John Stonestreet – Page 62

Is The Transgender Miss Nevada Making or Mocking History?

Jul 12, 2021John StonestreetTransgenderLGBT, Transgender

*John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center*

Last month the New York Post congratulated the first transgender contestant for winning the Miss Nevada USA Pageant, saying that the biological male was “making history.”

Kataluna Enriquez bested 21 other contestants, in the usual beauty pageant stuff including wearing skimpy swimsuits. For years, these contests have been justly criticized as sexist and objectifying to women. But now that a man is competing, they’re “historic”?

Certainly not like the first man on the moon, or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or the signing of the Magna Carta? I doubt that “men in beauty pageants” will earn an entry in our history books next to “George Washington.”

If these steps in the trans revolution are remembered as historic, it will be as signs of a culture that lost its way and indulged in unhealthy delusions.

Those who declare that trans men are “making history” should take care. After all, History is littered with “historic” moments, once praised, that are now derided.

How to Import a Baby

Jul 6, 2021John StonestreetBioethics, SurrogacyCommercial Surrogacy

Recently, The Atlantic described a problem unique to the 21st century: “stateless” babies.

Here’s the situation: a gay couple uses their own sperm, an egg donor, and a surrogate mother. The result is twin boys, born in Canada. One was genetically related to his American father; the other to the partner, an Israeli citizen. The men wanted to bring the twins to the U.S. but one wasn’t an American citizen. Diplomatic woes ensued.

As the reporter put it, “When a child can have five possible parents, whose citizenship counts?” The exploitation and cold consumerism that create this kind of legal riddle shouldn’t be considered “unintended consequences” of assisted reproduction; they are inherent in the process of separating babies from the moms and dads who create them.

This puzzle isn’t really about solving an immigration puzzle. Only recognizing that every child has the right to his or her own father and mother can do that.

Surrogacy Never Goes Right

Jun 21, 2021John StonestreetBioethics, SurrogacyBioethics, Commercial Surrogacy, Surrogacy

Last month LiveAction shared a story from the New Zealand Herald about a couple whose surrogacy experience went terribly wrong. After a surrogate mom volunteered to carry a couple’s IVF-conceived child, she began suffering prenatal depression and opted for an abortion.

The biological parents were devastated and helpless. Their story is one of many ways surrogacy goes wrong.

But does it ever go right?

Even if the surrogate mother had carried the baby to term, the child would be deprived of its biological mom. In cases where donor gametes are involved, the children of surrogacy lose their right to their biological mom or dad, or both. Increasingly, when the intended parents are a same-sex couple, the child is denied a mommy or daddy altogether.

Surrogacy may attempt to fix brokenness, but it always creates more. Even when everything goes according to plan, there’s a cost paid by the only one who didn’t consent: the child.