Is this Olympian a designer baby? The gold medalist’s IVF and surrogacy story
Olympic figure skater and gold medalist Alysa Liu has made Americans across the country proud — but BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey believes there is one thing that needs to be discussed when it comes to Liu’s past.
Alysa’s father, Arthur Liu, fled China as a political refugee and landed in California where he attended law school.
“Now he is the only biological parent that Alysa knows because Alysa was born by surrogacy. He used IVF with anonymous egg donors. This has all been reported publicly,” Stuckey explains.
“And then there’s also something interesting about how Arthur chose the women who were going to be the egg sellers for all of his children. So he specifically chose white women as these egg sellers. I don’t say egg donors because these women are making money from selling their eggs for all of his children,” she continues.
Liu did this because he believed it would give them a “diverse gene pool and reflect his own blend of Chinese and American cultures.”
“That should just kind of make your skin crawl a little bit that you’re creating these designer babies as if out of a catalog. I mean that’s really objectifying these little people,” Stuckey says.
“Arthur has said he doesn’t know the identities of the egg donors or the egg sellers. There are no records available to reveal them, which just again points to something that we need to understand when it comes to egg selling is that we are purposely cutting children off from half of their biological reality,” she explains.
“You don’t get to know the fullness of your medical history. You don’t get to know the fullness of your ethnicity. You don’t get to know the fullness of your origin or your family’s origin. And I think it’s just an innate longing in all of us to know whom we are and from where we come,” she continues.
And Liu’s daughter’s path to the Olympics was no accident either.
In an interview with Liu on “60 Minutes,” he explains that he took Liu to Japan as a child to learn from the top coaches there — spending “half a million to a million dollars.”
“That could probably be said by a lot of these Olympic parents. They invest a lot of time and energy and money into their kids. And I’m not condemning him,” Stuckey says.
“It’s just another opportunity for us to be reminded that yes, while everyone, no matter the circumstances surrounding their conception or surrounding their gestation or birth, are made in God’s image, we are glad Alysa is here, we are glad her siblings are here. It looks like they had a decent upbringing, I hope so,” she continues, though she points out that despite this, no one has a right to a child.
“Children are people. They’re image bearers of God. They’re not something that we are entitled to be able to create by any means necessary,” she adds.
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