Ep. 199: Cradled in Glass, IVF documentary with filmmaker Savannah Crossfield

Filmmaker Savannah Crossfield is exploring some of the ethical, medical, and legal complications of IVF in her documentary, Cradled in Glass. She was inspired by the frozen embryos across the world and hopes to shed light on some of the topics not always shared with couples before they begin the process. While everyone lands in different places in regards to ethical and moral solutions for IVF, the conversation is one worth having for all of us.

NOTE: This episode is appropriate for all audiences but does discuss IVF in detail.

GUEST BIO: Savannah Crossfield is a documentary filmmaker and founder of Lucidity Pictures, currently producing Cradled in Glass, a groundbreaking series investigating the ethical, medical, and legal implications of IVF. With a background in media and a fierce dedication to truth and logic, she approaches bioethical issues with investigative precision and moral clarity. Her work seeks to reframe the fertility conversation by advocating for the protection of embryos and promoting restorative reproductive medicine.

HELPFUL RESOURCES: 

Ep. 43: IVF is not your only option

Ep. 96: Theological Considerations with IVF

Ep. 122: IVF Alternatives for friends

Ep.147: Emotional healing after IVF, with Shiloh IVF Ministry

Ep. 163: Healthy pregnancy in 3 cycles after being told IVF was her only hope, with Loren

Transcript

Caitlin Estes (00:26)
Welcome back to the Woven Well podcast. I get a lot of texts and emails about women's health and fertility and fertility treatments and all sorts of things, but they're usually from women, couples, even maybe pastors who'd like to discuss something with me. But earlier this year, I got an email from a director and that just doesn't happen all the time.

Well, Savannah Crossfield is a documentary filmmaker and founder of Lucidity Pictures. She reached out because she was and is working on a new documentary called Cradled in Glass, a series investigating the ethical, medical, and legal implications of IVF while offering an alternative approach. And so I wanted an opportunity to just chat with her a little bit, let her share about the new documentary with you all.

And so I invited her to be a guest on the podcast. So Savannah, welcome to the show.

Savannah Crossfield (01:23)
Awesome, thank you so much for being here. It's great to be here.

Caitlin Estes (01:27)
I was so pleased that someone was interested in looking at this a little bit more closely. It is the status quo to just sort of move forward within the bounds that we're given. But from our brief conversations previously, you've said like, you want to help couples answer the question, is this really the only option? Is this really the best health care for families dealing with infertility?

Is this approach one that really honors life in the way that the couple maybe wants to? And these really aren't easy questions, but I totally believe that they are worth asking and we should be talking about them together as humans. We should be caring about this and thinking about it and diving deeply. What made you want to ask these questions?

Savannah Crossfield (02:19)
Well, so a good friend of mine was going through infertility and she had lots of reproductive issues. So she's around my age, she's young, so it's not age related, but she's got all these reproductive issues going on. And she talked to her OBGYN and her OBGYN referred her to IVF. And she texted me and she said, and at the time I didn't know anything about IVF. I have two kids and both of them were conceived no problem naturally.

It was not something that I ever even looked into. She texted me and she said, Savannah, I trust you. I know that you look into things really deeply and I have been told that I should do IVF. I really want to have children and I don't know what I should do. I said, well, let me look into it. I had also heard the statistic that there are 1.5 million embryos frozen in the US right now and that also just took me back.

And I said, you know, let me look into it and ⁓ I'll give you some resources or see what I can find. And as I looked into the topic and how IVF works and ⁓ these statistics around the success rates of embryos created versus embryos born, those that are frozen, those in scientific research, you know, just the topic grew and grew. And my background is filmmaking and broadcast journalism. And so it made the most sense.

For me, ⁓ the best way I know how to deep dive, do interviews with experts, ⁓ look at statistics, look at research, look at reports, and put together a logical and compassionate conclusion that I think can help her, but then also, of course, can help so many other couples that are navigating infertility and maybe aren't experts in embryology, aren't experts in...all the complexity of fertility because as we know, it's so complex. There's hormones, there's timing, there's sperm, there's the physical anatomy possible issues with that. So there's so much that goes into this. So just to be able to help better inform couples ⁓ on how the process works, what the potential ethical concerns would be ⁓ with IVF, and then if they have alternatives to look into.

