I was recently scrolling through Instagram when I stopped at a post from Guy Benson, a Fox News personality and political analyst.
"She's here, and she's perfect," Benson wrote, announcing the birth of his daughter, Madison Halsey. "Our hearts are filled to the brim. … We are just so thankful."
My first thought: I was happy for him. So were plenty of others – the post has more than 15,000 likes.
Not everyone was sharing in the joy. That includes some of Benson's fellow conservatives.
Benson is conservative in the classic free-market, limited-government mold, and one of the sharper political observers working today. He's also openly gay, married and – as of Madison's birth – twice a father via surrogate. His
son arrived in 2023.
The pushback and preaching aimed at Benson and his husband, at what should be one of the happiest moments of their lives, rubs me the wrong way. It's a sign of weakness in the conservative movement when its purity tests undercut the very values it claims to defend – marriage and family – just because they don't arrive in the form some factions demand.
Is there really 'nothing conservative' about surrogacy?
Writers at right-wing outlets like The Federalist and The Daily Wire have been leading the charge against alternative paths to parenthood – whether that be surrogacy or in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Two Daily Wire commentators responded directly to a New York Post story on X about Benson's birth announcement.
"Intentionally depriving a child of her own mother is one of the most depraved things imaginable," Matt Walsh told his 4 million followers. "The entire surrogacy industry should be forcibly shut down. It is pure barbarism."
Megan Basham was only slightly more measured: “Benson is an incisive pundit. But there is nothing conservative about deliberately creating motherless children. I pray Benson and those like him on the Right would consider what they are telling the world about how unnecessary they believe mothers … are to the needs of children."
In 2023, after news broke of Benson's first child via surrogacy, Katy Faust wrote a "how-to" guide in The Federalist for conservatives looking to oppose surrogacy and IVF.
"A conservative position rejects surrogacy based on the self-evident, natural rights of the child," Faust wrote, "his right to life, to his mother and father, to be born free and not bought and sold. The child is the voiceless party in the arrangement who would never consent to the intentional loss of his or her mother."
That's a presumptuous argument. Without surrogacy, there is no child to have rights in the first place. For Benson's daughter, the real choice is between a loving home and never existing at all.
Surrogacy, IVF have been a lifeline for many
For the many women and men who struggle with infertility or face other complications, the ability to use IVF (which President Donald Trump has championed) or surrogacy can give them the gift of parenthood.
And whether anti-surrogacy conservatives like it or not, gay marriage is the law of the land, and many same-sex couples want children. Some of them are conservative couples, like Benson and his husband.
Why shouldn't they get to pursue one of life's greatest joys?
In 2023, Vanessa Brown Calder of the Cato Institute made the case that the rhetoric around surrogacy's risks is overblown and misleading:
"In their quest to highlight the perceived harms of surrogacy, critics systematically minimize the substantial value of creating life," she wrote. "For most couples, surrogacy is the last stop on their journey after a hard-fought battle with infertility. Most children produced via surrogacy would not be alive without it."
I’m not a bioethicist. And I’m supportive of in-depth discussions about the real moral concerns raised by surrogacy and IVF.
But there's a difference between debating the ethics of family-building and treating people like Benson, who simply want to be parents, as threats to be shut down. The conservatives waging that fight are just making their own movement smaller.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is surrogacy 'barbarism'? Conservatives are turning on their own. | Opinion
