undercover investigative efforts to expose farm animal abuse on industrial farms and 64% oppose making such investigations illegal.
And there have been South Carolina, South Dakota, dominated by these industries, had such a law that criminally prohibits, criminally, the use of code deception to gain access to our employment at an agriculture facility that is not open to the public with the intent to cause physical or economic harm or other injury to the agriculture production facility, meaning you get a job there.
Freedom of Speech Exploited00:09:35
And at some point you go undercover or a group enters a facility without permission and films.
The idea is to prevent you from seeing the truth of what's taking place inside.
The truth about our wars.
The truth about what murder is by people who want to dismiss it.
These are crucial instruments for understanding the truth and it's why so many power centers want to prevent them.
And so while it may be well-intentioned to compel big tech platforms to remove the videos of Charlie Kirk's assassination, there were thousands of people there.
Tom, mostly college students, they all have cell phones.
They film everything.
You're never going to get rid of these videos.
And even if I give her the benefit of the doubt and believe it's well-intentioned, there's a huge public service, a journalistic service to seeing the reality of what that is.
Politico in October of 2024 had a headline in Gaza, a tipping point for social media at war.
Israel, as you know, banned all international journalists from entering Gaza.
Sometimes they handpick their favorite ones who are propagandists for the Israeli government.
They take them in for one second on the protection of the IDF, show them what they want them to see.
But real media, independent media, is prevented from going to Gaza because they don't want media reporting on and filming and showing the truth of what Israel has done in Gaza.
But as a result, we have plenty of people in Gaza who have cameras, who work for media outlets, have phones, have access to social media.
And that has played an absolutely vital role in ensuring that we can see the things that they want to see.
Now, I just want to point out, really emphasize what Charlie Kirk thought about all this, not by speculating, but by showing you his own words.
And I had talked, I've talked to you, I've told you before, I've talked to Charlie Kirk about this.
He was very generous in his praise of my work, even though we recognize we have very different views on many things.
But the two areas where we most bonded was, number one, by reporting about the abuses and dangers of the deep state, the Snowden reporting, reporting on the abuse of the FBI, the CIA, which he vehemently supported, but the other major cause of his life was freedom of speech.
And he was a consistent advocate of free speech.
There are not very many of them.
Here is Charlie Kirk in July.
Sorry, this is 2018.
So I'm going to show you some more recent ones, but this one is from 2018, July of 2018.
Freedom of speech isn't just being able to say what you want to say.
It also means at times hearing ideas you might not want to hear.
Here's Charlie Kirk in May of 2024, so about a year ago.
Compare what's being done in his name or what's being called for in his name to what he actually believed.
Quote, hate speech does not exist legally in America.
There's ugly speech, there's gross speech, there's evil speech, and all capital letters of it is protected by the First Amendment, keep America free.
So he's saying, look, there is no such thing as hate speech.
You can have evil speech, but there's no hate speech exceptions of the First Amendment.
All speech, all of it, he said, is free.
You cannot constrain it legally under the Constitution, including expressing happiness over someone's death.
He was very clear.
He said, you can find it gross.
You can find it evil or despicable, even dangerous.
But ideas and opinions and words cannot be constrained.
Those are protected by free speech, said Charlie Kirk.
Here is what he said in May of 2025.
This was right after that young couple was murdered outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington.
And there were all kinds of calls to ban all kinds of views based on the argument that it inspired this violence.
And here's what Charlie Kirk said about this.
Please listen to this, especially if you're somebody who thinks that you're acting in his name by calling for things that he've spent his life opposing.
Sarah Milgram and Yarin Leshinsky, the couple that was murdered, were two beautiful young people with their whole lives ahead of them.
Their murder was senseless, evil, and horrifying.
And the man who did it should be punished to the maximum extent possible.
But I must push back against one thing.
All over X, I see claims that some people have, quote, blood on their hands simply because they made tweets attacking Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government, or the war in Gaza.
In other words, they were trying to say it's not just the shooter responsible, but for the people who inspired him through their expression of their ideology.
And to that, Charlie Kirk had one more word.
He said, no.
And then he just added, I just came back from the UK.
Every day there are 30 people are arrested for social media posts that the government says are, quote, dangerous or offensive because they oppose things like mass migration or Islam.
In the UK, people are arrested for silently praying or holding signs outside abortion clinics.
