Kramer vs. Kramer
Divorce rates peaked in the United States around 1980. This dissolution of the traditional family unit was part of the larger counterculture era—and it’s been preserved in many movies and TV shows from that long period. Just to name a couple, there was Divorce American Style, a 1967 satirical comedy that skewered the legal and financial absurdities of divorce, starring formerly wholesome stalwarts Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds. There was also Love, American Style, a lighthearted romantic anthology series—less a sitcom than a string of sketches that highlighted the new era of sexual openness—that aired on ABC from 1969, to 1974. Changes to the American family, stable for centuries, were underway.
The so‑called “divorce genre” reached its emotional apex with Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979—a courtroom drama about child custody that swept the Oscars that year, capturing Best Picture, Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Best Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep), Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The story concerns a woman named Joanna (Meryl Streep) who leaves her husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and their son Billy for over a year, then returns to wage a fierce custody battle. Back then, divorce and custody disputes were treated as contract disputes adn often settled by trial. The courtroom scenes, sharply acted by Streep and tough‑guy Howard Duff (as Ted’s attorney), foreshadows the tectonic shifts in family law.
Joanna frankly admits she left her husband and child to explore her own needs. Watch closely: it shows the world that was passing—and the new one being born.
She wins the court fight. At the time, motherhood was still considered sacrosanct. Ted braces himself for the morning when his son will go away, and the child acutely feels that the more stable parent is slipping from his tiny grasp. In the penultimate scene, Joanna has a revelation about her ever-shifting emotional life, and changes course again, after having put everyone through a bruising legal fight:
In logic of the film, the child—Billy—is clearly the biological product of both parents, who were married at his conception. She could not find happiness and therefore, the union must be dissolved, and the child must lose an intact family. But, Billy WAS the biological product of the union.
Over the past 45 years, divorce has declined—but that’s partly because marriage has declined. More children are born outside marriage, eliminating the need for divorce. Still, there’s often a legal need to divide finances and determine child custody. After the no fault laws were passed, there was no more court proceedings, the authorities just apply the formula, Solomon style, splitting the money and the time with the child via the calculations fixed by the state.
Globally, fertility rates are also falling—many countries have dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Some of the world’s most populous countries are shrinking, in patterns one might expect only in war or epidemics.
Indeed, the family structure that’s lasted for centuries is radically changing. Enter IVF (in vitro fertilization), where a human is created not inside a mother’s body, but in a dish—and then implanted in a woman’s uterus. Once esoteric, this process has now become mainstream.
The evidence surrounds us: the traditional human family as we know it is dissolving, and our natural regenerative capacity is being both discarded and overtaken by science. The human baby of the future will be created and raised in entirely new ways. Increasingly, babies are born through contractual arrangements—their parts chosen and assembled—then raised outside traditional family structures. They are organically related to no one. This is the most significant rewrite of human familial relations of all time. What are far along the journey now.
Here’s how it unfolds.
Ancient Foundations
Every year, Houston, like so many cities, is blessed with Summer Shakespeare. I go willingly and joyfully, and I take someone each year. I love it. Each year, a familiar English phrase, one I use often, sparks recognition when I learn of its origin in Shakespeare.
This year, the players staged As You Like It, featuring the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, delivered by the melancholy Jaques. Here is a beautiful portion:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
Every work of great art, literature, and film reflects people moving through these stages, sometimes gracefully, sometimes stumbling, often with mirth and joy, but just as frequently with sadness and weeping.
We’re now well along with the Age of Knowledge, and even more of the language of this once timeless passage is coming into question. This phrase in particular catches my eye: And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
Why a furnace? Because this is the heat that catches the eyebrow (the mind) of his mistress which, if things go to plan, will lead to the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
This phrase sets the cycle up again to repeat, stage after stage, generation after generation. But what if, as is the case, infants—mewling and puking—do not result from a lover’s sighing furnace, do any of these stages carry on as before, or repeat in a cycle at all? This question is as vital as the basic question parents fear from their natural offspring: “Where do babies come from?”
To understand the natural order of things, it is often useful to turn to the remnant works of antiquity to see how previous eras of humanity operated. The Bible offers many instances of family formation in just the first chapter. The story of Adam and Eve starts the cycle when they are said to have given both to two children, both boys, one of whom murders the other. There are long recitations of the generations, where one human begets another. Seth, Noal, Issac, Jospeh, all these men have children, sometimes with one wife, sometimes when they have more than one wife. In the Bible we find two stories of maternal variation and dispute.
