Erasing birth mothers

Pop star Meghan Trainor and her husband recently announced that they have had a baby via a surrogate mother. They already have two sons, born naturally, but opted for the surrogate option. By Trainor’s own account, this decision came after long conversations with her doctor against the background of struggles she experienced after pregnancy and natural birth.

Any new birth should be a source of joy. The pictures of the Trainor family and the new child reflect that. This is a child that will be cherished and (we hope) grow up in a happy home. But awkward questions lurk just below the surface. The photograph of Trainor in what appears to be a hospital bed holding the child who still seems wet with the birth process is strange. Trainor did not give birth to the child, so why pose for a picture as if she had? It is not quite as bizarre as the picture of Pete Buttigieg and his partner holding twin babies in a similar hospital setting, but it is no closer to reality. What is absent from both photographs—or rather, who is absent—is the birth mother, she who carried the children for nine months, whose body nurtured them, and who then gave birth to them. She has been erased.

Fertility issues bite Christians hard. Few pastors have not had to counsel couples struggling with infertility. And many Christians will experience the brutal reality of their own infertility or that of good friends. When a young couple wants to have children, they desire a good thing. But does the desire legitimate all the means? Surrogacy carries with it an underlying philosophy of what it means to be human, and of what it means to be a mother. It denies the importance of the relationship of gestation and renders irrelevant the physical connection between mother and child. But that relationship and that connection exist in reality, and they cannot be denied with impunity. Perhaps those faked hospital photographs are an acknowledgment of the importance of that physical connection.

One obvious riposte is that adoption does the same thing. But it doesn’t. Adoption provides a substitute for someone—the physical parent—who should be there but is for some reason absent. It does not at its core offer a normative philosophy of parenthood as surrogacy does.

Another objection might be that surrogacy provides a source of fertility that should be there but is not. Yet the example of Meghan Trainor indicates that is not the case. She is fertile. She has two children. The decision to have a child by surrogate is a choice based upon other factors. This is a move, again along with the odd hospital photograph, that has the effect of normalizing the process rather than treating it as an exceptional response to extreme circumstances.

And that leads to a further aspect of surrogacy’s impact: It pushes the cultural imagination further along the road of seeing children as commodities, as things one can buy to order, and mothers as the machines that deliver the goods. These patterns of thinking are already established in our culture through the impact of no-fault divorce and the legal ramifications of IVF. Surrogacy is both consistent with, and an intensification of, these trends.

None of this is intended to derogate from the evident joy of the Trainors, let alone deny that they will love this beautiful child. But it is to make the point that the satisfaction of legitimate personal desires has public, social, and cultural implications. Our therapeutic world sees happiness as an imperative, so long as nobody else is hurt. I suspect that, in the long run, surrogacy will hurt not just children and mothers. In its dehumanizing impact, it will hurt us all. Christians need to grasp that point, especially in the area of fertility.