And I would add, they're also arrested for expressing criticism of Israel or support for pro-Palestinian groups.
And then he added this, quote, there are people who want that same tyranny here.
People who oppose freedom of speech will always claim we need to act to prevent, quote, hate or stop violence.
We must always oppose that.
But just because an idea is provocative or even offensive does not make it violent.
Speech is not violence.
Only violence is.
Speech is not violence.
Only violences.
Anybody calling for the arrest or the censorship of people who either did not pull that trigger or participate directly in the planning of his assassination?
You may think you're being very righteous.
You may think you're being very benevolent.
What you're actually doing is advocating exactly that, which Charlie Kirk spent his whole life consistently denouncing and opposing as far more dangerous than the speech itself that you hate or think is dangerous.
And he was absolutely consistent about that.
As I said, I've talked about that.
I was on his show to talk about that and other things.
And I actually talked about the demands by the Trump administration and many on the right to censor speech against Israel on the name that it's provoking anti-Semitism.
And he was in full agreement.
And again, he said that himself over and over.
I get that there are a lot of people on the right who feel like, oh, the political left is waging a war against us.
We can't be nice anymore.
We can't Accept the idea that there are constraints or limits on our power, even if they're set forth explicitly in the Constitution, even if Charlie Kirk himself spent his life clearly advocating it, making it absolutely, completely clear that if it had been someone else on the right rather than him who were assassinated this way and people were calling for the kinds of censorship and repression that they're calling for to avenge the person who was killed,
he would absolutely be saying exactly the things he was saying repeatedly in opposition to that.
And that is the lesson of 9-11.
Feel the anger, feel the rage, feel the emotion.
I have a lot of those emotions myself.
Watching the video on that train, certainly watching the videos from Gaza, watching Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck while he's holding a microphone and speaking on the college campus.
I have those same emotions.
But I think the lesson of 9-11 is that we have to guard against the attempt to have our emotions exploited, especially by people in government, to cede freedoms and vest them with more power because they convinced us to be so angry that we're willing to abolish all constraints on government power in order to avenge it.
Even if you don't care because it's not directed at you, even if you're not opposed to it on principle, at least pragmatically understand that whatever you endorse to be used against your political opponents, you're not just endorsing to be used against them, you're endorsing as a framework, as a system.
And soon there will be people in power who think that you're the dangerous ones.
and they'll absolutely use these same frameworks against you and you'll have no cause to complain since you so vocally called for them to be used.
Now, I know we all have two ages, our actual age and then our body's internal biological age.
Obviously, I'm living proof of this.
But what I didn't know is I've likely lowered my own biological age without even knowing.
Here's the thing: because Americans eat so many processed foods and not enough fruit and vegetables, many, perhaps most, are 10 years older on the inside than their actual age.
Power Imbalances in Surrogacy00:15:20
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Emmy Neatfield is a journalist who covers reproductive technology.
She also is the author of Acceptance, a memoir.
Her writing frequently appears in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and the New York Times.
Last week, she published a genuinely fascinating story and one that I think ought to be read by everybody in Wired magazine titled, quote, The Baby Died: Whose Fault Is It? in which she examines some of the dark underbellies and not often discussed aspects of paid surrogacy, which is a booming business in the United States and elsewhere.
And we are delighted to welcome her to the show.
It's great to see you.
Thank you so much, Emmy, for joining us tonight.
Thanks so much for having me, Glenn.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, I think there's a lot of interesting, fascinating issues raised by this story that you reported on through just sort of standard shoe leather reporting.
And some of them you raise in your article explicitly.
There's things in there that I didn't know, even as somebody who has kind of grappled with what I feel about paid surrogacy as a very complex issue.
So, I want to get to a lot of that, but before we do, for people who haven't read the article, can you just tell us kind of a summary of the specific story that you told?
Yes.
At Wired Magazine, I wrote about a venture capitalist named Cindy B who hired a surrogate in 2023 to carry her only male embryo.
Tragically, the surrogate, who I'm calling Rebecca Smith, experienced a placental abruption and the child was stillborn at 32 weeks.
So, how did Cindy respond?
Well, she sued the surrogate.
She racked up almost a million dollars in legal bills in 2024 and early 2025.
She called Smith's employer.
She called the FBI.
She filed reports accusing Smith of committing fraud.
And her ultimate hope, she told me, was to get Smith sent to jail, ideally for murder.
What is her theory about why the surrogate is responsible?