The first is that of Sarah. Sarah was the wife of Abraham, and in the earlier parts of the story, we find that Abraham, to save his life, lies about who Sarah is, describing her as his sister rather than his wife so that he will not be killed. She is taken into the house of both the Pharaoh in Egypt and later into the house of King Abimelech. Just what happened to her in these periods is in dispute, but both kings discovered the ruse and returned her to Abraham. She was, in fact, according to the story, his half-sister.
Sarah cannot conceive a child, so she instructs Abraham to have sex with a servant girl, Hagar, and a child is born of this union. Ishmael is a baby born of Sarah’s will, though not Sarah’s body. Here we have the first conflict over the roles of mothers in a situation where a child is not the product of two adults, but three. It was Sarah’s will that brought Ismeal into being. Years later, after Sarah has a child of her own, she exiles both Hagar and Ishmael for fear that Ishmael will compete with her son Isaac for inheritance. According to the narrative, Isaac is one of the Jewish patriarchs and Ishmael is the patriarch of the Arabs.
The second story recounts a legal judgment rendered by a sovereign. In this case, two women are living in the same household, presumably both wives of the same man. Each has an infant, but one baby dies. The women are in a dispute over the identity of the surviving child, each claiming to be the mother. They bring their case before King Solomon. Lacking the ability to determine who the biological mother is, Solomon orders that the living baby be cut in half, with each woman receiving a portion. One woman agrees to grim proposal, reasoning that of she can’t have the live baby, no one can, while the other pleads for the baby’s life, urging that Solomon give the child to her rival. Solomon declares this woman the true mother and grants her custody of the child, though he has no way, and doesn’t say, that the winner is the actual mother, the one who gave birth. He only can act within what he can see, which is that one woman is vengeful and wants the child, even at the cost of the child’s life, and the other has the best interests of the child in mind.
So, outside the bounds of one man and one woman having a child together the natural way, conflict is much more likely. In the case of Hagar and Ismael, the conflict results in banishment and bitterness, along with generational warfare between half siblings.
In the many centuries that followed antiquity, the role of women and children changed, and women were legally absorbed into the estates of men. From the Bible through the Elizabethan era, when Shakespeare was writing his plays, there are tales of women counted as an asset, along with the children and livestock. A principal driver of world history has the practice of using women and their offspring to seal alliance among powerful families. It was assumed that the woman at the center of the trade would be the vessel through which a powerful family would secure the following generation.
The modern era, barely two hundred years old, has changed the cultural and legal place of women in many countries. Carving out the woman legally from that of men has taken many decades, centuries even, but every state and the federal government has overlapping protection that give a woman legal status that isn’t surrendered to a father or husband regardless of marriage or when children are present. In most US states, a woman cannot get married until she is 18, and in ay places, she is sexually off limits until then as well.
It is impossible to separate these developments from the accumulated wealth of the countries that fostered them. Only wealthy societies can afford to offer these kinds of choices to women, to minorities of different kinds, and certainly to sexual minorities.
It is wealth and choice that have brought us to the next phase of human development.
Endless Autonomy
In the latter half of the 20th century, advances in technology, science, and law began to reshape how children were conceived and cared for. This transformation coincided with a great boom in human population. Medical and public health breakthroughs reduced child mortality and extended lifespans, creating both more babies and more old people. This demographic swell, in turn, influenced the cultural and legal framework in which scientists operated. The sudden increase in the human population forms the background for the laws that followed.
A milestone on this road was the Roe v Wade decision handed down by the Supreme Court in the middle of this demographic boom in 1973. The mental framework of this public decision had been gestating for many decades, but the decision clearly marked the point where the relationship between a mother and the child inside her was defined not as an immutable fact of nature, fixed in its course as a part of the evolutionary design of humanity, and into a flexible option in which the relationship between mother and child was subject to her individual will. The family formations that had defined human relationships for centuries were subjected to the will of an individual who had all power to supersede the interests of everyone else. As a result, reproductive bonds could now be affirmed, suspended, or severed by a woman’s personal choice.
