The Hypocrisy and Homophobia of Anti-Surrogacy Radicals
Currents
Among the more suspicious developments within, ironically, the past nine months, one that stands out is a new controversy around surrogacy — the process of arranging for a woman to gestate and give birth to someone else’s child. In my many years on social media, I have never once seen anyone voice an opinion about surrogacy either positive or negative. It was a virtual non-issue. Then, all of a sudden, prominent or not-so-prominent same-sex couples posting photos of themselves with their newborn sons or daughters started getting swarmed by far-right haters by the thousands. And, just as with so many other issues, including sex work, pornography, sexual freedom, and even just sex itself, the far-right was joined by their once-unlikely, but now apparently trusty allies, radical feminists.
At first, I thought the backlash against surrogacy was just another example of Twitter being awful, but this phenomenon has proved to be more widespread than I thought. Newsweek published the headline “For-Profit Surrogacy Dehumanizes Women”, a sentiment echoed in other mainstream outlets such as The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and The National Review. Pope Francis came out against surrogacy, calling it “a despicable practice that should be universally banned.” The European Union passed a resolution describing surrogacy as a form of human trafficking. In fact, surrogacy is outlawed or heavily restricted across much of the industrialized world. While US states adopt a comparatively hands-off approach to surrogacy, the online anglosphere has become a sounding board for hardcore religious conservatives, especially Catholics, along with some feminists, to decry surrogacy as “gravely evil” and an “abomination.”
Curiously, it’s not photos of straight couples using surrogates that inspire hate clicks and rage bait, it’s always the gays.
And when it comes to same-sex male couples, there are some astounding double standards. Jeremy Hambly, who runs The Quartering, an online political show with over 500,000 followers across platforms, tweeted that gay and bi men who use surrogates are “child trafficking”, but also says, “I tolerate [surrogacy] for a husband and wife who are biologically unable to have a child.” These attitudes have become increasingly common online. Male couples who have children through surrogates are told that they’re selfish and performative narcissists who only want a baby as a designer accessory. They’re told that they are ripping a child from its loving mother, treating women like microwaves, renting women’s wombs, and using them as their own “private incubators.” Over and over they’re told they are human traffickers. They’re told by the hard right that they are creeps and degenerates, and by radical feminists that they’re part of an evil patriarchal capitalist system coercing and exploiting women. According to these radfems, the female in question is selling the baby to the highest bidder — it’s literal slavery!
Apparently, there is something uniquely infuriating at the sight of gay couples who take photos with their newborns, whereas photos of straight couples with their surrogate infants prompt nowhere near as much outrage. As one commenter put it to me, referring to one such photo, “He didn’t go through hours of labor, he didn't give birth to that child, he shouldn’t be a parent.” Gay men selfishly did nothing… except commit to caring for the child for the rest of their lives.
The gold medalist Olympic diver Tom Daley and his husband, Oscar-winning filmmaker Dustin Lance Black, faced similar blowback when they had a baby via surrogacy back in 2018. On Mumsnet, an online women’s rights forum where self-styled “radical feminists” congregate to seethe about and organize pressure campaigns against men, trans people, and the like, one member stated, “The baby was both deprived of its mother and abandoned by its mother. That this happened was planned. I consider that to be child abuse.”
The fact is, when it comes to surrogacy in Western countries, babies are not “ripped” from their mothers’ arms — they are politely handed over. In many scenarios, the mother continues to be involved in the child’s life because she’s a relative or friend of the couple involved. To many radical feminists, however, the woman is being forced to give the child away even though deep down she really wants it, and to many social conservatives, a child raised by two men will invariably wind up traumatized for life. In reality, studies show, as a Forbes breakdown describes, that “children with [same-sex] parents fare as well as, or better than, children with parents of the opposite sex.” Of course, unhinged bigots never let facts get in the way of good demagoguery and same-sex fathers still get regular comments like “Mothers are essential. The first act in your child’s life is to deprive them of a mother. Horrific,” or, in a now-removed post (the user was banned), “Yes. Children need a mother and a father. And two degenerates playing pretend family are not the same as real family.”
This idea that same-sex couples want to have babies via surrogacy for nefarious purposes comes up disturbingly often. As the aforementioned Jeremy Hambly posted in another gem, “Founder Of ‘PinkNews’ Purchases a baby. In [sic] shocking turn of events, it's yet another boy. I wonder why they always buy boys?”