So there's a couple of reasons.
And, you know, I talk a lot about in the story kind of how she got to where she got.
You know, often when I tell people the situation, their first assumption is like drugs, right?
Because that's really cocaine, heavy, heavy cocaine use is like the one thing that seems tied to placental abruption.
In this case, the surrogate had left the hospital on a date about a week before the stillbirth and gotten a speeding ticket, which Cindy B, the intended mother, only learned about later.
So the surrogate had been going, you know, 40 miles per hour in a 25 mile an hour zone.
She came back to the hospital.
And then the next day, there was some, you know, there's a disagreement over whether it was like bleeding or light pink fluid, what exactly was happening there.
But the intended mother, Cindy, Cindy B, was also not told about that.
And so she basically claims that, you know, at different points, she claims that this was like an intentional choice, that the surrogate wanted to have the baby early so that she would get paid in full without having to stay in the hospital longer.
I think that's an important piece of context that she was hospitalized during this period, starting at 29 weeks.
And, you know, she would not get full payment given that the baby was born so early and didn't die.
But, you know, and then Cindy B also, you know, has said that she had an undisclosed boyfriend and that perhaps that was part of the picture here.
So, you know, there's a few, there's a few different reasons and including things where you understand why somebody would be really upset when they find out they weren't informed about what they believed was like an emergency situation, right?
Yeah.
I mean, one of, you know, I think there's this automatic tendency to sort of look at this issue of paid surrogacy and look at it from a kind of just, I don't mean dogmatic libertarian perspective, but from the perspective of how we often look at things, which is, okay,
you have two consenting adults voluntarily entering an agreement where one agrees to carry the baby to term for whatever reasons and gets paid for it, and then agrees at the end to give that baby over to the person or couple that has paid.
And okay, why should we interfere in that?
Why should we ban it?
But the reality is, as is the case here, at least to some extent, it's often driven by a lot of huge economic disparity where the surrogate maybe feels economically almost compelled to do it, making it a lot more questionable whether or not this is really voluntary.
Can you tell us what we know about the I don't mean the name, obviously, of the surrogate whose name you're protecting, but I mean what we know about why Wendy B decided to enter into, decided to pay a surrogate.
Just to give a little understanding for how these, because I'll just tell you, like from experience, I think that a lot of people now, every time they hear surrogacy, think it's just gay couples that buy babies.
Maybe that's the image they have in their head.
This is obviously not a case.
There are huge numbers of cases that do not involve same-sex couples or gay people.
In fact, the majority of them.
So just tell us a little bit about who Wendy B is and why she decided to take this route.
So Cindy B is a venture capitalist who claims to have invested in, you know, more than a dozen unicorn companies.
When she entered into the surrogacy agreement, she told me she had an eight-figure net worth.
And she told me and she put on her, you know, her agency profile that surrogates would see that she was pursuing surrogacy because she was older.
She was 43 at the time and because she was taking a medication for PTSD.
And then on Facebook, she had also written that she had been preparing to use a surrogate since she froze her eggs almost a decade earlier.
And so, you know, I think in a lot of cases of surrogacy, there's often complicated reasons why people are doing it, right?
Some of which might be seen as medical reasons, right?
Later in the story, it's revealed that she was taking lithium, which does have a higher risk of, you know, carries some risk of birth effects.
And then, you know, various, various reasons, right?
And so that was, that was why she, you know, got into surrogacy.
And I think that there's often this perception that the women who are who are working as surrogates are like poor women, right?
And in America, most clinics will not allow someone who's on public assistance of any form to serve as a surrogate.
And so her surrogate, Rebecca Smith, was a middle class woman, right?
Who was working as a bank manager, making enough money to support her and her son.
But she hoped to use the money from surrogacy to help pay off her student loans and like build an emergency fund.
And didn't she also say in your story that one of her motives was that, so there was partly an economic motive.
Even though like someone's middle class, like a bank manager, I mean, it doesn't mean that you don't need money.
Like a lot of people who are working in those capacities may not be poor on public assistance, but they're kind of living paycheck to paycheck or something remotely similar to it.
But so there is this financial aspect, but as I understand it, part of the motive of the surrogate was that she had already given birth, was raising her son as a single mother and wanted other people who were incapable of carrying a baby to be able to experience the joys of parenthood and became a surrogate for that reason as well.