The implications of this change cannot be overstated. Legally, human familial relationships were framed as mechanical and conditional. Whatever actions produced by a baby were secondary and only legally and financially relevant. In this view, babies ceased to be human by themselves; instead, they became less than the “the sum of the parts,” and the mother’s body a vessel whose contents she could hold or release as her autonomy dictates. If the baby had no legal standing, then a baby summoned from contracted parts, and not just the male and female parts assembled inside her body, was a natural extension of the law, if the science could make it happen. What was possible was naturally allowable. It did not take long for science to break the biological barrier, and for complications to ensue.
The mechanics of achieving human fertilization outside the body were perfected in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s—and the breakthrough bore fruit in 1978, when Louise Brown became the first person ever born via in vitro fertilization (IVF). In just under a decade, this medical advance began to raise the kinds of ethical and theological questions the ancient texts foresaw.
Fast forward to 1985—12 years after Roe v. Wade (1973), just six years after Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)—and the Baby M case thrust the legal quandaries of reproduction squarely back into courtrooms. In that case, a surrogacy contract between William Stern, his wife Elizabeth, and Mary Beth Whitehead, who would be impregnated and then surrender parental rights, unraveled into courtroom combat over custody and contract enforceability.
Here is a summary provided by Time Magazine in an article about the surrogate that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, now divorced and estranged, hired to carry their third child.
In 1985, a biochemist named Bill Stern and his pediatrician wife Elizabeth Stern, faced with the fact that Elizabeth’s multiple sclerosis would prevent her from carrying a pregnancy, hired a woman named Mary Beth Whitehead to bear a child fathered by Bill Stern via artificial insemination. (Kardashian West reportedly also chose surrogacy because of health concerns.) As TIME explained to readers as the case developed, Whitehead had come forward to be a surrogate out of a desire to help a couple facing infertility, and underwent testing and counseling before being matched with the Sterns, who agreed to pay her $10,000 along with other fees and payment to the clinic that arranged the surrogacy. When the baby was born, he or she would be the Sterns’ child.
But when the time came, it became clear that things were not quite so straightforward. Because laws about surrogacy at the time were not well developed, the rights of those involved were unclear.
“Whitehead began to have misgivings about handing over the girl she named Sara Elizabeth and the Sterns named Melissa Elizabeth,” TIME reported. “She refused the agreed-upon payment from the Sterns, so the money was put in an escrow account. A few days later the Sterns agreed to let Whitehead keep the baby for a short time. When the child was not returned after several weeks, the tug-of-war began.”
The two issues that had to be set before the courts in New Jersey were the issue of payment and custody. If the courts decided that the $10,000 payment that was part of the contract was legally binding, it would be finding that a woman can rent out her uterus, though renting her vagina was prostitution and illegal. They decided against this, and Whitehead never collected the money. They also concluded that parental rights can’t be terminated because of a contract, and that Whitehead had visitation rights. So, because the egg was hers, and she was not deemed unfit, she and a man she never had sex with, and to whom she was not married, who was in fact married to another woman, had parental rights which were shared with the married couple.
So, the child had in essence, three parents. The daughter in question, Melissa Stern, was able to legally terminate her relationship with Whitehead on her own in 2004 and she allowed herself to be formally adopted by the Sterns. She went in to write a book called Reviving Solomon: Modern Day Questions Regarding the Long-term Implications for the Children of Surrogacy Arrangements.
No single court case has reached the Supreme Court and set the precedent for all surrogacy in every state. The legality of the arrangement has been the subject of much litigation and legislation, but its legality is highly dependent on jurisdiction. In the United States, ‘altruistic surrogacy’ meaning a woman carries a child for reasons other than money, and a ‘paid’ surrogate, are treated differently. The politics are dependent on the local tastes of the citizens, and so California, with a large gay population, treats surrogacy different than Indiana. There are states and jurisdictions that will not recognize surrogacy contracts, and like with the Baby M case, view the resulting child as just another matter for family court.
There are many districts in the world that allow for full surrogacy, even for foreigners. If an American couple wants to hire a poor woman in another country, they can do it. It is IVF and surrogacy combined that cut the path towards the perfect global baby.
