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(LifeSiteNews) — Last month, a photo of a “maternity” shoot went viral. It depicted two gay men holding hands, beaming at into each other’s eyes, with a pregnant young woman in a red dress in the background. The caption: “We did a ‘maternity’ shoot and it came out great!” The woman was a surrogate; she’d been paid to carry a child created with sperm and an egg donor for the two men. The online reaction — which soon escalated into the millions — was immediate. “This is some Handmaid stuff right here,” wrote conservative commentator Bethany Mandel.
She’s not wrong. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — and the gory, brutal TV show — depicts a cultural hellscape in which young women are subjugated and forced to carry children for elites who are unable to conceive naturally. The parallels are obvious, and surrogacy horror stories are increasingly frequent. Surrogates, of course, aren’t forced — although many of them feel the pressure of being paid to use their bodies in the service of others (wealthy couples who prefer not to gestate their own children; gay couples who cannot have natural children).
Of course, it isn’t just the women who are commodified as gestation vessels for the children of the rich. It is also the children who are reduced to objects that can be created and purchased on demand. Some of these parental purchasers firmly believe the old maxim “I brought you into this world and I can take you out.” There are many stories of dissatisfied customers demanding that their horrified surrogates abort one or more of the pre-born children they ordered due to a perceived imperfection in the order. Many children begin their lives in a petri dish and end it through the bloody suction aspirator of the abortionist. Return to Sender.
In fact, a gay couple is suing an IVF clinic in Pasadena for not giving them precisely what they wanted. From NBC:
A male same-sex couple is suing a Pasadena in-vitro fertilization clinic, alleging their hopes of having a son were stymied when a female embryo was wrongly implanted in their gestational carrier and a daughter was born to them instead in 2021. Albert Saniger and Anthony Saniger brought the lawsuit Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court against HRC Fertility and fertility specialist Dr. Bradford A. Kolb, alleging breach of contract, medical malpractice, negligence, fraudulent concealment and violation of the Unfair Competition Law and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act. The suit seeks unspecified damages.
Read that again for a moment — these gay men are angry and suing because their “gestational carrier” gave birth to a baby girl, whom they did not want. Before they “married” in 2013, the men had decided to purchase two sons and apparently even chose their names and (weirdly) set up Gmail accounts for them. Their lawsuit insists that they had specified that “only male embryos [be] transferred to the gestational carrier and … get to select the exact embryos, which had an identified gender, to be used in each transfer.” The IVF clinic in question “specifically targets” gay couples and is “dedicated to helping the gay and lesbian community achieve their dreams of parenthood.”
But after paying $300,000, the two men ended up with a daughter, who was born last year. Presumably, she will one day find these stories on the Internet, and her intentionally motherless childhood will be made worse by the realization that she was a mistaken order. If her “dads” had had their way, she would have been left in a freezer, donated for research, or simply abandoned forever. The two men are still hoping to acquire two sons but are launching the suit to defray the costs of raising their unwanted daughter. Such is the narcissism of these two men that they actually believe that they are the wronged one in this tragic situation.
They are not. They are perpetrators; their motherless children, and the little girl most of all, are the victims. Surrogacy is a sick practice, and it should be banned.
