John Stonestreet – Page 14

Why There’s No Such Thing as “Surrogacy Gone Wrong”

Aug 21, 2023John StonestreetBioethics, SurrogacyCommercial Surrogacy

In the 22nd week of surrogate Brittney Pearson’s pregnancy, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Because the necessary treatment could harm the baby, her doctors recommended inducing labor early and allowing the baby to be cared for in neonatal intensive care while she started chemo. However, the gay couple paying Brittney Pearson to serve as their surrogate did not want a premature baby with potential developmental or health problems. They wanted her instead to have an abortion.

Pearson offered to put the baby up for adoption, but the men refused because, according to Pearson, they did not want a child who was genetically related to one of them somewhere “out there.” According to Pearson, the men threatened both her and her doctors with a lawsuit if she did not abort her child. Because of California’s radical surrogacy laws, which allow financiers of a surrogacy arrangement to be granted legal parental rights of the baby before he or she is born, they likely would have prevailed.

In an interview with Jennifer Lahl of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, Pearson told her story. Her son was born at 25 weeks of pregnancy, a gestational age that, thanks to advances in maternal medicine, children have survived. Though she has not publicly stated whether her son was killed before or after delivery, or whether he was given or denied the medical treatment a premature baby needs, she has confirmed that her son died the day he was born, which was Father’s Day.

Though, of course, not every surrogacy contract ends this way, Pearson is not the first surrogate mom pressured to kill her baby by those paying for it. However, it would be a profound mistake to think of hers as a case of “surrogacy gone wrong,” as advocates of the practice claim about stories like hers. Each and every moral violation that occurred along the way was not exclusive to Pearson’s unique circumstances. Rather, they are violations endemic to surrogacy itself, a practice that denies children the right to their mother and, at times, their father, and denies a mother the right to her own child. Children are treated as products to be purchased and arranged, subject to property laws and other legal realities long used to dehumanize certain individuals.

It’s jarring to hear these men talk of Brittney Pearson’s baby as if he were a lamp ordered off Amazon that was delivered broken. However, it is the surrogacy contracts signed ahead of time that treat human babies as commodities. If it seems like an obvious violation of human rights and God’s moral order for two men to demand that a woman have her baby killed, what should we make of the legal contract governing the baby’s creation, gestation, and delivery in the first place? If babies are treated like products and pregnancy like the means of production at the beginning of the surrogacy process, why would we expect things to be different at the end?

Human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. Thus, they should never be treated like any other thing.

Like the social research that shows how extended exposure to violent video games and media can desensitize people to actual violence, surrogacy is among those cultural realities that reveal how much our view of children has been desensitized by all that constantly reduces them to “things.” As one gay man who sued his employer last year for refusing to pay for him and his husband to hire a surrogate put it, children are just one of the modern “trappings” of “marriage,” like a “house, children, [and] 401k.”

The willful death of Brittney Pearson’s son is a tragic, but logical, escalation of the moral errors fundamental to surrogacy. As marriage and family are increasingly deconstructed, reimagined, and replaced in law, the demand for surrogacy will only increase, and more babies will face the same kind of danger as Pearson’s baby. If we don’t stand up for them, who will? And if we do, it will require standing against this practice, which is fundamentally disordered and always wrong, and not merely against selective cases.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Maria Baer. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.

Cannabis Linked to Depression and Bipolar Disorder

Aug 14, 2023John StonestreetMarijuanaMarijuana

Despite cultural propaganda that sells marijuana as “harmless,” increasingly research finds that regular cannabis use is just the opposite. Not only have recent studies found that marijuana use is a leading indicator of workplace accidents and leads to schizophrenia among young men, but a new, peer-reviewed study tracking almost 30 years of medical records for over 6.5 million Danish citizens has found that marijuana use is closely associated with increased risks for depression and bipolar disorder.