Freezing embryos further complicates matters since it alters the timeline of human development. Consider baby Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, born in July 2025 from an embryo frozen in 1994—over 30 years ago. His biological mother, Linda Archerd, now 62, underwent IVF with her then-husband, resulting in four embryos. One was implanted at the time, leading to the birth of their daughter, who is now the 30-year-old sister to Thaddeus. The remaining three embryos were frozen.
After Archerd and her husband divorced, she retained custody of the frozen embryos, thinking she might use them, but she eventually decided to donate them instead. Through an embryo adoption program, Lindsey and Tim Pierce ‘adopted’ one of these embryos, leading to the birth of Thaddeus. Tim, now the dad of Thaddeus, was just a toddler when Thaddeus was conceived.
From the Guardian:
Archerd was awarded custody of the embryos after divorcing her husband. She then found out about embryo “adoption”, a type of embryo donation in which both donors and recipients have a say in who receives the embryos.
Archerd had a preference for her embryo to be “adopted” by a white, Christian married couple, leading to the Pierces adopting the embryo.
One must ask: if Baby Thaddeus is alive, what was his status for the past 31 years? Where has be ‘been?’
And what if Archard had died and her daughter wanted to carry Thaddeus to term? Would that be legal? She’d be giving birth to her own brother, which— in any other context—is a clear case of incest. He’d be her brother and her son, and the brother and uncle to his “little” sister.
The Market Place for Parts
Traditionally, if that is the right word, IVF was for couples who were having trouble getting pregnant and delivering a child the normal way, and surrogacy was the service, paid or not, of a separate woman gestating a baby in her body that was inserted artificially, with or without her natural egg. But the global baby need not have any known genetic participants. Womb space can be rented, and the genetic building blocks purchased. Eggs and sperm are legal products to buy.
Over the years, I’ve given both blood and plasma. I was paid for my plasma, but when I gave blood, it was at a blood bank, and I was not paid. Blood banks are the recipients of “blood drives,” so an entirely different kind of person is typically in a blood bank, as opposed to those who loiter outside a paid plasma center. Blood donations go directly into other people, and so hospitals wish to remove the financial aspect from the donation on the theory that if payment were involved, the donor might lie about any blood‑borne illnesses they might have. Plasma, on the other hand, goes into other products and not directly into another person. So, lies about the donor’s health are less significant.
So, given the dangers and ethical considerations, one would think that donating sperm, or an egg from a woman, should follow a regulatory regime for more rigorous than blood donations, but that is not true. There are screenings for things, existing virus infection, as well as screenings for criminal history or mental health issues, but these precautions have not prevented one recurring failure: doctors using their own sperm rather than the donors to carry out the IVF procedure. That’s right—time after time, male doctors have gone back to the lab and used their own sperm to create embryos, and then, fully aware of what they were doing, implanted those embryos into unwilling mothers.
Here is a partial list of doctors who were proven to have done this, along with the number of children they fathered—against the will of both husbands and wives. This is what they call “medical rape”:
Quincy Fortier, Las Vegas (1960s–2000s), 26 known children
Cecil B. Jacobson, Virginia (1980s),15 children (up to 75 suspected), convicted of fraud.
Donald Cline, Indianapolis (1974–1987), at least 94 children; exposed via DNA kits; subject of Netflix’s “Our Father.”
John Boyd Coates III, Vermont (1977 timeframe), At least 1 (two cases filed), $5.25M judgment awarded in one lawsuit; license revoked.
Jos Beek, Netherlands (1973–1998), 21 confirmed children; investigation found dozens more possible.
Norman (Bernard) Barwin, Ottawa (1980s–2000s),17 children confirmed from own sperm; $13M settlement.
Paul Brennan Jones, Colorado (1975–1997), ~12, Over a dozen women inseminated; jury awarded ~$8.75M
Burton Caldwell, Connecticut (1980s), 22 identified children via DNA; led to awareness of accidental half-sibling dating.
Morris Wortman, Rochester NY (1980s), at least 9 half-siblings cited in litigation.
Bernard Paul Wiesner (via clinic), London (1940s–1960s), ~600, Clinic co-founder inseminated patients with own sperm; DNA suggests c.600 children.
Thomas Ray Lippert, Utah (1988–1990s), unknown, replaced customers’ semen with his own at a clinic—exact child counts unspecified.