Is that something you generally believe?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that that was a, you know, a goal that she had stated, you know, on her application and Facebook.
And generally that is the case, right?
I think people believe that women are entering into surrogacy arrangements purely out of financial reasons when there's a lot of evidence that that's not the case, right?
Like the money is a driver and there's also a strong wish to help, usually to help a family who otherwise couldn't have a baby.
And so I think that that's an important part of the of the conversation.
Right.
But I did want to just zero in before I get to a couple of the broader points you raised on just the facts of this case, which clearly there's an economic disparity here in the sense that the and you use these terms that are kind of the terms of art that are used, which are really creepy and dehumanizing, the intended parent, which is it is it Wendy B or Cindy B. Cindy B. Cindy B.
Yeah, who was married to a man, right, at the time that this happened.
So she not only pursued litigation that she says has cost her thus far a million dollars and is clearly intending to pursue more and more to kind of drive this surrogate into the ground.
I mean, if she's a bank manager, you know, and she's being sued by a very wealthy woman, I mean, it's very, very difficult to find lawyers or pay lawyers who can defend against that.
But also the thing that was so striking to me is that they're both under a gag order.
And for that reason, the paid surrogate was kind of reluctant to be identified or to talk to you because if she had to felt like she had to obey the court order, but Wendy B felt free to just give you anything she wanted to talk openly because she doesn't seem to care about the cost of litigation.
So it does seem pretty clear like there's a major economic disparity here, even if the surrogate mother is not like on food stamps.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think that that's something that the story really made clear, right?
Maybe the story is less about surrogacy and more about how if you have money and power, you can use the legal system in your favor.
And that was something that became really striking to me where I feel like a lot of the conversations around power imbalances and surrogacy happen in kind of like a theoretical level.
Because most of the time, if you ask surrogates, like the situations work out well, you know, and it can be like life-changing and beautiful for a surrogate.
But then what happens when it goes wrong?
And I think really diving into any story of the American legal system where one person doesn't have the money to lawyer up, it can be a really, really scary story for that person.
Yeah, I mean, I've always tended to have a very libertarian outlook on these kinds of things, like consenting adults entering into transactions.
Like there's no reason the public should be able to interfere in them.
But when it gets to severe economic inequality, it does seem like the question of consent starts to become extremely dubious.
I mean, I recently read reporting, and it's very confirmed, that affluent Europeans who need some kind of organ transplant, like a kidney or something, but can't find a donor, will travel to West Africa and pay what is for them a monumental sum of money, but for the affluent European is completely affordable to pay for them to agree to be a kidney donor.
And you can see this sort of very dystopian path that this kind of thing might lead to, even though theoretically there's consent and voluntarily entering into a contract by adults, it's hard to imagine someone in extreme poverty resisting that sort of a temptation.
So the thing that I really didn't understand or know, or maybe I just hadn't thought about much that you talked about in your article was the fact that even though this is a very booming business now, like surrogacy is what you call, I think you said it was a $5 billion industry now, that there's basically no regulations on it.
And this is, before we get to that, I just wanted to ask you, like, so even here, there's kind of a question of like, while this baby is being carried to term in the surrogate's body, but the intended parent, as it's called, the mother who paid, also sees that baby as hers, there's kind of a question of like, what responsibilities the surrogate has, what rights the intended mother has, if there's a breach of contract, what are breach of contract.
So did the contract not specify in this case what the responsibilities of the surrogate mother were?
So the contract says that the surrogate has to follow medical advice.
And the surrogate says that she's never violated medical advice.
And the intended parent disputes that.
But there's like a huge, a huge question mark here, right?
Where the surrogate left the hospital, but she says that they let her do that and they just monitored the baby.
And she was going to pick up a vitamin that the intended parent wanted her to take that the hospital had in stock.
And then the intended parent says, well, that's ridiculous.
And I think that there is this real tendency to say, as long as we have a contract, everything is good.
And then this story really shows, okay, well, what happens when a contract falls apart?
And when one party is violating the contract or one party believes the other person is violating the contract, then what?
And how do you enforce that?
And as you mentioned, surrogacy is not regulated on the federal level.
There's like a couple FDA rules about like STD testing embryos and testing embryos for other infectious diseases, but that's it.
Legal Parentage Dilemmas00:15:51
And so everything else that happens, if there's regulation at all, is on the state level.
And then that differs across states.
And so in this case, the intended parents were in California and the surrogate was in Virginia.
