baby to be born in the united states conceived outside the human body. conception occurred in a petri dish. made headlines around the world and launched the modern day fertility industry in the u.s. since elizabeth s birth, secretaries at the eastern virginia medical centers in vitro clinic have received between 600 and 700 phone calls from couples wanting to join the waiting list. last december, elizabeth celebrated her 40th birthday. according to the most recently cdc statistics, an estimated one in six couples without children are infertile. it s no wonder that the number of people using assisted reproductive technology to expand their families has doubled over the past decade. i know what it s like. my husband and i tried for three years to have a child. two miscarriages and three rounds of failed ivf cycles later, i was emotionally devastated. until 2005 when ivf worked and my twins were born. and 13 months later, the bigger shocker, i was pregnant with my third ch
Create this kind of chaos that distracts us from the fact that, yeah, more people are suffering. Were going to start our coverage with Nbcs Kelly Odonnell at the white house and msnbcs Garrett Haake at the white house where nancy pelosi and tlaib spoke this morning. Kelly, we have heard extensively from the president. On the eighth day of fighting with the four congresswomen, what did we hear from President Trump today . No backing down, no letting this cool off. And in fact, the president seems more than happy, kasie, to stoke this fight. And seems to be getting something out of it and when he was asked ago our own colleague Kristen Welker who was serving in the pool today, why he took to this fight, the president took the opportunity not to quiet things down, but to again criticize these four members of congress in a way that any other administration would have been a harsh rebuke. And the president s sort of speak, it was a sort of middle of the road attack, the kind of thing that,
right, started around age 15. he went from having a girlfriend to captain of the football team to when he hit 15, almost like a complete change and he started getting into trouble with the law, using drugs, marijuana. years later, the gunners would learn that marijuana could have triggered steven s rapid mental health decline due to a genetic predisposition from his donor that they knew nothing about. we reacted like most parents. we, you know, tried to get him help. therapy, doctors. by the time he was 17, we had taken him to his first rehab. there were different doctors, so each one would present with the same question. is there a history of schizophrenia. they didn t say mental illness. they would say, schizophrenia. and we would say, no. no. there s not. right. so, they always asked you if there was a family history, and when you said, no.
reproductive law at the university of san diego. alex is one of the only donor-conceived children to ever go public and go after a sperm bank for false records. much like young steven gunner, alex s mental health spiralled in his early teens. growing up, we had gone through what felt like 100 different therapists and s psychiatrists and medicines. and nothing was working. and i had been to mental institutions, and nobody knew what was going on. his older brother, andrew, who was conceived using a different anonymous donor, vividly remembers the hardest times. he would get really passionately angry about something to the point of threatening violence or threatening violence against himself. he chased me with a knife several times. amid that confusion and turmoil, alex began to wonder about his own genetics. about 14 ish, like a lot of
we even know the donor s history, no. and the doctors said to you, that doesn t make sense. yes, yes. and i was like, absolutely not. in fact, with the donor, they went back three generations. my wife s never so it always the doctors would get confused and they would diagnose it as drug abuse or oppositional defiance disorder. by age 19, steven was diagnosed with schizophrenia. he spiralled over the years, in and out of psychiatric facilities, trouble with the law, violent episodes. but laura and david never gave up, trying to stabilize him, finding the right doctors, balancing the correct f medications. then on may 21, 2020, it all came crashing down. i walked in the house and could hear laura upstairs. and i ran to the stairs and i ran up, and she s in the bedroom. and she s on the phone. and i kept whispering at her, looking at her going, where is