Audio only:
In this episode Trent shows why anyone of good will should support outlawing a common “family planning” method.
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Trent Horn (00:00):
What if you found out your neighbor was selling their baby to a total stranger? You probably call it cops, right? Well, every year, thousands of babies are sold to strangers in the US and tens of thousands are sold worldwide under the guise of commercial surrogacy, paying a woman to carry an embryo to term and give birth to that child. And in many cases after birth, the baby is given to someone who is not biologically related to the child and is simply paid to have one. The issue went viral last month in a video showing gay country singer Shane McElany and his so- called husband telling their crying child who is saying, Mama, that there is no mama because the child is born through surrogacy to two men.
Shane McElany (00:38):
There is no mama.
Shane McElany (00:41):
So sorry. You have dead dad. Two choices. No mama.
Trent Horn (00:52):
A lot of people were outraged by this and I’m glad to see the tide turning on this issue because four years ago, many prominent conservatives congratulated self-described conservative Dave Rubin for using women acting as gestational surrogates to provide him and his same-sex partner with twins. And only a few people like myself and Ali Beth Stuckey publicly rebuked this. Ruben has also conveniently deleted his older post, celebrating the impregnation of children through surrogates. So in today’s episode, I’ll make the case for why we should ban gestational surrogacy. And I’ll also make the case that you should click the subscribe button to help our channel grow and support us at Trenthornpodcast.com to keep the channel sponsor free and help us to create all this great content. Seriously, if our content has helped you, then please head over and make a small gift at trenhornpodcast.com so we can bless other people as well.
(01:42):
Now let me get some preliminaries out of the way. First, I want to make it clear I am not condemning someone who is born through surrogacy. Some of those people might say to me, “If people like you had your way, I’d never exist.” We can value life while condemning offenses against life. For example, some children are falsely presented as orphans in foreign countries and then adopted by US couples. We can value the lives and families these children have now, none of whom know about the crime of kidnapping involved in their adoption, while saying that such a system like this should be illegal. Second, the gaslighting over the mama clip that I showed earlier infuriates me. Some people will say that babies don’t know what the word mama means since they don’t speak English. So the video, it’s not a big deal. But the point is that babies express the universal human desire for a mother through the word mama, even if they don’t know what the word means.
(02:41):
For example, every language on earth has a word for water, but they’re all different from each other. But every language also has a word for mother, and almost all of them include the letter M and have a mama sound in it. That’s probably because ma sounds are the easiest for infants to say, and they’re directed at the person who is ordered towards sustaining the child’s life, his mother. And so we should outlaw practices designed to destroy that sacred bond between mother and child. And third, I want to make it clear I’m not condemning adoption in general. Adoption involves a child who already exists and everything we do for that child should be in the child’s best interest. Surrogacy, on the other hand, creates a child with the intent of taking him away from one or both of his real parents. In the least damaging but still damaging scenario, a husband and wife might use another woman to birth an embryo created from their sperm and egg.
(03:37):
In this case, the child ends up in the custody of his rightful parents, but he spent the first months of his life maternally bonding with a woman who is not actually his mother. In the more damaging scenarios, a child is created through in vitro fertilization with donor eggs, donor sperm, or both. The child is then birthed through a surrogate and raised by a couple where only one member is a biological parent. In some cases, neither person is related to the child. And now unmarried individuals, even unmarried men, have used donors to create and gain custody of unrelated children. This is no different than just walking down the street to a couple and paying them for their baby, which is illegal. The Hague Convention on Adoption signed by over 100 countries works to ensure that, “Intercountry adoptions are made in the best interests of the child and with respect for his or her fundamental rights and to prevent the abduction, the sale of or traffic in children.” Most adoption agencies are very strict that adoption fees can only cover expenses for birth mothers and cannot be used as income, but commercial surrogates do basically the same thing as birth mothers, but can get paid tens of thousands of dollars for doing so.
(04:49):
That’s why many countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and India ban commercial surrogacy. They recognize it’s a way of exploiting the poor in the same way that letting people sell their organs ends up exploiting the poor. In both cases, you make permanent choices with your body that a rich person would see isn’t worth it, but a poor person can be coerced into tolerating. That women are exploited can also be seen in surrogacy contracts where the people buying the baby might change their mind and so they can legally demand the child be killed through abortion. These people who probably call themselves pro- choice don’t care if the child’s de facto mother, the surrogate, wants to choose to not kill the child. One woman was told by the so- called commissioning parents in her surrogacy case that because the child was missing two fingers, she would have to get an abortion, which she did to avoid being sued.