Caitlin Estes (04:43)
You're right that your friend is not alone. That's such a common story for a couple to not be able to conceive after a year. They go to their OB-GYN who refers them to ⁓ a reproductive endocrinologist and they say, hey, try IVF. And I call this the infertility conveyor belt because you just do the next step, but you end up face to face with the possibility of IVF and you get there so quickly that you know at that point it's like wait a minute you know how do feel about all of this

Savannah Crossfield (05:16)
a large percentage of people who are going through IVF, don't have a diagnosis. They have unexplained infertility. ⁓ so just wrestling with, should I be doing IVF? I don't know if there's something deeper, some health concern that we haven't addressed and corrected, and then going down that road and really studying it and meeting with other specialists. And so we have an entire episode, it's a six episode series, and we have a whole episode, or second episode, about restorative reproductive medicine. And we go and interview OBGYN surgeons who specialize in restorative reproductive medicine, whether that be with endometriosis or tubal blockages. The male side look into urology surgery.

And then of course, we've got a hormone specialist. We've got the Creighton method and different tracking cycle tracking methods and trying to look at everything, women and men and their fertility in a holistic approach.

Caitlin Estes (06:22)
We're all about getting to the underlying cause of whatever it is that's contributing to that infertility. Infertility is not actually a diagnosis in and of itself. It's a symptom. And so we have to get underneath that to figure out why that's happening. So I think it's great that you're covering that there are options.

Savannah Crossfield (06:34)
Thank you.

Caitlin Estes (06:43)
that we don't just have to go through IVF, which bypasses the natural system, but really look at honoring, nurturing, and restoring that natural system. hopefully something like IVF isn't even needed. It's not that IVF will never stop being an option. It will always be out there now that it's there. But we don't think that that should be where women have to go.

When they haven't conceived after a year, there's so many options for getting to that underlying cause and treating it, which I feel like is the really dignified approach. So what's something that was surprising to you as you began investigating or maybe something that viewers may find surprising? Either way you wanna go about it.

Savannah Crossfield (07:29)
Okay, yeah, I've got plenty. We actually went into ⁓ one of the largest cryobanks in California and in San Diego, it's Family Fertility Cryobank. We interviewed the president. He's also the president of six other IVF-related companies, one of which is the company it does posthumous sperm retrieval or post mortem sperm retrieval. So after a man has died within, they'd like to say about 24 hours, depending on the conditions of where the body has died and where it's been, they can retrieve motile, meaning moving, active living sperm, and then do IVF with those sperm. And so that company, they're looking to have a partnership of some sort with the military and other high-risk careers. ⁓ And so, of course, that opens a whole host of ethical concerns. that I didn't really know about before I investigated.

Caitlin Estes (08:37)
So very interesting. I'm sure you just uncovered a lot of different things

Savannah Crossfield (08:42)
IVF business, I mean, of course, makes money and it is a field. you could call industry. It has grown to so many markets over its development. So in the initial stages of IVF, they were initially created for women with tubal blockages.

⁓ And at the time, we didn't have a way to correct with surgery that tubal blockage. so IVF would be able to facilitate that fertilization without the fallopian tubes and then take that embryo in the petri dish and be able to implant that into the uterus that way. And so to bypass that tubal blockage. And then now...

As IVF has developed and there's been more additions to the process potentially that you can choose, whether that be genetic testing or cryopreservation of embryos, so freezing those embryos. Now we can do egg preservation, whereas we couldn't before. Of course, freezing sperm, we've done that for long time. We've got all of these new things that are possible in that.

And so the market for IVF has now expanded to more, more individuals are being referred to IVF or doing IVF. And so those ethicists that we have spoken to, one, his name is Dr. Ben Hurlbutt, and he was a bioethicist with MIT. Now he works at a different college or university, but he was explaining that.

