Marriage best ensures children are raised by their own mother and father, providing stability, love, and identity, while prioritising children’s needs over adult desires.
A backlash against surrogacy broke into the mainstream again this week, as social media users criticised celebrities who pose in hospital beds with their adoptive newborns as though they had just given birth.
Celebrities are accused of erasing the mothers, typically from poorer backgrounds, who have just given birth, in scenes likened to The Handmaid’s Tale.
One Mumsnet user wrote that airbrushing the “birthing mother” out of the picture “makes me feel a bit sick”.
Columnist Suzanne Moore describes her horror at “the sight of clips on social media of newborns being snatched away from their mothers – sorry ‘gestational carriers’ – and placed on the bare chests of men who have paid for the children”.
The backlash is part of a wider pushback against surrogacy, which has ballooned in popularity in recent years.
Surrogacy is a primary way male gay couples obtain children, often biologically related to one of them. But this arrangement is fundamentally unjust. Every child has the right to grow up with their mother and father—the very thing marriage secures. By intentionally creating children who will never know their mother’s love, surrogacy inflicts what Katy Faust calls the primal wound, a deep loss felt by children separated from their biological parents at birth.
Surrogacy is increasingly recognised as exploitation that “turns the female body into a commodity for hire”, reducing women “to ‘rent-a-womb’ service providers”.
While commercial surrogacy is illegal in the UK (though maybe not for long), “altruistic” surrogates can still receive unlimited “expenses”. Globally, the surrogacy market is predicted to grow almost 10-fold between 2022 and 2032, reaching $129bn.
Beyond financial transactions, surrogacy leaves a trail of heartbreak. Moore reminds us that many women “change their minds, or give birth to children with disabilities that the prospective parents reject”.
Marriage exists not so that every couple can have a baby, but so that every baby can have a mother and father.
The explosion in surrogacy is a symptom of a society that has lost its way on children’s rights. That’s why at C4M, we will never stop standing up for real marriage—the best protection for children, ensuring they have the love of both their mother and father.