The insinuation that gay men prefer baby boys because they are pedophiles who want to sexually abuse them is an age-old homophobic canard. As with all bigoted stereotypes, all it takes is endless repetition and a couple of real cases to misrepresent entire demographics of people by the actions of a statistically infinitesimal few.
Last year, a story broke about a gay couple who used their two adopted, pre-pubescent boys to make child porn and attempted to pimp them out to their friends. Just writing that sentence makes my blood boil. And sure enough, homophobes seized on this single case report as “proof” that gay men are all pedophiles who want to have kids because they’re sexually attracted to them. Screenshots of this story are omnipresent in the comment sections of articles and posts about gay parenthood. Decades of research show that gay men are no more likely than any other group to sexually abuse children. Most pedophiles are straight, should that justify denying fatherhood to all straight men?
In true political horseshoe fashion, an oft-cited piece published in Progress.org totally agrees with the far-right, but for entirely different reasons. In it, the author, Dr. Linda Layne, discusses a study of 40 male and 55 female same-sex couples with surrogate children that found gay men chose boys 60% of the time, whereas lesbians chose a 50/50 boy-to-girl ratio. Of course, 40 couples is a very small study, and Layne notes, “The sample is not large enough to be conclusive.” Nevertheless, she goes on to write that “it does raise the question of whether sex selection for boys is taking place among gay men who choose gestational surrogacy.”
Being that it’s Progress.org, Layne naturally concludes that this reinforces “gender stereotyping.” She condemned “male selection”, and argued that the reason men as a whole (whether straight, gay, or bi) have a preference for male offspring is in part because it is thought to “increase the likelihood of economic success”, before proceeding to rehash tried-and-no-longer-true wage gap narratives.
What’s fascinating are the ways in which each extreme abandons its own principles to find ways to oppose surrogacy for same-sex couples. The same feminists who chant “my body my choice” when it comes to abortion pivot to “poor women have no other choice but to rent out their womb” when it comes to surrogacy. Radical feminists paradoxically support a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy and to pursue a nine-to-five career, but not her right to choose to have a child for another couple in exchange for capital to pursue her life’s ambitions.
For its part, the hard right is just as deranged over this issue. When the subject is surrogacy, social conservatives set aside their supposedly unshakeable “pro-life”, “pro-family”, and pro-natalist convictions and become suddenly concerned with how damaging it is for a woman’s body to have a baby. “Deeply held beliefs” pale in comparison to the hair-on-fire scramble to stop the scary gays from raising children.
The attitudes and discourse surrounding surrogacy ultimately rest on a game of framing. If you’re pro-surrogacy, you use words like grow, gestate, give, facilitate, help, and hire. If you’re anti-surrogacy, you use words like rip, tear, rent, exploit, use, discard, take, and traffic. Forming a legal, voluntary, consensual contract to pay a woman to implant an embryo in her womb so that couples who cannot get pregnant can have a baby of their own becomes, under a different framing and with some deceptive rhetorical sleight of hand, “using and discarding a woman’s body and stealing her baby.”
Are there legitimate moral concerns with surrogacy? Only when it’s viewed through the dystopian lens the far-right and radical feminists try very hard to impose on it. Forced surrogacy is wrong, full stop. No Western country permits forcing women to get pregnant against her will, or the stealing of children. There’s a world of difference between those fears and the reality in countries like the United States. But this is the warped framing that has taken root among the strange bedfellows of anti-surrogacy radicalism — and it only seems to boil over when same-sex couples use surrogates. Take the far-right’s penchant for seeing human trafficking conspiracies around every corner, mix it with old-fashioned homophobia, left-wing vitriol toward capitalism, and add a dash of radical feminist misandry for good measure, and what you get is a very toxic brew indeed. Drunk on this concoction, social conservatives claim they love family, and feminist hardliners say they want bodily autonomy — but not if it enables two married men to raise a child together.
A woman choosing to enter into a contract of her own volition to carry a baby to term for another couple should be her right in any free society. And, let’s be clear, getting up in arms about surrogacy only about same-sex, male couples isn’t some kind of principled stand. It’s homophobia and misandry — and all the grandiose scaremongering in the world can’t change that.
Published June 13, 2024
