In December, gay father Balázs Boross published” Queering babies: ( Auto ) ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy” in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. The article “explores how encounters with]a substitute child ] destroy or confirm ethical anticipation about the’ babyness’ of babies, the’ parentness’ of parents”.
Given their prenatal history, queerness can provide a window into the queerness of all children, according to Boross. Biological babies are naturally gay creatures.
Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, criticized the “autoethnographic account” as depicting the” sexualization of babies.” He criticized Boross ‘ discussion of his daughter’s instinctive search for a breast during early skin-to-skin contact and characterized the relationship between a parent and child as inherently “gendered and sexual.” Boross also referred to the conversation as being somewhat “animalistic and perverse” and “animalistic and perverse.”
The troubling report that acts as scholarship deserves sharp and unapologetic denigration. Adults should not sexualize infants, surrogate-born or then. But Boross is right that surrogacy does “queer” children, just not in the physical sense.
Queer Experiencing Gender
What is “queer”? Many consider the expression as a physical identification of something other than right, and often as other than gay, trans, or transgender. We think of “queer” as physical, but something else.
Even the queer-identified person knows what that something more is, or maybe he is” still exploring”. It occupies the second place in the Gay acronym that, within the social imagination, it’s an extension of those intimate identities.
But “queer idea” defines itself as a social tool that seeks to destroy societal norms and groups, aiming to dismantle traditional buildings and perceptions. Boross agrees. When he polled a group of queer dads about the way their children perceive “queerness” in them, he said queerness “embodied resistance to confining constructs of structurally defined and politically controlled ideals.” Surrogacy does really function as a “resistance” to” politically controlled ideals”.
Because it consistently violates children’s rights, my philanthropic Them Before Us is a strong critic of infertility both here and overseas. We broke the story behind Massachusetts ‘ egregious surrogacy bill, which would allow the immediate sales of newborn babies. We identify the legal and technical abuse of children by the baby-manufacturing industry, speak against surrogacy legalization, and introduce pedophiles who obtain children through these “progressive” technologies.
If “queer” is the destruction of universally recognized categories and “deconstructs traditional structures”, that’s exactly what surrogacy achieves for both babies and parents.
Surrogacy causes natural mothers and fathers to lose their jobs.
To explain why, let’s go to surrogacy itself. What is surrogacy?
Quite simply, it trifurcates “mother” into three purchasable and optional components: 1 ) The genetic mother who contributes the egg and thus half of the child’s biological identity, 2 ) The birth mother, with whom the child forms a primal bond, establishing the foundation for future trust and attachment, 3 ) The social mother, who furnishes the female-specific love and investment that maximizes child development and satisfies a child’s soul.
Except in cases of tragedy, the biological and social “norm” throughout human history is that all three “mothers” are found in one woman. That is never the case with surrogacy.
In his prologue titled” Mommy Dad,” which acknowledges that “names do curious things… They single out and separate… and communicate norms,” Boross supports this assault on categories. He thinks that their two-year-old daughter started calling him” Mommy Dad” as proof that surrogacy must blur the boundaries between the traditional definitions of mother and father.
Little Greta clearly craves the maternal love she has been denied, because she projects some kind of motherness on Boross by calling him” Mommy Dad,” despite the fact that both her fathers and her teachers pound into the two-year-old that she is in a” two-dad family.” When this young girl asks for” two mommies” at age five, he responds by denying that she is because he and his partner” suck at braiding her hair.” His commitment to the “non-normative parenting” made possible through surrogacy has blinded him to this little girl’s needs.
How Surrogacy Destroys Childhood
The destruction of Boross ‘ daughter’s right to her mother aside, surrogacy is an assault on surrogate-born babies in other ways as well.
First, surrogacy really does destroy the “babyness” of babies, primarily by ignoring their humanity. Surrogate-born children are not even considered children, regardless of the sexual orientation or family structure of the intended parents.
Allowing the creation and custody of a child to be governed by contract, as surrogacy arrangements do, treats children as property — items to be commissioned, purchased, and exchanged. That’s by design, because the destruction of human life is rampant in the world of reproductive technologies.
Destroying someone’s couch is no big deal, but as Alabama briefly learned, destroying someone’s children certainly is. The Big Fertility business model is critical to the dehumanization of children in the world of IVF and surrogacy.
Next, surrogacy destroys the notion that children are the property of their natural parents. They are no longer born in a pre-political natural family and are no longer born inherently related.
Surrogacy and the legal adjustments necessary to accommodate intentional father or mother loss cause children to be awarded to whichever adults have the means and the money to purchase them. Surrogacy is prohibited by the” traditional structure” that presums babies come from one man and one woman and belong to that man and woman.
Surrogacy Destroys Parenthood
Surrogacy also obliterates the traditional definitions of what a “parent” is. Historically, we have recognized parenthood based on two criteria — biology or adoption.
The first grants children the legal right to the two adults who are arguably the safest, most connected to, most invested in, and most protective of them. The second aims to imitate those safeguards by conducting extensive screening to ensure that children are raised by loving parents.
But in unnatural families, biology is seen as inherently “discriminatory” because same-sex couples can never produce a child who is biologically related to both adults. And undergoing an adoption process for a partner’s biological child made some same-sex parents feel “lesser than” and “unequal to” their heterosexual counterparts.
Therefore, intended parents must be included in the normalization of unnatural families. Now any adult who can assemble sperm, egg, and womb, who “intends” to parent, and who has a valid contract can walk out of the hospital with an unrelated baby. Third-party reproduction in general, and surrogacy specifically, genuinely destroys the category of “parent”.
Queering Every Family, Whether We Want It or Not
Boross is accurate in his assessment of the “queerness” of surrogate babies and their parents, as well as the possibility that their normative-destroying queerness may soon extend to parents and children conceived the natural way.
Parenting laws are currently schizophrenic. Parents of biological children who leave the hospital with their child are not subject to any fitness screening. Adopted parents who leave the hospital with an unrelated child have to undergo months of screening, background checks, home studies, references, training, and a social worker follow-up. There is no vetting for purchasing parents who leave the hospital with an unrelated surrogate child.
What is the solution to this disparate treatment? It’s undoubtedly not necessary for all parents to share a biological family. Per leftist family dictates, that’s discriminatory. The only way to lower the importance of biological connections in each parent/child relationship is to downplay the relationship.
That’s the route Canada took in 2005. Upon redefining marriage, they scrubbed their parenthood laws of all references to “natural”, “biological”, or “genetic” parents, and instead simply referred to everyone as “legal” parents. Parental rights no longer exist as a result of a biological parent-child bond’s pre-political relationship. The government of Canada currently grants parental rights.
And what the state gives, the state can take. As state after state overhauls their parenthood laws to accommodate commercial surrogacy, that government-constructed family model is spreading through the country.
Governments across the world, most of academia, and the adults surrounding Boross have been captured by queer theory. As a result, Greta, along with thousands of other children, has lost her mother. This profound misinformation has devastating effects on both parents and newborns.
Greta and other surrogate children must deal with the reality that their father’s queer utopia required that they be given the freedom to be known and loved by their mothers. And the rest of us will have to deal with the cultural consequences of allowing the modern family and technology to “queer” all children and parents.