The new frontier of IVF, the new ⁓ target that people that could be doing IVF in the future that we need to look at too, is those who are interested in quote unquote designer babies. That is being able to use AI to look at the genes, the chromosomes of embryos that you have biopsied cells off of, looked at their chromosomes, ⁓ and then be able to try to create bell curves that can ⁓ give people some kind of markers for height, for IQ is on the table, for different physical traits ⁓ and potentially mental traits that people might want. So rather than those who have infertility or those who cannot conceive without IVF. This market is expanding to those who want specific traits in their children.

Caitlin Estes (11:14)
I know that the goal is factual and to put out these ethical concerns so that people can kind of consider those before they walk into the door and they know where they stand on things, which is very helpful. Our listeners are mainly faith based. so listeners, I'm just thinking about this as she's describing all of it. And it may be easy to think, well, I would never do that or I'm not in that category or this doesn't apply to me because I'm not going to do IVF or things like that. But I do think it's important for us to learn about it and to understand these possibilities because the more we're swimming in these waters, the more used to it we get and the less strange or wild some of these things sound they just start becoming like yeah that's what we do or that's that's what's we want to make sure children are healthy or that sort of thing but we have to remember that we come up from a place our listeners and myself you know as believers we come from a place that says that every human being has worth and dignity because we are made in the image of God.

And it's not just the smart children. It's not just the healthy children. It's not just the beautiful children. It's every single one of us and that dignity cannot be taken away. And I often think about, ⁓ in fact, I even have some clients who are children of IVF. They were born through the IVF process and it's actually a challenging part of their story, you know, like it is a it is a challenge for them 25 years later, knowing that they were born in that manner. And I know it's different for every couple. It's different for every child. And there is so much prayer that has to go into all of this. But I think it's so important listeners as believers that that be our starting point as we pray, as we discern, as we talk with professionals as we watch documentaries like this, you know, where are we coming from and kind of go from there. ⁓ Savannah, in your work, it's not faith-based, but it is focused on this ⁓ very ethical point of view. And if we are to maintain the dignity of human beings from just like a very basic ethical level,

And I really appreciate that perspective as well. So you cover the alternatives available. You cover the ethical concerns. You cover medical concerns. Any other big categories that I'm missing that are gonna be in this documentary.

Savannah Crossfield (14:16)
So we have a whole episode on the legal landscape of IVF and so in every state but Alabama, embryos are considered property and so we look at what are the implications of that legal categorization because in the US we only have two categories of anything at all, anything. It's either property or person and so there is no middle ground, and we need to look at what are the implications when embryos are considered property. Then in Alabama, and we have great interviews with primary sources involved in this case, in Alabama in 2024, there was a Supreme Court case that gave personhood to embryos. We look at all of the myths of that ruling and what the effects were, and then the legislation that was passed after that ruling. so just, you know, the whole legal landscape of IVF is really important too.

Caitlin Estes (15:20)
Well, it sounds fascinating. It sounds really interesting. I look forward to watching it. And thanks so much for being on the show to talk with us about it. Listeners, you know, obviously I have not seen this yet. I don't know everything that's going to be covered or what it's going to look like in the end. But what I'm really pleased about is that we're asking these questions. We're not simply accepting what's in front of us, but we are using

Savannah Crossfield (15:29)
Of course, thanks.

Caitlin Estes (15:49)
our humanity, our intellect, our personhood to look into the most ethical, kind, compassionate care for couples who are dealing with infertility and the children that may be born from that. So I just think it's so important that we dig deeper and we ask questions and it's okay to explore your options. In fact, I'd say you're more likely to have a better experience when you go in knowledgeable, confident, and peace with your decision instead of feeling like they're being made for you that you're stuck on that conveyor belt. There really are options. So I'm hopeful that this documentary will just be another great resource for you. But we certainly have a lot of free resources available here through Woven as well. And I'll be sure to link several of those, maybe some of our most shared IVF related episodes with you in the show notes as well.

As always, thanks for listening as we continue to explore together what it means to be woven well.