And so when it comes to things like who is the legal parent of the child, you know, you get into this very, very interesting situation where like in California, if you implant the embryo, if you transfer the embryo within California, a California court will give you a parentage order that you can then take to the state of Virginia and say, you know, that's my baby, even if Virginia has different, you know, different rules.
And so basically like a lot of this is untested territory.
And I think people just really are not aware of that and are not aware of like, you know, well, what, how are things going to break down if everything goes wrong?
Yeah, that is really what surprised me the most is that there's very little regulation.
I think you said New York State has some regulations now.
But you also talked about how this is becoming increasingly popular in Silicon Valley, where obviously, again, there's this kind of economic disparity.
And I can tell you that before I was a journalist, I'm ashamed to say, but it's nonetheless true that I was a litigator and I litigated lots of contract cases.
And I can tell you that no matter how clear and clean and unambiguous a contract is, if a party has enough money, they can drag the other part of their party to the alleging breach of contract through a court system if that other party can't pay and do a lot of damage.
But no matter how, there's all, you know, good lawyers can find ambiguities, even in the best of contracts, at least enough to do those sorts of things.
So what kind of, I know you're not advocating regulations necessarily, but the absence of regulations does seem to leave a lot of important ethical questions about surrogacy unanswered.
What are some of those?
Like how might regulations address some of the problems we're seeing?
Yeah, amongst surrogates, there's a big push for greater transparency.
So, you know, it's not, there's no like government, there's no like party that's saying like you have to tell surrogates like how many children your planet you already have, how many surrogates are pregnant at the same time.
You know, we saw this with the big news story coming out of California where there was a mansion with 21 children, mostly via surrogacy.
And those women had each believed that they were like the only one having a baby for an infertile couple.
And so there's just a strong desire to have more clarity.
I think it's really surprising to people that although surrogates usually go through extensive vetting with like reviewing the medical records and doing background checks, that that standard does not apply for intended parents.
Like I think it would really surprise people that I don't know of like of I don't know of any state that requires background checks.
Maybe that exists, but New York State has like the most recent regulation that is seen by many as a gold standard.
And I don't believe that that requires a background check on the part of the intended parents.
And because, you know, you, this is such an intimate process.
And yet there is, you know, people tend to meet for like one video call and then and review like a profile that they've written that, you know, in at least in the intended parents case, like probably is not fact checked.
And then suddenly you're, you're in this relationship that really is like almost impossible to get out of, you know, without producing the baby if there's no miscarriage.
So those are the kind of things that I think people are really, really pushing for.
And New York State has has like a surrogate's bill of rights that says, you know, that theoretically at least like offers surrogates some amount of rights as far as like, you know, termination and medical care and stuff like that.
I think to try to address some of these issues that come up and the way that contracts can be really, really very restrictive in terms of what people can do, right?
Because you can sign a contract for just about anything.
Right.
You could enter conductive slavery, but it's not something that, you know, if the state finds it offensive enough to public policy, it would just be invalidated on that reason alone.
One of the things that I did not know, and, you know, I mean, I'm not somebody who has ever entered the surrogacy process, so maybe, you know, that's the reason.
But I imagine there are a lot of people who don't know this, including, I bet you, some people who agree to be surrogates, is that the risk of complications or miscarriage or serious problems to the mother, the woman carrying the baby, is actually several times greater than just ordinary conception where the biological mother carries the baby to term.
And then there was also this aspect in this case where the paid parent, the woman paying Wendy B, wanted to actually implant twins into the surrogate.
But I guess there's research that says that twins in a surrogacy context make it even more dangerous.
And there was kind of another option that seemed very creepy to me of kind of having this delayed birth where you first have one child born and then like two months later, you have the other.
You know, these things are starting to get very, very sticky, it seems to me, in terms of like just what humanity is and what kind of things we really want to ratify.
Can you talk about some of those health risks and also this twin option?
Yeah.
So there was a 2024 survey pretty recent of almost a million pregnancies and it found that if you conceived without using any IVF, that your risk of serious health issues as a parent was like 2.3%, right?
And then IVF makes it more risky.
And then surrogacy was like almost 8% risk of something like preeclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage, you know, these conditions that can be really serious and can potentially be deadly.
And so that is, it is a newer number.
People have known for a while that IVF carries additional risks for like both the mother and the child.
