RFK Jr.'s Running Mate is a fierce critic of IVF

Nicole Shanahan, the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., isn't just one of the most prominent critics of IVF this election cycle — she's made it one of her life's missions to change the narrative around IVF. treatment.

As highlights PoliticoShanahan called IVF “one of the biggest lies being told about women's health today,” according to an interview published in February by Australian Economic Review.

Shanahan, a Silicon Valley attorney and ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has publicly criticized the fertility industry for years through her work as a philanthropist. The couple, who finalized their divorce in 2023, had gone through several unsuccessful rounds of IVF before conceiving a child together naturally, an experience that left Shanahan feeling distraught over what was supposed to be a helpful procedure.

“I believe that IVF is being sold irresponsibly, and my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed.” wrote about People magazine in 2022.

Shanahan is the founder of the Bia-Echo Foundation, a nonprofit organization that funds research for “reproductive longevity and equity,” and is a major donor to the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, giving $6 million in seed funding in 2018.

“Many of the IVF clinics are financially motivated to offer you egg freezing and IVF and are not motivated to offer you other fertility services,” she said. The New Yorker last year.

IVF has become a political flashpoint since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos must be treated as children under the law. The decision was met with widespread backlash, prompting Alabama lawmakers to do so pass a carvette bill in a hurry protection of IVF services in the state. But anger over the decision doesn't appear to have subsided, and it's credited as a major factor in helping Democrat Marilyn Lands flip a deep red seat in the Alabama state legislature this week.

In 2021, IVF was used to conceive more than 86,000 babies born that year in the United States, about 2 percent of all births, according to Department of Health and Human Services.

“Sane people could have concerns about bioethics, or many of us are concerned about how a lot of science is circulated and mass-produced, right?” Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, told Politico. “I'm sure there's a little kernel and logic behind it all. But at the end of the day, IVF is a long-established reproductive health technology, and Nicole Shanahan, bless her, is not a medical expert.”

But Shanahan isn't the only woman to criticize IVF after undergoing it, with some fertility doctors describing the procedure as “expensive lottery ticket“This is not a guarantee. “If you win, you get the best payout ever: you get a child. But if you don't win, you feel cheated,” said Dr. Emily Goulet he told NBC News in 2019.

Tanya Selvaratnam, activist and author of “The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism and the Reality of the Biological Clock,” said Rolling rock in an email that while fertility treatments have led to “many heartwarming miracle stories,” women and families need to be properly informed about the process, costs, risks and interactions of underlying conditions.

“Private doctors and fertility clinics, when insidious, will prey on people's deep desire to have children,” he wrote. “The Fertility Industry Generates Billions of Dollars in Revenue.”

At a Buck Institute event in 2019, Shanahan said she went through three failed attempts to create an embryo during “three dozen” visits to IVF clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to Marin Independent Journal.

“Personally, I find it crazy that my reproductive organs are considered geriatric long before any other organ has even begun to show the slightest decline,” Shanahan said at the event. “I find it even crazier that we've accepted this narrative about half the human species.”

RFK Jr. has not taken a public position on the matter. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.