(LifeSiteNews) — The culture war over surrogacy – the practice of renting the body of a woman to gestate a child created outside the womb through IVF – has been growing louder over the past several years. It has also drawn some stark lines through the right-of-center coalition in the United States and prompted debates about what it means to be conservative.
On July 15, Fox News political analyst Guy Benson announced on Instagram that he and homosexual partner Adam Wise became “fathers” again with a picture of himself cradling a little girl, Madison Halsey. This is the second child the two men have procured through surrogacy; son Conrad James was also birthed by an anonymous surrogate mother in November 2023.
The photos of men holding newborn children with the mothers who gave birth to them entirely absent and unmentioned is jarring, and many on social media pointed this out. Indeed, each new time a “conservative” influencer makes such an announcement (Elon Musk, Dave Rubin), a stark divide over this fundamental moral issue emerges. Some steadfastly ignore the commodification of women and children; others feel morally obligated to highlight it.
“Fox News political analyst Guy Benson is a dad again – and the conservative commentator’s growing family is drawing congratulations from some of the biggest names in Republican media circles,” the New York Post noted. “The announcement drew an outpouring of well-wishes from prominent conservatives, including former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Fox News host Dana Perino and political commentator SE Cupp.”
On the other hand, Christian commentators such as Megan Basham emphasized the injustice. “Benson is an incisive pundit,” she wrote. “But there is nothing conservative about deliberately creating motherless children. I pray Benson and those like him on the Right would consider what they are telling the world about how unnecessary they believe mothers (or if we’re talking about two women, fathers) are to the needs of children.”
“What did you think was going to happen after we legalized gay marriage?” wrote Katy Faust, a children’s rights activist and founder of Them Before Us. “That same-sex couples would finally be able to visit one another in the hospital? Inherit property? Make medical decisions? Many of those legal protections were already available through powers of attorney, contracts, and other legal arrangements. What Obergefell enabled was something else.” Faust added:
It accelerated the legal replacement of biological parenthood with intent-based parenthood. It made it easier to detach children from their mother or father and reattach them to biological strangers so same-sex couples could be “equal” to husband-wife couples. It conditioned an entire culture to repeat, “Love makes a family,” by threatening them with social isolation if they refused. It permitted scrubbing “mother” and “father” from parentage laws and replacing them with “gestating” and “non-gestating” parent in the name of non-discrimination. It made politicians afraid to defend the importance of mothers and fathers because genderless families had been upheld by the country’s highest court. The lasting legacy of Obergefell has not simply been the redefinition of marriage. It has been the unmaking of the American family by erasing mother and father, both in law and culture.
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Some GOP figures pushed back; Jeff Miller insisted that “Many gay men want to raise children for the same reasons as anyone else.” Faust’s response to Miller is a master class at cutting to the point.
“‘Gay men want to raise children for the same reasons as anyone else.’ But they cannot make children the same way as everyone else,” she pointed out. “For them to ‘raise children,’ those children must lose a parent or two. The two unions are not the same. One deserves to be endorsed and promoted within society because it protects the natural rights of children. The other undermines the rights of children.”
As commentator Elizabeth Barcohana put it: “I am very bothered by the attacks … against mothers who defended motherhood today. Two men purchasing a baby via surrogacy is a very specific and new phenomenon that only six or so countries in the world permit, plus some states in the U.S. Since it erases motherhood completely, mothers have strong feelings about it. I am one.”
Motherless babies are a tragedy. It is not cruel to point this out; it is essential.
One Response
Republicans are flaming fags, even worse than the Obama gays of fifteen years ago.
There are far more gays on TV under the Trump Administration than under Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden combined!
As Liberal as Ronnie Reagan was, he would have vehemently pulled this gay crap off the air in a heartbeat!