That is the known example of this kind of fraud, and note, there are no known examples where a female doctor used her own egg fraudulently. So, this is a male thing? And why was this so prevalent? This seems obvious to me: men are natural seed spreaders, and sperm donation and IVF opened the door to secret seed spreading on a fantastical scale. These doctors did it because they could.
Pause for a moment and think about how monstrous this reality is, and how little punishment was meted out. The woman was inseminated against her will with a partner she didn’t even know about. The man who contracted this service had his progeny, his family formation, usurped. His wife was used as a vehicle to birth another man’s child. It’s the ultimate cucking. The variance is permanent and will be carried on for all future generations. The child has a father who inserted himself without consent or knowledge, but that criminal is still the father. It’s incredible, and from the notes above, it resulted in prosecutions that didn’t include any punishment beyond financial and regulatory.
Regarding egg donations, the same issues are present here as there are with prostitution; the door is open to women being coerced (by men) to donate the eggs. Poverty often provides the greatest form of coercion. The egg marketplace is a multibillion-dollar yearly enterprise around the world and getting larger. There is the incentive to both force women into “donating” an egg, and every incentive to fraudulently represent the health and history of the donor.
The parts marketplace has the highest stakes and safety protocols so lax as to allow for the fraudulent birth of hundreds, if not thousands, of kids under false pretenses. Harvesting an egg from a women is many times more difficult and painful than extracting sperm from a man, and yet, women can be induced to do this. If we stick to our blood or plasma allegory, donating an egg or sperm is treated like plasma but it is used like blood.
Where there isn’t fraud, there is sometimes simply silence. The Free Press recently had a story about a young lady, the journalist Lauren Laughlin, who found out as an adult that her mother had gone to a sperm bank, and that her father was not her biological father. Her sister, Jen, uncovered the truth when she had her own kids tested via 23andMe.
Even now, nearly a decade after Jen’s initial discovery, it’s not something my father is able to discuss—not even with my mother, as she recently told me. But the longer he couldn’t talk about it, the more I wanted to understand why my parents had treated their sperm donation like the darkest of secrets. So I began conducting interviews with doctors and scientists who had been involved with the very early fertility efforts that were conducted in the late 1970s, when my sister and I were born.
And the reason I discovered, was pretty simple. It was shame.
Laughlin began to investigate the sperm donation marketplace and uncovered many painful, or at least odd, truths. For example, at the California Cryobank, you can find this:
THE DONOR RESERVE PROGRAM
LIMITING DONOR DISTRIBUTION. DELIVERING MORE EXCLUSIVITY.
This unique program grants you exclusive access to a select collection of our donors. Choose either a donor whose vials we will make available to your family only or one with vials we will make available to a limited number of families. Both offer you greater family exclusivity – for today and tomorrow. Check back regularly, as new donors are added often.
The cost for this exclusive perk? $70,000, but at least your kids won’t find out that they have some unknown number of half-siblings, or God forbid, marry one. That is, if the donor lives up to his end of the bargain and doesn’t sell to other banks.
Laughlin confirms that the baby parts market—eggs, sperm, embryos—is both costly and fraught with uncertainty. Of course, natural reproduction was also fraught with uncertain, and old societies took steps to assure a stable lineage. In royal courts, for example, only eunuchs were permitted near royal women to prevent unauthorized pregnancies. This practice acknowledged the potential for women to allow other men into the chamber.
Extensive literature explores the reasons behind female infidelity. They have their own reasons for wishing to be impregnated by a man other than their husband. Many men have discovered that their children were not biologically theirs, with the deception stemming solely from their female partner. This very subject has also inspired classic stories such as The Scarlett Letter.
Infidelity represents a personal tragedy, but failures in the reproductive market have far wider and more significant implications. Historically, few men fathered hundreds of children. Only warlords and kings had such opportunities. The sperm donor industry now enables thousands of men to achieve this status. Men possessing traits highly desired by women can potentially impregnate thousands of women they will never meet. If women have unrestricted choice, entire categories of men will be obsolete. Nature has never granted such selective power to either gender. In the past, monarchs and unfaithful partners operated within certain boundaries. Today, these boundaries are eroding. Advances in gene editing threaten to dismantle these limitations completely.
