“What a Thanksgiving gift! Fox News commentator Guy Benson and his husband Adam Wise became first-time fathers over the holiday weekend,” Parade reported a few days ago. It went on to note that a baby boy, Conrad, “arrived at 3:42 a.m. CT on Saturday, Nov. 25 via surrogate.”
As the news spread on Twitter (alright, X.com), some people offered congratulations and others registered their opposition to surrogate pregnancy and assisted reproduction, particularly when used by same-sex couples. Not surprisingly, the conversation got heated and others were drawn in.
The social conservatives expressing opposition are people I respect, including MBD and Mary Hasson, and many of whose views I share. We should be especially concerned about the way in vitro fertilization, as practiced, results in the devaluation and selective abortion of “surplus” human embryos. I nevertheless think that in this episode, some social conservatives are opposing reproductive technologies in a way that is both politically and morally mistaken.
First, some important context: These technologies are used by many couples both same-sex and opposite-sex, and controversy over them is barely present in our culture. Many people who oppose abortion have no objection to them; indeed, many of the people who have had children via surrogacy or IVF are themselves pro-life.
While none of this means that the practices should be immune to criticism, the critics should be aware that we occupy a distinctly minority position. We are not seeking to affirm a taboo but rather to change minds. That’s not likely to happen — indeed, we are likely to alienate people who might be sympathetic to some of our points or agree with us on other important issues — if our criticisms seem or are unloving, unfair, unreasonable, mean, or just tone-deaf.
Even people without strong views in favor of surrogacy may recoil at the idea of taking to social media to volunteer a criticism at one of the happiest moments in someone’s life. We all understand that there’s a time, place, and manner for argument. There’s a difference between skipping a friend’s same-sex wedding and posting the same day that it’s an abomination.
Whatever good we think we are doing by weighing in can also be undermined by exaggerated rhetoric. Surrogacy ordinarily doesn’t amount to “stealing” a baby from a mother, in any normal sense of that word. Even “buying a baby” is not the right way to talk about the issue, given that the baby does not become anyone’s property to exploit or discard — and that kind of charge is guaranteed to be taken badly given the historical smear of gay people as child abusers.
When we hear that someone — a celebrity, or an acquaintance — has had a baby out of wedlock, we don’t take the birth announcement as an occasion to share our views about the circumstances of the baby’s conception. And we would not want to give that child reason to think, when he looks back years later, that we wish he had never been born. The first thing we should do instead is to wish the baby well, and the second is to encourage all those who love and care for that baby. So it should be with baby Conrad.
On Welcoming Babies
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05.12.2023
“What a Thanksgiving gift! Fox News commentator Guy Benson and his husband Adam Wise became first-time fathers over the holiday weekend,” Parade reported a few days ago. It went on to note that a baby boy, Conrad, “arrived at 3:42 a.m. CT on Saturday, Nov. 25 via surrogate.”
As the news spread on Twitter (alright, X.com), some people offered congratulations and others registered their opposition to surrogate pregnancy and assisted reproduction, particularly when used by same-sex couples. Not surprisingly, the conversation got heated and others were drawn in.
The social conservatives expressing opposition are people I respect, including MBD and Mary Hasson, and many of whose views I share. We should be especially concerned about the way in vitro........
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