(05:44):
Most surrogacy contracts have clauses saying that the buying parents get to make the final decision on when abortion can be done. And according to surrogate.com, “If a surrogate chooses to move forward with a pregnancy against the terms of the contract, she may become responsible for the medical bills and costs of the pregnancy from that point on. ” If you’re willing to undergo something as dramatic as pregnancy for on the low end $60,000, you probably aren’t financially well off. And so you aren’t willing or able to pay for medical bills yourself, which leads to women being coerced into having abortions. So just to protect women from being exploited, we can make an easy case for why the US should ban commercial surrogacy, which is already banned in Louisiana and Nebraska, just like in nearly a dozen other countries, many of which are politically more liberal than the United States.
(06:36):
And many countries in Europe also ban so- called altruistic surrogacy, where the woman renting her womb is not making a profit or using a commercial contract. This kind of surrogacy is often done by a relative, which also creates ethical nightmares of things like having babies with your parents or your siblings, as Dave Rubin notes. And
Dave Rubin (06:56):
We thought we could take some of my sister’s eggs, and she’s a mother, now she’s actually pregnant with her third, but that we could get her eggs, and then we would take David’s sperm, and then we would have two children from that. After a long time of talking about a year debating that back and forth and going through all that, there were a lot of ethical and moral issues, and my sister then would be the biological mother of my children. I mean, there were all sorts of things that we were about to traverse.
Trent Horn (07:21):
This is why when commercial surrogacy is outlawed, most surrogacy goes away because close relatives don’t want to be involved in this kind of altruism and strangers typically want to be paid. But even if they do it for free, there are good reasons to ban even this kind of surrogacy. First, it still usually involves creating multiple human embryos and intentionally killing some of them so that others have a better chance to live, but human embryos are human beings. You and I were once embryos. So it’s no surprise someone like Dave Rubin will support in vitro fertilization and surrogacy because he doesn’t think the killing of the unborn is a big deal anyways. But
Dave Rubin (08:00):
I would also say that it’s very unfortunate that abortion is such a big issue for everybody because it’s a personal and private decision, obviously for the most part. And then there’s the issue of where the state has to protect life.
Trent Horn (08:12):
But human embryos are not potential persons. They are persons with great potential who end up in these situations being treated like disposable property, as you can see in this clip of a man talking about acquiring these embryos for him and his partner.
Surrogacy Man (08:27):
All in all, we’re so happy that we decided to purchase as many frozen eggs as we could, 40, because that leaves us with these 10 embryos for two babies. And we’re told that the majority of journeys take two to three transfers to get pregnant. We’ve decided which embryo on both sides that we want to transfer to our two surrogates. We’ll keep you updated as we do the transfers and as we find out whether or not we’re pregnant and continue to be transparent of how many transfers it takes. But we’re not going to share the sex of both babies until we’re officially pregnant, just like any other expecting parents would.
Trent Horn (08:58):
You are not pregnant. Neither of you is pregnant. You are two dudes buying babies and hiring women to do all the pregnancy work while you LARP later, pretending like you gave birth by lying in a hospital bed for photos. I can’t even understand an actual husband and wife using the phrase, “We are pregnant,” because the husband is tending to his wife through the nine-month process, but honestly, we should probably get rid of that language because only women can be pregnant. Only women can give birth. I’m not saying we need to go back to the old standards of men just being in a hospital waiting room during birth, but one might make an argument for it. For
Old Television Educational Show (09:36):
Them, the maternity routine is quite simple. First, you wait. Second, wait patiently or look like it, and most important, keep from underfoot. The
Trent Horn (09:46):
Second reason this should be illegal is because all forms of surrogacy deprive children of the right to be conceived in the marital act and to grow in the bodies of their true mothers. Consider this passage from the catechism of the Catholic Church. A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The supreme gift of marriage is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged right to a child would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights, the right to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents, and the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception. No one has the right to a child because no one has the right to another person. That’s what we call slavery.
(10:31):
All you have a right to is the right to marry and then the right to engage in the marital act to which a child may or may not proceed. If a child does proceed from that act, the parents have a presumed right to care for the child unless evidence of them being unfit or abusive is discovered. In contrast, parents who seek to adopt a child must prove they are fit before they can adopt, so they have to go through things like home studies. But when we legally redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, this has entailed that these same-sex couples also have the same right to try to have a child, which always entails them buying a child from someone else because their relationship is not actually a marriage. Even men who are sex offenders who normally wouldn’t be allowed to adopt children are allowed to buy children in this way, which Representative Nancy Mace has sought to outlaw through the Protecting Children and Surrogacy Act, and they need to be protected.