The Global Baby Is Here
The 1997 science fiction film Gattaca didn’t win any Oscars—but it had incredible cultural foresight. It envisioned, early on, the direction our society might take: a world where genetically edited babies are seen as inherently superior to those born “naturally,” and a whole social order created that elevates the genetically enhanced over everyone else. It is a world where only genetics, and not character or determination, sets your future. It’s the ultimate form of royalty.
In 1997, there were extremely limited ways to edit the DNA of living beings. No more. That science is a reality.
There are many explanations of CRISPR-Cas9 out there, so I’m going to refrain from a detailed explanation here. Basically, it’s a gene-editing tool that can target and change portions of a long DNA strand. It has been used in agriculture for reasons easy to explain but hard for some people to accept. It can make some foods resistant to certain pests, or make them different colors, or any other crazy thing food scientists can think of. These foods, long dubbed ‘Frankenfoods,’ have been rejected in many cases or banned in others. Europe, long protectionist in its agricultural sector anyway, has banned some ‘GMO’ foods.
We are at the edges of the ability and will to use this technology to edit embryos. It would be much harder to edit the egg or sperm, but once the IVF procedure has taken place, it is now possible to edit the DNA of the potential child in an infinite variety of ways. This is presented in a positive light by the few scientists who have used the technology, including one in China who is said to have edited the DNA of twin girls to make them HIV-proof.
The story of Dr. He Jiankui is tragic in its own way. He learned the gene-editing techniques in American universities, including Rice, right across from Hermann Park where I go to watch Shakespeare. In November of 2018, he released this video, where he explains that he edited the single cell that would go on to make twin girls to make them HIV-resistant:
It was lauded at first, but then scientific opinion turned, and he was branded a Frankenstein in China, and ultimately sent to prison. He’s out of prison now but can’t travel, and while he says he’s setting up a business in Austin to perform a similar service—but under strict scrutiny—this seems unlikely.
What isn’t unlikely is that this will be done by companies everywhere for any reason, eventually. Name a medical technology meant to serve the wants of potential parents, from IVF to abortion, and I’ll name a big business and a legal framework around it. Dr. He may or may not be heard from again, but editing human babies is here to stay. Serving medical science is ALWAYS the justification for any significant change—from ‘medical’ marijuana laws to mandatory COVID‑19 vaccines. If it can be done, it will be done, in war, and in science.
And so, here we are at dawn of the true global baby, summoned via legal contract, each child representing, in a formal, methodical, and legal way, the will of the summoner, and then the parts purchased and edited to taste. This pushes the creation of children away from what we’ve thought and stated—and codified into law—was the best way to raise a child into the kind of adult that will serve the civilization we covet: two loving parents in a legal and permanent union. Most Western countries outlawed polygamy because we reasoned it didn’t serve the larger goals of society. We’ve stigmatized single mothers because the were thought to be a subpar arrangement for parenting. We instituted marriage—and later, child support laws—for the reasons. Rape is illegal, also for these same reasons. We’ve forbidden the sale of children for these reasons. We’ve built our modern civilization on two loving parents acting together to create the child, with the expectation that they will keep the child safe, and, along the way, inculcate the baby with our developed, but still natural, habits.
In light of these changes, the recent past is starting to look like an interim phase towards a more common future of wealth based customized baby making choices. The global population boom of the early and mid-20th century was built on new medical advances but old patterns of male seed spreading combined with female servitude. Men had more control, women less, and so the men expressed the sexual gratification and the resulting children survived at a higher rate. The elderly lived longer as well.
None of this, by itself, altered the relationships between men and women quite like the radical increase in wealth. Wealthy societies are places where those with less power become more powerful, and in nearly all places on earth, that has meant more power accruing to women. This changing power dynamic, more than anything else, is what is driving the fertility rate down around the globe, and now, creating new marketplaces for children.
There are those that disagree that greater wealth and choice is the driver behind falling birth rates. A competing theory is that the sperm count of men is falling because they are so safe. According to the theory the male body produced more sperm back when, through the hormonal system, men knew they were in danger and might not live long, so any chance to procreate was possibly the last. Their testes reacted accordingly. Men now have multiple opportunities to procreate over a longer period.