Those previously diagnosed with cannabis addiction were almost twice as likely to develop clinical depression and up to four times as likely to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The increased risk for psychosis is more likely for men than for women, and the chances go up with use.

As U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse deputy director Dr. Wilson Compton noted, studies like these are rapidly exposing that “cannabis may not be the innocent and risk-free substance that so many people believe.”

When Parents Lead Their Children Toward Transition

Aug 14, 2023John StonestreetTransgenderLGBT, Sex-Reassignment, Transgender

Recently, British author and journalist Helen Joyce offered a hard-to-hear but reasonable explanation for why transgender ideology continues to endure, despite its inherent contradictions, its obvious falsehoods, and the harm that has been inflicted on children. Her words are worth quoting at length:

There’s a lot of people who can’t move on [from] this and that’s the people who’ve transitioned their own children. Those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific Islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced. A lot of people have done the worst thing that you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives for their own sanity and for their own self-respect. So, they’ll still be fighting.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has got turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child,” or “the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child.” The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person … And now you can’t talk truth in front of that person because what you’re saying is, you as a parent have done a truly—like a human rights abuse level—awful thing to your child that cannot be fixed.

In other words, according to Joyce, the real breakthrough of the current gender ideology movement has only come through the co-opting of parents, whose instincts to protect their children tragically became a threat to them and their wellbeing. This was accomplished, in large part, because Western medical authorities ultimately betrayed parents.

Dr. Miriam Grossman, a clinical psychologist, has described this phenomenon in her new book Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness:

The entire mental health profession—psychology, social work, counseling—was captured by radical ideologues years ago, and you and your families are paying the price. The doctors are wrong, your gut is right. Your son will always be your son. Your daughter will always be your daughter. To say differently is inane. And to place blame on you, parents who represent reality, is shameful.

Dr. Grossman’s best advice for parents is to “[t]rust your parental instincts. The entire world is telling you to put your gender-questioning child in the driver’s seat, but you will learn they’re wrong.”

The story of 19-year-old Chloe Cole, “perhaps the most well-known detransitioner in America,” is a case in point: “They coerced my parents into allowing me to do this. And while my parents were required to sign off on everything, they were also putting it on me, because I desired to do this.”

In fact, most parents who deny their children’s wishes and instead try to do the right thing will often find entire communities opposed to them. Friends, counselors, teachers, and medical professionals—not to mention their own children—will condemn them as hateful and bigoted, and even accuse them of choosing a “dead daughter over a live son,” or vice-versa. After all, it is the children, these new experts insist, who are the inexhaustible source of truth about who they are, and their desires should always be respected.

All of which means that, if Christians do not come to the support of parents walking this incredibly difficult road, no one else will. Pastors, youth pastors, Christian friends, neighbors, and family members simply must show up here. And parent, if you are in the middle of a child’s gender crisis, remember that you can walk with them in truth and in love. Or, as Dr. Grossman has said, “It’s possible to survive, albeit with scars.”

Erin Friday, a California mom described her journey this way:

Your love for your child has to be strong enough to take their vitriol. And it’s very, very hard. I spent many nights crying myself to sleep. Some days, I didn’t get out of bed. But you still have to do it, because now there’s not a day that doesn’t go by that my daughter doesn’t say that she loves me … even if my daughter didn’t come back to have a relationship with me … I saved her from being a lifelong medical patient, so I would do it again.

Tragically, there are many parents whose children chose differently. Even more tragically, there are many parents who fit the description offered by Helen Joyce. Coming to terms with what they have done to their children seems impossible. So, Christians must run toward this brokenness with the Gospel, especially its offer of forgiveness and promise of restoration.

Many men and women have faced the reality of choosing to have an abortion and, in the process, were found by Jesus Christ. Their lives prove again that no one is beyond the reach of God’s grace, that as Paul wrote to the Romans, “by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

In this cultural moment, the Church must help parents know and choose what is true and find hope when their children choose otherwise.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org.