(11:26):
As you can see in this Newsweek article, which I’ll link in the description below, entitled For-Profit Surrogacy Dehumanizes Women. It says, “In one case, a single man purchased embryos, hired a surrogate, had twins, and then sexually abused them. In Japan, a businessman fathered 16 surrogate children on his own and now wants more. YouTuber Shane Dawson, who’s been accused of making pro PDF file comments, hired a surrogate with his husband, no questions asked. Another couple had 20 surrogate babies in one year on their way to a goal of parenting 105 children. Something isn’t right here. And a bit of advice to LGBT advocates, if you’re trying to beat the allegation that same-sex couples are weirdos who are more likely to harm children, then maybe don’t have, as your representative gay couple, two dudes who look like they’re heading out to film a gay Triple X film.
(12:17):
And this isn’t baseless fearmongering. Studies show that children raised by non-biological parents are more likely to be abused, something called the Cinderella effect, though the amount of risk is disputed. However, 12005 study showed that, “Children residing in households with unrelated adults were nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than children residing with two biological parents.” Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong with a couple, or even in extraordinary cases, a single person adopting a child, like an unmarried aunt adopting her deceased sister and brother-in-law’s children. The problem occurs when children are purposely created outside the marital act because children have the right to be created in love and not in a laboratory. Then the children are ripped away from their mothers by splitting the idea of a mother into two people, the surrogate mother who carried the child in her womb and is the first person the child bonds with and a genetic mother, the egg donor, who is often a stranger to the child, even though her genes have a lasting impact on the child’s life.
(13:18):
Children are also denied their so- called genetic father when sperm donors are used and denied bonding with their actual father whose voice can even be recognized from the womb. And it’s sad when people try to act like this is all perfectly normal or it can be remedied with technology, as you see in this exchange between Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson (13:37):
Children who are breastfed do better.
Dave Rubin (13:40):
Yep.
Jordan Peterson (13:41):
I believe that one year of breastfeeding is equivalent to … I think breastfed kids have a five point IQ advantage and one point IQ is worth one year of education.
Shane McElany (13:51):
I have two freezers in my garage, two industrial freezers full of breast milk. Except
Trent Horn (13:56):
That fresh breast milk is much better than frozen because whenever you freeze something, you destroy some of the cellular elements and so the quality degrades. That’s why you can tell the difference between restaurants that serve frozen reheated food and restaurants that serve fresh cooked food. And this is especially true with breast milk that is stored for longer than six months, which sounds like what Reuben is doing. Now, does that mean people who rely on frozen breast milk because they’re sick or unable to breastfeed or bad people? Absolutely not, but we shouldn’t glamorize emergency food for children like donated breast milk as being the normative way that children should be fed, just as we shouldn’t treat emergency food buckets like regular dinner choices because they’re nowhere near as healthy. Finally, I pray that all people, but especially all Christians, would support banning surrogacy and protecting the natural bond between mothers and their children.
(14:47):
Unfortunately, some Christians believe that a behavior can’t be sinful if it isn’t explicitly condemned in scripture. So they’ll say that contraception, for example, isn’t always sinful. It’s up to the individual to decide. Even though prior to 1930, all Christians believe contraception was sinful. But if that’s your approach to moral theology, then it becomes difficult to apply biblical principles to modern evils, like in vitro fertilization or gestational surrogacy, because the biblical authors never had these things in mind when they wrote their sacred texts. Katie Faust is a Protestant author who has done a lot of work combating surrogacy, and even she notes the problem writing this. Few Christians are confused about same-sex parenting. They understand it not only goes against God’s design for the family, but against nature as well. Unfortunately, many Christians are confused about surrogacy. Outside of Catholicism, hardly any denominations have clear teaching on IVF, let alone the much rarer practice of surrogacy.
(15:46):
When did you last hear your pastor address the issue of surrogacy from the pulpit? Odds are never. Solo scriptura all the way for me, but at times like this, an evangelical Humana vitae sounds awfully nice. That’s why I’m grateful for the forceful and universal guidance the Catholic Church provides on this and many other issues, as can be seen in Pope Francis who called for a global ban on surrogacy and Pope Leo who said this.
Pope Leo XIV (16:10):
Likewise, there’s the practice of surrogacy. By transforming gestation into a negotiable service, this violates the dignity both of the child who is reduced to a product and of the mother exploiting her body and the generative process and distorting the original relational calling of the family.
Trent Horn (16:33):
Finally, if you are a conservative who is in favor of legal abortion, so- called same-sex marriage, calling prostitution sex work, and buying children through surrogacy, then I’ve got news for you. You’re not a conservative, you’re a liberal who likes low taxes. And if you’re a Christian who always supports your favorite conservative commenter, even when they obviously contradict Christian teaching on things like surrogacy or IVF, then you are a victim of political tribalism whose first allegiance should be to the lion of the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ. For more on the subject, I recommend Olivia Morrill’s interview on being a child of surrogacy that is linked in the scription below. And my book co-authored with Layla Miller called Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.