And while this theory of declining sperm counts may be true, I suspect it isn’t the driver of the fall in fertility. The driver is what wealth provides to the wealthy everywhere: choice. Women have more wealth so they can be far pickier about a mate. In fact, some are so picky they are picking no mates at all. In what was two of the most fecund societies on earth. Japan and Korea, an enormous percentage of the men and women have lost interest in each other. Colleges show that the wealthier and more privileged a social group is, the more the men and women will diverge in political opinion, and subsequently, in romantic entanglement. The phenomenon of choice driven by wealth and leisure is now pathological.
The Politics of Global Baby Making
It has been my purpose in this long summary to show where we were and how many dangers there are along the path to where we are going, but it has never been my purpose to doubt that we are going there or even bemoan the journey. It has instead been of interest to me to more truly understand where this path leads, and what we will have to leave to get there. The global baby train has already left the station, and the law is already conformed to the world that’s coming. It’s been therefore most of my already long life. Two writers where summarize the implications to be considered: First, here is Jeff Shafer writing in Humanum:
A predominating theme and school of contemporary political philosophy conceives of persons primitively as unattached individuals in a state of nature, whose subsequent attachments are chosen for autonomously designed ends. Because the individual’s rudimentary condition is one of loose isolation, justly free of heteronomous law or restraint, the so-called natural family must be remedially understood to be non-basic, and indeed a deviation from and impediment to full realization of the individual condition of freedom. Thus relations such as marriage do not naturally beckon and then fulfill the person in his or her unchosen, created purpose; instead marriage and its extending family relations are deemed contractual attachments selected and modified in accord with individual preference based on non-embodied considerations such as will, affection, orientation, and utility. As, on this telling, bodies are mechanisms, with the locus of personal identity present in subjective interiority, the embodied connections of husband and wife, mother and child, father and child are only empirical or mechanical—not meaningful and defining. The family is a spectral and conventional rather than indelible institution; its frame is plastic rather than given and permanent.
He notes that we are already legally there by noting that Roe v Wade was the starting point, and that ruling, negated or not, has set the idea of a baby as a tissue set not centrally located in and part of a women. He goes on:
That is, Roe made official the conversion of motherhood from a natural and public fact to a private choice (or, after Dobbs, a legislative choice), thereby relocating the meaning and relationality of human persons from immutable nature to flexible option. The family (visibly represented in vital respect by mother and child) therefore is not a reality of creation or a radical aspect and expression of human identity, but a construct of selection, thus ultimately subservient to the State agencies that authorize and superintend those individual choices. Roe and its sequalae, prominently including Obergefell v. Hodges, disqualified in principle the natural family’s public and legal authority—even if, at the moment, certain courts and other legal officers by tradition still often defer to it.
So, all the legal pieces are in place. the other writer I source, N. S. Lyons, describes the consequences of this change from the child’s perspective:
A child’s entry into existence is not as a blank, solitary integer, primordially unaffiliated and just as well distributed for upbringing to any one household as another. To the contrary, children are, in and from their conception, radically relational and immediately and naturally connected to forebears. Throughout life, children will express in their visibility the bond and resemblances with their mother and father from whom they sprang and to whom they are indelibly connected and thus presumptively received and cared for in their vulnerability.
The consequences are thus inevitable:
This sort of mechanical-contractual and “gender-neutral” redesign of humanity invites a totalitarian political dynamic. For if the law now refuses to defer and conform uniquely to the authority of the natural family and its filial bonds, and instead redefines marriage and parent (and perhaps even male and female) to assign rigid equivalence in status to persons and relations that are, in fact, profoundly different, then a pristine legal positivism is enacted in which any sphere beyond state construction and command effectively disappears. When the individual is loosed from the natural family and its constraining certainty of relatedness, he (along with his now-contingent relationships) is instead comprehended exclusively within the uncertainties of political solicitude.
Thus, though this family redefinition is carried out under the banner of reproductive and sexual “rights,” instead of accomplishing a limitation on government power it becomes an instrument securing, in principle, the totalism of state jurisdiction. For on this account, parents are deemed provisionally accredited custodians, not naturally vested authorities.
