Yet another gay conservative surrogate-born baby announcement has been met with another round of conservative elites offering their congratulations.
Mind you, many of these same people surely objected to the hospital bed photo of Pete Buttigieg and his partner. But never mind, now it’s one of ours, so all of the “kids need moms and dads,” “stop erasing women,” and “sound-of-freedom-end-child-trafficking” messages disappear.
Dave Rubin’s surrogacy announcement wasn’t the first, and Guy Benson’s won’t be the last. So here’s your one-stop shop on how to respond the next time a gay — or straight — conservative you love announces that he has created a motherless child.
First, your arguments need to stem from a posture of child defense. There are good bioethical arguments against surrogacy. And feminists largely reject surrogacy based on the reality that it exploits women. But those arguments can fall flat because very often, the women involved — the egg seller, the surrogate, and the commissioning parents — all love and consent to the arrangement.
A conservative position rejects surrogacy based on the self-evident, natural rights of the child, his right to life, to his mother and father, to be born free and not bought and sold. The child is the voiceless party in the arrangement who would never consent to the intentional loss of his or her mother.
When discussing surrogacy, you will need to constantly steer the conversation away from what adults want and recenter it on the rights and well-being of the child. The
