Listen Now | The Sage Steele Show | RFK's VP: Nicole Shanahan
Club Random with Bill Maher
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The number of women who want to get pregnant and have a baby and cannot is higher than it has ever been in this country. The number of women suffering from miscarriages, the number of women who are giving birth to kids that then develop chronic illness, it's astronomical. It is a national security issue, in my opinion. It is a moral issue. How is it a national security issue?
When you have a shrinking population and that population has so many sick kids who cannot work, who are going to need assistance for their life, and we are going to have to put in government dollars. I mean, just, you know, some of these chronic diseases are going to amount to adding, you know, five to ten trillions of dollars to our national health care budget in the next 20 years if we do not stop this chronic health issue. Yeah.
It's already one of our largest budget items, $4.6 trillion a year in government spending in health care. We cannot sustain it as a country on this course. So what I have noticed is that the issue of fertility in general has had a ton of corporate involvement.
I've been criticized for being anti-IVF. That couldn't be further from the truth. I'm critical of IVF because it was designed out of cancer research dollars. And I learned through my own experience that the funding into women's reproductive health
virtually doesn't exist. So how do you keep a healthy woman healthy longer? How do you look at ovarian function through a scientific lens? Foundational sciences, never really been funded. So this idea of women's reproductive longevity, health, and equality, I'm like the first funder in the space. I created the field. So...
And it had been so neglected. And as a result, you have these very savvy private equity-owned IVF clinics coming in and saying, this is an amazing opportunity. Yes. Right? This is $15,000 a cycle. Okay.
Cash, right? All cash. It is one of the fastest growing industries in the world today. Industry. That's the key word there too. It's an industry. Yeah, business. And so anytime I look at an issue, I look at it as where the money is going, how it got there, and what is actually being neglected. Right. And so that's how I look at all issues of women's reproductive health, including
you know, this issue of abortion and I've,