How Legalizing Surrogacy Helps Activists ‘Queer Babies’

In December, gay father Balázs Boross published “Queering babies: (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy” in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. The essay “explores how encounters with [a surrogate baby] disrupt or confirm normative expectations about the ‘babyness’ of babies, the ‘parentness’ of parents.”

Boross suggests “surrogate babies are queer creatures by default,” “given their prenatal history,” and “that queerness can serve as a window into the queerness of all babies.”

Evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright condemned the “autoethnographic account” as depicting the “sexualization of infants.” He noted the somewhat “animalistic and perverse” nature of Boross discussing his daughter’s instinctual search for a breast during early skin-to-skin contact, and framing the connection between parent and child as inherently “gendered and sexual.”

The disturbing paper masquerading as scholarship deserves loud and swift denunciation. Adults should never sexualize babies, surrogate-born or otherwise. But Boross is correct that surrogacy does “queer” babies, just not in the sexual sense.

Queer Means Exploding Sex

What is “queer?” Many regard the term as a sexual identity of something other than straight, and sometimes as other than gay, bi, or transgender. We think of “queer” as sexual, but something else.

Maybe the queer-identified individual knows what that something else is, or maybe he is “still exploring.” It occupies the fifth position in the LGBTQ acronym because, within the cultural imagination, it’s an extension of those sexual identities.

But “queer theory” defines itself as a political tool that seeks to disrupt societal norms and categories, aiming to deconstruct traditional structures and perceptions. Boross agrees. When surveying a group of gay dads about the way they see “queerness” in their children, he defined queerness “not just as a sexualized strangeness, but … embodied resistance to confining constructs of institutionally defined and socially mediated ideals.” Surrogacy does indeed function as a “resistance” to “socially mediated ideals.”

My nonprofit Them Before Us is a leading critic of surrogacy both here and abroad because it always violates children’s rights. We broke the story of Massachusetts’ egregious surrogacy bill that would allow the outright sale of unborn children. We highlight the legal and technological victimization of children by the baby-manufacturing industry, testify against surrogacy legalization, and expose pedophiles who acquire children through these “progressive” technologies.

If “queer” is the destruction of universally recognized categories and “deconstructs traditional structures,” that’s exactly what surrogacy achieves for both babies and parents.

Surrogacy Erases Natural Mothers and Fathers

To explain why, let’s go to surrogacy itself. What is surrogacy?

Quite simply, it trifurcates “mother” into three purchasable and optional components: 1) The genetic mother who contributes the egg and thus half of the child’s biological identity; 2) The birth mother, with whom the child forms a primal bond, establishing the foundation for future trust and attachment; 3) The social mother, who furnishes the female-specific love and investment that maximizes child development and satisfies a child’s soul.

Except in cases of tragedy, the biological and social “norm” throughout human history is that all three “mothers” are found in one woman. That is never the case with surrogacy.

Boross endorses this assault on categories in his prologue titled “Mommy Dad,” which recognizes that “names do curious things … They single out and separate … and communicate norms.” He interprets the fact that their two-year-old daughter started calling him “Mommy Dad” as evidence that surrogacy necessarily blurs the traditional categories of mother and father.

Despite the fact both her fathers and her teachers pound into the two-year-old that she is in a “two-dad family,” little Greta clearly craves the maternal love she has been denied, because she projects some kind of motherness on Boross by calling him “Mommy Dad.” When at five this little girl expresses her “mother-hunger” by asking for “two mommies,” he dismisses it again, attributing her request to the fact that he and his partner just “suck at braiding her hair.” His commitment to the “non-normative parenting” made possible through surrogacy has blinded him to this little girl’s needs.

How Surrogacy Destroys Childhood

The destruction of Boross’ daughter’s right to her mother aside, surrogacy is an assault on surrogate-born babies in other ways as well.

First, surrogacy really does destroy the “babyness” of babies, primarily by ignoring their humanity. Regardless of the sexual orientation or family configuration of the intended parents, surrogate-born children are not even considered children.

Allowing the creation and custody of a child to be governed by contract, as surrogacy arrangements do, treats children as property — items to be commissioned, purchased, and exchanged. That’s by design, because the destruction of human life is rampant in the world of reproductive technologies.

Destroying someone’s couch is no big deal, but as Alabama briefly learned, destroying someone’s children certainly is. The dehumanization of children in the world of IVF and surrogacy is critical to the Big Fertility business model.

Next, surrogacy destroys the “babyness” of babies by destroying the presumption that children belong to their natural mother and father. They are no longer born inherently related and embedded into a pre-political natural family.

Surrogacy, and the legal overhauls required to accommodate intentional father loss or mother loss, renders children accessories to be awarded to whichever adults have the money and means to acquire them. The “traditional structure” that presumes babies come from one man and one woman and belong to that man and woman is anathema to surrogacy.

Surrogacy Destroys Parenthood

Surrogacy also obliterates the traditional norms of what constitutes a “parent.” Historically, we have recognized parenthood based on two criteria — biology or adoption.

The first grants children the legal right to the two adults who are statistically the safest, most connected to, most invested in, and most protective of them. The second seeks to replicate those safeguards through extensive screening so children live in homes with parents who love them as if they were born to them.

But in unnatural families, biology is seen as inherently “discriminatory” because same-sex couples can never produce a child who is biologically related to both adults. And undergoing an adoption process for a partner’s biological child made some same-sex parents feel “lesser than” and “unequal to” their heterosexual counterparts.

So the normalization of unnatural families requires a new category of parents: intended parents. Now any adult who can assemble sperm, egg, and womb, who “intends” to parent, and who has a valid contract can walk out of the hospital with an unrelated baby. Third-party reproduction in general, and surrogacy specifically, genuinely destroys the category of “parent.”

Queering Every Family Whether We Want It or Not

Boross is not only correct about the “queerness” of surrogate babies and their parents, but also that their normative-destroying queerness may soon extend to parents and children conceived the natural way.

Parenting laws are currently schizophrenic. Biological parents who leave the hospital with their child undergo no vetting for fitness. Adopted parents who leave the hospital with an unrelated child have to undergo months of screening, background checks, home studies, references, training, and a social worker follow-up. Purchasing parents who leave the hospital with an unrelated surrogate child undergo zero vetting.

What is the solution to this disparate treatment? It’s certainly not requiring all parents to be biologically related. Per leftist family dictates, that’s discriminatory. The only solution is to downgrade the significance of biological connection in every parent/child relationship.

That’s the route Canada took in 2005. Upon redefining marriage, they scrubbed their parenthood laws of all references to “natural,” “biological,” or “genetic” parents, and instead simply referred to everyone as “legal” parents. No longer does the pre-political relationship of a biological parent-child bond grant parental rights. Now the government of Canada grants parental rights.

And what the state gives, the state can take. That government-constructed family model is making its way through the United States, as state after state overhauls its parenthood laws to accommodate commercial surrogacy.

Governments across the world, most of academia, and the adults surrounding Boross have been captured by queer theory. As a result, Greta, along with thousands of other children, has lost her mother. This profound confusion has dire consequences for all babies and all parents.

As they grow, Greta and other surrogate children must grapple with the fact that eliminating their right to be known and loved by their mother was necessary to advance their fathers’ queer utopia. And the rest of us will have to deal with the civilizational fallout of allowing modern family and technology to “queer” all babies and parents.