It’s not easy to find examples of practices that are legal everywhere in the United States, but also banned in Canada and most of Europe on moral grounds. Usually it works the other way around. Canada doesn’t place any restrictions whatsoever on abortion, for example. The government will actually pay its citizens to kill their children at any point in a mother’s pregnancy. But in the U.S., in many states at least, there are some limits on that kind of barbarism.
Meanwhile in Europe, as I discussed yesterday, there’s an extremely permissive attitude toward euthanasia. It’s easy for young adults to get their doctors to kill them in The Netherlands, even when they don’t have any kind of terminal illness. But in the U.S., killing patients for no reason is still frowned upon by major medical associations. For now, anyway.
So in general, we’re more restrictive when it comes to most immoral and unethical medical procedures. Canada and Europe take the opposite approach.
But there is one glaring exception to this rule. And it concerns commercial surrogacy, or the act of paying a woman to carry someone else’s baby, usually via in vitro fertilization (IVF). This is distinct from so-called “altruistic surrogacy,” where there’s no profit motive. Yet still nearly as many ethical problems, despite the name. Commercial surrogacy is legally equated with human trafficking by the E.U., because it provides significant financial incentives for women to rent out their body to strangers. So they ban it. The same is true in Canada.
It’s not true in the United States, however. This week, the state of Michigan became the last state in the union to decriminalize commercial surrogacy. In other words, in all 50 states, you can now rent a woman’s body and use it to carry your child, without suffering any criminal penalties.
That seems like it can’t possibly be true, but it is, according to Michigan’s governor. Her office put out a statement saying that Michigan had been “the only state in the nation to criminalize surrogacy contracts.” To be clear, there are still several states that say they won’t enforce commercial surrogacy agreements, but broad criminal bans don’t apply, as far as I can tell.
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That’s extremely good news for the surrogacy industry, which is worth around fourteen billion dollars as of 2022. By 2033, analysts expect the surrogacy industry will explode in value to $129 billion — an increase of about 900% in just a decade. For perspective, the global weight loss market — which is obviously gigantic, no pun intended — is valued around $140 billion. So we’re talking about surrogacy being roughly as big as the weight loss industry in just a few years. You’ll be seeing surrogacy ads as often as Ozempic commercials.
There are all kinds of reasons why the industry is doing so well. One of them is that infertility is on the rise. Roughly one in ten men and women who are at childbearing age are infertile in this country. In the 1950s, worldwide, each woman had an average of five children. That number is now down to two children, and it’s falling further. I’ve outlined some of the reasons for this infertility crisis in the past.
Suffice it to say, it’s something the most powerful Left-wing activist groups in the country, including Planned Parenthood, have been hoping to achieve for quite some time. They explicitly want to depopulate the Earth, so they welcome the fact that sperm counts have dropped 38% in a decade. They’re happy to see more women killing their children, and more men removing themselves from the gene pool.
But the problem here is bigger than infertility because surrogacy is not an appropriate or moral or justifiable response to infertility in any event. Surrogacy (especially commercial surrogacy) is arguably the most direct form of human commodification this side of slavery. It is the purchasing and renting of human bodies, organs, and body parts. That’s true regardless of your motivation for doing it. And we don’t allow that kind of transaction in any other context. Federal law prohibits you from selling your organs on eBay. Virtually every jurisdiction in this country outlaws prostitution. People are not chattel.
But in this one case, it’s allowed, because otherwise, we’re told that infertile couples and gay men wouldn’t be able to have children. Therefore, it’s worth the sacrifice of human embryos. It’s worth turning a handful of poor countries like Georgia and Ukraine into surrogacy hubs. The women in these countries are selling their bodies for rent to foreigners who are looking for a lower rate, compared to what they might find in the United States. And a lot of couples, particularly gay couples, are taking advantage of that offer.
You might remember that, during the gay marriage debate, we heard the familiar line that two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want, they’re not hurting anyone. But that was never true, and surrogacy makes that extremely clear. Surrogacy deprives children of their mothers it robs them of a connection that is hard-wired from birth. No matter how much propaganda you force on children, no matter how many times they hear the lie that having two fathers is completely normal and natural, they know it’s not true.
There’s a video circulating online right now that makes this point tragically clear. It’s footage of a surrogate mother wishing her child a happy birthday. This is a mother who sold her eggs a few years ago to a couple of gay guys, and only sees her daughter through an occasional video call. Here’s one of those calls:
As a parent, that clip angers me at the deepest levels of my soul. The thought of my own children being deprived of their mother is horrifying. To lose their mother would be to lose a part of themselves. Like losing a limb, but worse. And yet this is done to children intentionally, and all for the sake of satisfying the wishes of gay couple.
That clip, by the way, is from Surrogacy Concern, which is a group in the U.K. that opposes surrogacy. And yet, in the UK, commercial surrogacy isn’t generally allowed. Contracts for commercial surrogacy aren’t enforceable for the most part. But they still allow so-called “altruistic surrogacy,” where the surrogate doesn’t accept any payment, outside of expenses that are incurred.
But as you can see from the video, this model isn’t much of an improvement over the commercial model. “Altruistic surrogacy” isn’t remotely altruistic, when you consider its impact on both the child and the mother. It’s devastating and painful for the mother in ways she must vividly understand. And devastating and painful for the child in ways that she cannot yet fully understand. But one day she will.
And yet, somehow, it’s likely that things are only going to get more and more deranged and dehumanizing from here, as we continue to divorce human reproduction from its natural context. The ultimate dream for many on the Left is to one day make men into surrogates via implanted uteruses. I don’t know if this will ever be scientifically possible — I doubt it will be, as sustaining a pregnancy requires a lot more than just a uterus, after all — but I do know what some trans activists plan to do with that power should they ever be granted it. Here’s one video, which was surfaced recently by Robby Starbuck, that gives you some idea:
This man who says he’s trans wants to get the first trans uterus transplant so he can get an abortion. Folks, this is a death cult. pic.twitter.com/iFaNZfqICg
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 7, 2023
He’s grinning about killing a child for the same reason that Lia Thomas grins while beating female swimmers and depriving them of their rightful accolades and opportunities, which is that he ascribes to an ideology of extreme pathological narcissism. It’s reminiscent of the video of that WPATH expert talking about turning people’s genitals into abstract art. Above everything else, these people cannot tolerate being told “no.” They simply have to believe that they can do anything they want.
In that sense, the underlying ideas behind trans ideology and the commercial surrogacy movement aren’t that distinct. They’re both premised on the idea that humans can be gods. They think people can invent their own genders, just as easily as they can invent new ways for two men to “have a child.”
But humans don’t have the power to create new genders. Two men don’t have the power to create a child. And no one has the authority to end an innocent human life. The commercial surrogacy industry, like so many other movements we’ve been told to accept over the past decade, is yet another step towards a dystopia that embraces delusions, instead of rejecting them. And as we’ve seen before, if this is allowed to continue, many children will be irreparably damaged if not killed. They will be forced to suffer in order to appease narcissists and psychopaths. And, as with the trans movement, women — the very people who are supposedly “empowered” by this new approach — will again be collateral damage.