But that like talking to surrogates for the story, it's like, okay, nobody was telling me that their doctor told them about this, right?
that it's basically presented as like, this is about as risky as, you know, a pregnancy that's like your own pregnancy with unassisted conception.
And so that I think that's really important information for people to know, right?
Even if you're approaching it from a totally libertarian point of view, if you want someone to be providing informed consent, like that's how, you know, and this additional risk is like, is thought to be coming from the fact that the eggs are not related to you.
And so you see some similar increases with like women using donor eggs.
And, you know, the people I've talked to who have used donor eggs, like also have not been in many cases, like told about this, this recent research that's coming out.
And in, so in the story, like Cindy B and her husband initially wanted to do twins.
And this is like very common in surrogacy where, you know, basically if you, if you are doing one surrogacy journey in California, the price is often around $200,000.
And in this case, like $45,000 was going to the surrogate.
But if she had carried twins, you know, she would receive an extra $5,000 of compensation.
So, you know, she'd be receiving a lot of money.
That's right for a whole other baby?
Yeah, for a whole nother baby.
I mean, that's standard.
The $5,000 number per additional fetus is standard, like basically across the industry from all the contracts that I've seen.
And so like, if it ends up being triplets, you know, then it's like you get $55,000, right?
And this is like kind of a principal agent problem because the fractional amount more you're paying is like a tiny fraction.
But then you get two kids, right?
For the price of one when everything goes well.
And so it's super attractive to people, right?
And a lot of people who are older are just like, well, I want to complete my family, right?
Like, I don't want to be, you know, 80 when my kids are going to college or 70.
So like, let me have them both at once or like however many at the same time.
And this is something where like the fertility clinics in recent years really have like made a culture shift where it used to be extremely common in IVF, like not, not just with surrogacy, but any IVF for doctors to put in two embryos, kind of, you know, thinking that that would boost the rate, boost the rate of having one baby.
And if you get twins, you know, for some people, that's a nice bonus.
And then for other people, it's like, it is a lot of additional risk for the, for the, um, the fetuses and then the future children.
And so that process has really like become less prevalent.
And so in this case, like, you know, Cindy's and her husband's doctor said, you know, strongly discouraged her, refused to do it.
And so instead they did what's becoming increasingly popular in surrogacy, which is called twibblings.
And that is when you have two, you know, or potentially more children a few weeks or months apart by surrogates who are pregnant simultaneously.
Right.
And this, this practice is like pretty, I feel like it's pretty popular, especially in Silicon Valley.
One of the other people who is featured in the story, another venture capitalist is like featured in a YouTube video talking about how he has like multiple friends doing this.
It's, I mean, and I think it's because it has a nice portmanteau, right?
Who doesn't want twiddlings?
Especially Silicon Valley loves that kind of innovation, like on the edge of modern technological pioneering and the like.
I can see why it is appealing to that Silicon Valley culture.
Let me just ask you as a final question.
This is, I think, one of the things that bothers a lot of people about surrogacy.
It definitely is an issue that I see as concerning.
I'll just tell you a quick story to illustrate it.
I have a friend who had a unwanted pregnancy in their family, some very young person who impregnated his girlfriend and they're not remotely ready to have kids and the like.
And so they presented them with like, you know, they sat down with them and presented them with three options.
And one option was, you know, have the baby and assume responsibility for the baby, even though you're not remotely ready to.
The other one is have an abortion.
And then the third one is adoption.
And immediately, the one that horrified them the most of that, those options was adoption.
The idea that like you actually let the baby, you know, carry through the term, let it be born, and then you just give it away to someone else to never see it again.
And it was like instinctively horrific, that very idea.
That's the one they instantly eliminated, like more than abortion or having the baby.
Not neither good options, but the adoption one was so unthinkable.
And I think that's probably true for a lot of people.
There are some women who give up, you know, newborn babies for adoption.
But I would think that it's very difficult to understand how much of an impact psychologically or emotionally it would have on a woman, especially one who's never done it before, to carry a baby to full term and then have to just give it away.
Like even if they obligated themselves contractually, I assume there's no regrets allowed.
Like there's no, if they want to keep the baby, the surrogate, the people are paid to and when they're right, I assume.
But are there studies or do you have an understanding of kind of the psychological harms to these women who enter surrogacy contracts and then give away their newborn babies?
From the sociology research that I've seen, surrogates tend to say, I always knew that the baby wasn't mine.
