Paris Hilton said she is beginning the process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) with her boyfriend Carter Reum on Tuesday.

IVF is a fertility treatment that takes an egg and a sperm and fertilizes them in a lab, rather than during sex, to help couples conceive. During an interview in an episode of “The Trend Reporter with Mara”, Hilton said Kim Kardashian was the person who told her about the process, suggesting her own doctor.

The 39-year-old heiress said she wanted to start the process now to ensure she could have “twins that are a boy and a girl,” since parents can, for an added cost, select which embryos they want to use.

“I think it’s something most women should do just to have and then you can pick if you want boys or girls,” Hilton said. “The only way to 100% have that is by doing it that way.”

Hilton’s words were met with some pushback on social media, as many people who undergo IVF struggle to have any healthy embryos, let alone enough to chose between them for their sex.

What’s more, experts say selecting embryos by sex is ethically complicated.

Many felt Hilton’s comments were “out of touch” and insensitive to people struggling with infertility who can’t afford IVF, a procedure that can cost upwards of $12,000.

“Millions of women across this country cannot have access to IVF due to lack of funding and insurance coverage — women/men with actual medical diagnoses — and even after they finance and go through all the struggles of even getting to IVF, it’s no guarantee that they end up with a healthy baby,” one Instagram user wrote. “For her to make this statement is so beyond infuriating to me on the basis she did it to get twins and choose the sex.”

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a process that can be included with IVF that screens the embryos for what sex they will be by looking if they have XX (female), XY (male), or XXY (intersex) chromosomes.

According to CNBC, this process can cost upwards of $20,000 and isn’t an actual guarantee that the embryos will take and each a full pregnancy. All PGD does is use the embryos with the desired sex, as many people who go through IVF struggle with their embryos implanting.

“IVF is not a simple case of choosing what embryos and how many embryos to transfer providing they are good quality. She needs to read up on the harsh reality of IVF,” one commenter on Instagram wrote under a post by Pregnantish.

The ethics behind choosing a baby’s gender have long been debated by experts in the biomedical field.

According to Dr. William Keye, an OB/GYN at the University of Utah Health, there are concerns that it is a slippery slope, potentially leading to an imbalanced population between sexes in places where a certain gender is given preferential treatment.

An editorial published in the BMJ’s Journal of Ethics warned sexism could play into sex selection, as it could cause more people to opt for male embryos than female embryos.

In addition to being an expensive procedure many people in the US can’t afford, the idea of “picking” a child’s gender before they are born may present some problems.

Since a child could be transgender, and may not identify with the gender they are assigned at birth, no one truly knows what gender their child will be.

Source: insider.com

Paris Hilton’s story is getting the podcast treatment, with Wondery’s original podcast “Even the Rich” launching its newest season focused on the heiress, entrepreneur and OG influencer. Over four episodes, co-hosts Brooke Siffrinn and Aricia Skidmore-Williams take a deep dive into Hilton’s empire and “how this hotel heiress turned a provocative moment into super-stardom and how Paris built her persona brick by brick.” The first episode, which launched Tuesday, chronicles Hilton’s early days in the spotlight before “The Simple Life.”

“She seems like a ditzy wild child. At least that’s the way the media portrays her,” the hosts detail in the episode. “She’s always on Page Six for something or other like the time she danced on a nightclub table and flashed her thong to the paparazzi. Or the time her and Nicole Richie showed up to a club in matching denim suits and nothing else underneath. But what does Paris care if she’s sometimes the butt of people’s jokes. She pretty much has it all.”

Explaining why the podcast — which has chronicled the Versace family, the Kennedys, the Murdochs and Beyoncé and Jay-Z to date — focused on Hilton for its latest season, Skidmore-Williams says, “There’s so much more to her than what the 2000s media would have us believe – she’s been through a lot. Paris is quite the savvy businesswoman. She used her knowledge and experience to curate the brand she wanted for herself.”

“Like many, my original fascination with Paris was brought on by the outrageous public image I was seeing in tabloids and on TV,” Siffrinn adds. “But I had no idea the trauma she suffered as a teen at Provo Canyon School. My jaw definitely met the floor when I discovered the details of what really happened.”

Hilton recently revealed her experiences at the Provo Canyon School on her YouTube Originals documentary, titled “This Is Paris.” The film, which launched in September, chronicled Hilton’s rise to fame and childhood traumas from her perspective.

“I feel by me telling my story and having the courage and being brave is going to help a lot of other people who want to come out and tell their story,” Hilton told Variety ahead of its launch. “And expose these places for what they’re doing to children. My ultimate goal is to shut these places down because they shouldn’t exist and no child should ever have to go through what I went through.”