When your existence depends on the contractual power of the government—its ability to accept or deny the conditions of your existence, your freedom of association, and your God-given right to start a family—then there is no longer any justification for a democratically elected and limited government. Many political commentators have noted that a government providing basic healthcare, especially one that forbids all other forms of care, is not a government in which a person can live freely. The individual’s ability to address even the slightest malfunction in their body necessitates the intervention of the state. A world in which one’s very existence is allowed or disallowed by regulated commerce, interstate legal agreements, and mediating scientific laboratories operating under the guidance of the state is not likely to be or remain a free nation. The babies that result will not yearn for freedom; they will want safety above all, and comfort.
Humanity has adapted to previous eras of radical lifestyle change, and once such changes become widespread, few willingly revert to what came before. Personally, I employ “artificial” methods—like going to the gym—to stimulate my muscles, and I have zero interest in returning to the grueling labor of fieldwork for physical fitness. When procreation becomes detached from the natural man-and-woman script—the very script Shakespeare’s Jacques so famously reflects on in As You Like It—it becomes hard to believe future generations will yearn to return to the randomness that nature ordained.
Yet this new world, unquestionably shaped by human choice, will prey on our vanity and our impulse to rally around tropes, types, and brands. Will society still foster individuals like a comic genius like Woody Allen or a scientist of Stephen Hawking’s caliber? Or will modern celebrities—say, Brad Pitt—view $70,000 for exclusive sperm as trivial and instead market their DNA for a billion dollars per vial? If Harrison Ford offered a vial of his sperm for one billion, would there be a waiting list? The answer seems all too obvious. And what if LeBron James offered the same—what would that fetch? Picture babies as branded products. Celebrity culture, barely a century old, already dominates our lives—and this would be its ultimate expression.
When nature isn’t rolling the dice, but it is us, are we surely not going to treat children as status items, the way the rich, such as Brad Pitt, do now? Why do so many celebrities, again including Pitt, have transgender children? It’s well beyond chance now; trans is a status child for the celebrity set like a child in Harvard is to the intelligentsia. Again, we see the ‘wealth effect’ moving choice to the center of decision making.
This photo is of Shilo Pitt, son of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, born a boy, now identifies a girl.
It should also be noted that, while the cost of IVF will come down as it becomes more common, it will never be free, like making babies the old-fashioned way. Sex between men and women is free because it had to be. It is a birth right. Children were not luxury items in the past, and yet they are now. Many childless young people claim not to have children because they can’t afford them, yet the poor have children all over the world. We’ve raised the price of children because of what we expect their lives, and ours with them, to be like. If they can’t live like us, or even better, their lives are not worth living, as the logic goes.
It is worth noting how many times technology has been predicted to ‘democratize’ this or that, from media to music. In some instances, it has, but in many—if not most—instances, technology consolidates. It comes under the control of a few, as is the case right now with the leading technological firms. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and the Chinese entrants are the leading tech companies on earth. Their collective net worth is greater than countries that are thousands of years old. The AI train is only now leaving the station, and so its effect is unknown.
Reproductive technology could very well consolidate children into very few hands. Imagine a world with only 1,000 families, but 10 million members each. This is possible, we know, because it has happened with every other great wave of innovation. Nature disperses as part of its design; humanity consolidates and makes efficient. Nature rolls the dice; humanity seeks to control and standardize.
We will enter this world, but we should do so with our eyes wide open—distrusting authority and committed to the enduring virtues that have guided us through generations. My mother and father did not intentionally create me, yet I am content with my life. I find worth and value in my existence, embracing my shortcomings and limitations.
My three children are wonderful as they are. The world is not a terrible place, and sometimes, choice is exactly what we don’t need. The global baby need not be a monster, but he need not dominate our future either. The world needs a place for human love, romance between men and women, and babies born of nature—or, as you prefer, God’s design— and not the product of eternally dissatisfied man.
Here are links to sources and other interesting new developments.
The Shafer article on the global baby is here. Highly recommended.
The N. S. Lyons article is here. He quotes a speech by Shafer.
The Wiki about Baby M is here.
The New Yorker has a horrifying yet fascinating article about surrogacy here.
The Time magazine (yes, its still around) article about Kanye and Kim using a surrogate is here. Celebrities gone way wrong.
The Guardian article about the baby born 31 years after ferritization is here.
There is an incredible story unfolding in Los Angeles about a family that had 22 babies by surrogacy, it is here.
Here is a local Houston story about a women who took money for surrogates, but kept it, it is here.
TomRoushOnline 