Baby selling is big business

On Wednesday the New York Times published "The Fight For Fertility Equality," informing readers that everyone should be able to have a baby. This right comes even at the economic and emotional expense of hiring surrogates, forcing insurance companies to pay for fertility procedures for LGBTQ couples, and other procedures. This is all in service to ultimately erasing women, even as authors claim the problem is society and those unwilling to have children through traditional means are merely wading through repeated and perpetual injustices.

The subhead of the piece reads, "A movement has formed around the idea that one’s ability to build a family should not be determined by wealth, sexuality, gender or biology." This sounds innocent enough. So many people, including gay couples, poor couples, or I suppose, transgender couples—and singles, let’s not exclude them—want children. Why shouldn’t everyone have their very own baby? They look so cute on Insta!

To that end, this April, it became legal in New York state to pay a surrogate to carry a baby. Surrogacy is an atrocity against women that treats them like a commodity to be used, enjoyed, and discarded once their reproductive system is no longer needed or desired.

Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy says in the New York Times piece, "This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion. True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers LGBTs face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles."

At least Mr. Poole-Dayan is somewhat honest: Before the Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage via Obergefell v. Hodges, many conservatives predicted this would happen eventually and here we are. Except it’s even worse than we imagined.

Now, the LGBTQ community wants to force insurance companies to cover procedures that would make this biological anomaly a miracle due to scientific progress.

"Fertility equality activists are asking, at a minimum, for insurance companies to cover reproductive procedures like sperm retrieval, egg donation and embryo creation for all prospective parents, including gay couples who use surrogates. Ideally, activists would also like to see insurance cover embryo transfers and surrogacy fees. This would include gay men who would transfer benefits directly to their surrogate," the piece reads.

Let’s be honest: This isn’t just about starting a family. This is about realizing the natural, biological, innate, limitations to the human body—and harboring disgust that one single sex can’t procreate within itself—and instead of acknowledging it and respecting it, the LGBTQ community cries foul and begins the proverbial march against yet another injustice or "inequality."

Now they are demanding entitlement, special treatment. As if the scientific fact that only biological women have the ability to bear babies is somehow a purposeful, devious, campaign by straight people to prevent the fulfillment of the LGBTQ community’s dreams.

This truth is now inconvenient for LGBTQ couples to the point of being an injustice and they now must punish women for it. But women are not a commodity. They are not meant to be bought and sold any more than the babies that emerge, nurtured, from their bodies.

Yet, these perpetual cries for victimhood and change are a bizarre but effective mechanism that really only the LGBTQ community gets away with frequently. I might want to be a size four but I’m not going to start a campaign against thin models demanding they pay for me to look like them. Still, the LGBTQ community believes it’s unfair that women have a uterus. They believe that those uteruses are theirs by right, for sale or rent, and that they should be able to pay women to grow babies in their uterus for them and then sever all ties to the women who nourished the baby-commodity in her belly with her own body, thereby erasing women yet again.

The erasure of women from motherhood is not only dangerous to the women forced into reproductive servitude but for the children who are instant, intentional orphans.

The best example of this is the South Australian gay couple Mark and Matt, who notoriously went to Thailand to literally pick up their newborn twins that were born through commercialized surrogacy in 2014. This tweet thread, about the couple summarizes the surrogacy process and identifies the red flags appropriately.

"These babies have a complex genealogical history. They were conceived from eggs extracted from a single Caucasian donor woman, separately fertilized with the men’s sperm, then implanted into two Thai women who acted as surrogate mothers. The men spent $80,000 to obtain the children. Commercial surrogacy is illegal in Australia and adoption by gay people disallowed in South Australia. What most concerns me is the complete erasure of the mother or mothers in these acts of global womb renting by wealthy Westerners.

"This latest case highlights this mother’s disappearance. There is no mother in the story. A graph showed the two men as 'Biological Fathers' and the women as 'Surrogate 1' and 'Surrogate 2' [...] The birth mothers won't ever be contacted or shared in photos even though it was their voices the babies heard and responded to in-utero, their bodies who nourished and sustained them and prepared for their arrival. The mothers who grew and birthed Tate and Estelle are eliminated from the children’s history, treated as nothing more than disposable uteruses. The physical, emotional, spiritual bonds between mother and child that develop during a pregnancy are rendered null and void by a monetary transaction."

As doctors line their pockets, and babies are sold across borders, it is not equality, but money, power and influence that are at stake. Women and children—as usual—are collateral damage.

Now that New York state has quietly made this legal, you'll see a whole lot more sticky situations that involve using women for their uterus and then banishing them. Commodifying poor women to do the bidding of wealthy men who want to erase motherhood for their own selfish reasons, whether it’s due to being pro-LGBTQ or not is an affront to women, mothers, and the beautiful gift of bearing children.