Though Hilton is not involved in telling her story on the “Even the Rich” podcast, the show’s hosts feel confident that the media maven will approve of their take.

“I believe Paris and the Hilton family will love it,” Skidmore-Williams says. “We worked so hard to honor the people behind the Hilton name and this arc tells their story with humor and poignancy while sticking to the facts.”

Siffrinn adds: “They’ll see that we really do Paris justice as the ‘OG Influencer.’ We spent hours and hours watching, reading and understanding Paris and the history of the Hiltons.”

“Even the Rich” is just one of podcast producer Wondery’s offerings, with original shows including “Bad Batch,” “The Shrink Next Door,” “Business Wars,” “American History Tellers,” “Tides of History,” “The Daily Smile” and “Imagined Life.” Both Wondery’s “Joe Exotic: Tiger King” and “Dr. Death” podcasts are in development for TV adaptations with Universal Content Productions.

In December, Amazon announced a deal to acquire Wondery, with the podcast producer set to join the Amazon Music group.

“With Amazon Music, Wondery will be able to provide even more high-quality, innovative content and continue their mission of bringing a world of entertainment and knowledge to their audiences, wherever they listen,” a post announcing the deal explained.

Since “Even the Rich” launched in March 2020, Wondery reports that the show has doubled its audience base, through gossip-friendly episodes like their examination of the #FreeBritney movement. Hilton is also not the only reality TV figure the “Even the Rich” team plan to explore, with episodes about the Kardashian family in the works.

Source: variety.com

If your brain has rotted as much as ours have, you will know, off by heart, the full story of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan’s flip-flopping tumultuous friendship in the mid-noughties, with Britney Spears — arguably the most famous of the trio — at its centre. The pair, once inseparable, spent weeks in 2006 purportedly going back and forth between being besties and hating each other. (“Paris is a c*nt” lives in our head rent free.) Now, that iconic, very public feud — which apparently lives on to this day — has been transformed into a movie script. All it needs is a willing financier to put money behind this legendary story and bring it to the screen.

Debut screenwriter Ariel Sayegh is behind Frenemy, a script that’s managed to earn seven mentions on 2020’s Black List – an annual rundown of the most-liked, unproduced scripts in Hollywood which has helped launch projects like Diablo Cody’s Juno.

The blurb attached to the film’s entry calls it “a chronicle of the infamous Lindsay Lohan/Paris Hilton feud of 2004-2006 over who would be Britney Spears’ best friend”, which is a one-line pitch that has us scrambling in our pockets for cash to make this happen. If the stars don’t play themselves, who would you like to assume the roles of Lindsay, Paris and Britney?

But that famous noughties trio are not the only Hollywood legends to have their life transformed into what’s 100% bound to be an unequivocal on-screen masterpiece. The late, great Anna Nicole Smith also gets the biopic treatment on this year’s Black List.

Director and screenwriter Abigail Briley Bean has written Gusher, a script that follows the model and actress’ life and controversial positioning as a young woman married to a man pushing 90. “Based on the story of Anna Nicole Smith,” the summary reads, “a shrewd young mother rises out of a small Texas town to become a famous Playboy centerfold, but when she falls in love with an eighty-nine-year-old billionaire, his son and the entire world believe she’s nothing but a gold digger.” It got 12 mentions on the Black List while Frenemy racked up seven. Either way, both are in strong positions to get commissioned, so long as the respective parties agree to it.

So what else has made the list? The most popular, with 29 mentions, is a script by Sophie Dawson called Headhunter, about a high-functioning cannibal whose victims are selected based on how many people follow them on Instagram. Not far behind it is Chang Can Dunk, about an Asian-American basketball-obsessed teen navigating his final high school years that Disney+ have already picked up the rights to produce.

There are also some queer titles making appearances here too. A meta-fiction Richard Simmons biopic about a boy who’s inspired to lose weight and help others do the same after he’s visited by an apparition of Barbra Streisand, called St. Simmonds. There’s the story of two trans women holding a sit-in in a Nordstrom bathroom after a manager refuses to let them use it, called Occupied. And then there’s What If?, a high school movie being financed by MGM and directed by Billie Porter about a 17-year-old boy asking out his transgender classmate.

We’ll have to wait a little longer to see if anyone bites on the Lindsay and Paris feud script, but you can view the Black List rundown in full here, and get a sneak peek at the movies that might be coming your way in the years to come

Source: i-d.vice.com