You know, going into it from day one, women are describing themselves as like, you know, I'm the oven, right?
The bread went in, but I'm just the oven.
And in almost these cyborg terms, it's probably the healthy way to look at it of feeling like that they are like part of a bigger process, right?
Versus taking a child who's like their own, you know, DNA and then that they that they might be able to take care of if they had more resources or more family support, you know, these reasons why, why people are turning to adoption, that it's just a very different process from day one.
I mean, and there certainly are people out there who do it and regret it, you know, and there's, there's right-wing organizations that are dedicated to ending surrogacy that have, you know, profiles of those women.
You know, it's, it's certainly something that happens with like every, with this and, you know, with many, many things in life.
And they, this is a reason why you do have to be in any, you know, in any reputable thing happening in America, you do have to have already have a child.
So you know, you at least know, okay, well, what is it like to go through a pregnancy?
And like, can I imagine being there in the hospital room and then turning over the baby?
And if the answer is no, then, you know, you should really stay away.
But, you know, I think that that's an interesting one.
But and it's also, you hope, I think most surrogates hope that they'll have a lifelong, like wonderful kind of kinship relationship with the intended parents.
I think that that's most people's hope going into it.
And that certainly does seem to play out in some cases where, you know, you're getting pictures of the kid, you might go visit the kid.
And that's very different than, you know, than a closed adoption situation where you're like, okay, where is my child?
Like my flesh and blood, like out there in the world, like lost without me.
Yeah, it is a kind of hybrid situation because you are carrying the baby, but it's not genetically yours.
It was conceived through another woman's egg.
So, but still, there has to be like an intimate relationship with the baby.
I don't know.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot more research as it's become more popular.
You did say one thing, I just, and I said that was the last question, but I did just, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about it because I find it so interesting.
So maybe you have some insight.
You said there were right-wing groups that are kind of trying to shut down surrogacy or opposed to it.
And in fact, with your article, the way I saw your article, the way people on my team saw your article was that a lot of people on the right were kind of promoting it and talking about it, whereas very few people on the left are.
Now, I understand why there's kind of a right-wing opposition to or tension with surrogacy because it just seemed that, you know, it's like there's a social conservatism ethos that says there's something unnatural about this.
This is not how babies should be created.
You know, there's God's plan, whatever.
I get the reasons why the right would be concerned about that.
But it seems to me like the economic exploitation that's so obviously at play here.
And like, I'm not saying it's in every case, but certainly the potential for abuse because of economic disparity is so high that you would think there'd be more left-wing concern about it for that reason alone.
And yet I don't see much.
Is that aligned with your perception of how this is breaking down politically?
And if so, why do you think that is?
Complicated Surrogacy Debate00:02:13
I think a lot of right-wing people are probably sharing this story because X exists and X is like one of the places where stories can go viral and it's now frequented more like by a certain political section of society.
I agree with you that I think that this is a really complicated issue that should interest people across the political spectrum.
And I think cutting it up into like, oh, here's how you should feel as a Republican or here's how you should feel as a Democrat, like doesn't really make sense because there's so many factors at play.
And in the New York, with the New York surrogacy legalization, one of the big opponents of it was Gloria Synem, where she was fighting to keep commercial surrogacy banned in New York State.
And it ultimately was something that she lost, but there was kind of that coalition there of, you know, radical feminists who tend to be also be opposed to sex work and these like, you know, trad cats, like people who are generally opposed even to IVF, right?
And I think that that's one of the reasons why surrogacy is a problem for people because it uses IVF, which involves the creation and destruction of embryos.
And, you know, similarly to IVF, it's reproduction that's happening like with a third party and not done in the marriage bed.
So I do think it's really important.
And I think people really should be thinking about it like across the spectrum.
And even people who believe that surrogacy can be beautiful and can be like a wonderful way to make a family, I think really owe it to themselves to think about what kind of safeguards are in place, what should be in place, and how to protect people when things go wrong.
Well, I want to really thank you for taking the time to talk about this with us.
I think it's the first time we've covered it on this show.
I also want to congratulate you on what I think is a fantastic article.
Congrats on Great Reporting00:00:22
It's like a very polemical topic, but there was virtually no polemic in your article.
It was really just like straightforward reporting about a very complex issue that kind of left it to the readers to decide in a much more informed way than they likely were when they went into the article, which for me is what journalism is about.