A video is making the rounds this week, which every Christian, conservative, and American should watch. And after watching it, we should all weep for how far our culture has fallen.
In the video, two men, a gay couple, are bouncing a young baby. The baby is fussing, reaching, and out of his mouth tumbles the oldest word any human being ever learns. Mama. But Mama is not there. She was never going to be there. And the men laugh.
Laugh. At a child crying for his mother, they paid to disappear before he opened his eyes. They laugh, knowing that the child will never have the mother he so desperately needs. Jesus reserved some of his sharpest words for men who harmed children.
"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6).
Read that verse. Then watch that video again. Then ask, "How did we get here?" A baby was deliberately severed from his mother. He was handed to men whose arrangement guarantees, by design, that he will never hear her voice, never again feel her heartbeat, or know her face.
He is already reaching for her. He does not yet have the words, but the ache for mother is hardwired. This is why we weep when children lose their mothers young. The Creator put that yearning there. And the men who commissioned this child are laughing while he cries. If this is not evil, then the word "evil" has no meaning.
And there certainly is a millstone with someone's name on it. Scripture is not ambiguous about that. In fact, there are many millstones for the many people involved in creating this modern-day slavery. Understand what you are looking at. A human being was:
1) commissioned
2) manufactured
3) delivered to satisfy the desire and vanity of two adults
Adults whose union, by its very nature, cannot create life. A woman was paid to carry him, sign him away, and walk out of his life forever. No care is given for the ache she, too, will feel for the rest of her life. A contract was drawn, a price was set, and a child was transferred like freight.
Commercial surrogacy is complete inversion of the gift of life, where the child serves the desires of the adults rather than adults sacrificing themselves for the child. "Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward" (Psalm 127:3). Children are heritage. They are a reward. They are not a product or a line item on an invoice, not to be manufactured through contract.
We used to recognize the evil of tearing a nursing child from his mother. The abolitionists did. The auction block ripped black mothers from black babies for profit, and the Christian conscience of this nation finally roared in protest.
Now the same transaction is carried out in fertility clinics, the paperwork is cleaner, the nursery is painted in pastels, and we are told to applaud. A mother's womb was sold. A child was sold. The arrangement was designed, from the first signed page, to guarantee he would grow up asking a question no one intends to answer honestly.
"Where is Mama?"
The video is engaging. It's perverse. It shows the evil of these two individual men. But the large-scale scandal is the industry behind it. Commercial surrogacy rents a woman's womb, treats her body as a machine, and removes her from her own child by contract.
It manufactures human beings on demand for anyone with a checkbook and America has no federal regulations banning the practice which is legal in many states. Commercial surrogacy tells women their wombs have a price, tells children their mothers have a price, and tells all of us that life itself has a price tag, and a cheap one that. Commericial surrogacy allows families to be assembled like furniture if the assembly fee is paid.
Italy banned it. France banned it. Germany banned it. Spain banned it. Much of Europe, right and left, has called this a universal crime against women and children. And yet here in America, the nation that once fought a war to end the buying and selling of human beings, we celebrate it on Instagram.
It is long past time to outlaw commercial surrogacy in every state. Do not regulate it. Do not license it. Ban it. "You shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15) applies to children, too, and a contract does not sanctify a theft.
"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20). That verse was written for moments such as these.
We are watching a culture cheer while children are stripped of mothers, while women are reduced to vendors, while men treat parenthood as a consumer purchase, and we are told that to object is bigotry. It is the last trace of a conscience the culture has not yet fully seared.
Pastors, we have been quiet too long. We preached the sanctity of life in the womb and went silent when that same life was treated as inventory outside it. We defended marriage as the union of one man and one woman and said nothing when children produced outside that union by commercial contract were paraded as props, products of prideful egos. Our silence has been taken for consent.
Christians refuse to celebrate what God condemns. Many are left in ignorance of the evils of this industry because our passivity has been taken for approval.
Americans, we must rid ourselves of this evil. Family is the highest joy in this life. We cannot allow this fundamental building block of our society to be so degraded, perverted, and abused.
There should be no more cooing comments under Instagram posts that treat a motherless-by-design arrangement as family goals. Instead, we should warn our friends and neighbors of this modern-day slave block.
We do not shun the child. He is made in the image of God, and he is precious. We shun the industry, the contracts, the laughter, and the lie. We decide to call evil what it is, and we do not apologize for it.
The baby in that video was not making an argument. He was doing what babies have done since Eden.He was reaching for the woman whose heartbeat he knew before he knew anything else.
He was asking where she went.Our culture owes him an answer. The answer is that we sold her, and him, and the covenant that should have bound them, and then we laughed while he cried.
God help us if we have ears to hear that cry and still call it good.
