This summer, Guy Benson announced the birth of his second child via surrogacy. Madison Halsey arrived in July, a baby sister to Conrad James, the son Benson and his “husband,” Adam Wise, acquired through surrogacy in 2023. Congratulations poured in from conservatives, including Nikki Haley, Dana Perino, and Meghan McCain. A smaller cohort on the right, led by Megan Basham and Matt Walsh, said the obvious thing aloud: Intentionally making a girl motherless should not be celebrated.
Benson and Wise were not the first same-sex couple to deny a child her mother or father after they “married.” They are simply the latest Instagrammable beneficiaries of the parenthood remake mandated by Obergefell.
To the many people expressing justified sadness over the plight of these motherless children, I ask: What did you think would happen after we legalized same-sex marriage?
Did you believe the public-relations campaign that framed “marriage equality” as necessary so same-sex couples could visit one another in the hospital, inherit property, or make medical decisions?
Those basic protections did not require redefining marriage. Same-sex partners could designate one another through wills, powers of attorney, healthcare proxies, beneficiary designations, and other legal arrangements. Years before Obergefell, federal rules already protected same-sex partners’ hospital visitation rights. None of these protections required overhauling the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known.
What Obergefell enabled was something else entirely: the erasure of mothers and fathers from parenthood law and the codification of the purchase of children.
The ink was barely dry on the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision when activist lawyers began “updating” the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). These updates offered recommendations for how states could bring their parenthood laws into compliance with “marriage equality.” They prescribed stripping all gendered terms - male and female, mother and father, husband and wife - from parenthood law. New York’s gender-neutral parentage bill, still awaiting the governor’s signature, simply followed the UPA’s recommendations. Other states, including Texas and Alaska, now offer categories such as “Parent A” and “Parent B” or “guardians” on birth certificates instead of titles identifying the two people who actually made the child.
States did not remove those words by accident. They removed them because a mother and a father are precisely what a household headed by two men or two women cannot produce, and the law had to paper over the biology it was determined to ignore.
But scrubbing these two biological roles from parenthood statutes was not enough. Same-sex couples were disadvantaged because both partners could never be the child’s biological parents. So, to ensure equal access to the “constellation” of marital benefits promised by Justice Kennedy, the UPA generalized “intent-based parenthood,” a doctrine that had existed only in narrow surrogacy carve-outs since the 1990s. It allowed anyone with a contract to acquire a child.
If you could assemble sperm, egg, and womb and had the proper paperwork, you could leave the hospital with an unrelated child and state-granted parental rights. No home study. No background check. No requirement that you even be married. No questions about whether single men over 60 should be permitted to take home children conceived through surrogacy or whether convicted sex offenders should be raising infants. This is child commodification in the name of gay equality - the erasure of a child’s mother or father in service of adult identity.
Arkansas learned this the hard way in Pavan v. Smith, when the Supreme Court ordered the state to list a woman’s same-sex spouse on a birth certificate. The child’s biological father was legally erased so that the state could not be accused of discriminating against the mother’s “marriage.”
Of course, opposite-sex couples use surrogacy and donor gametes, too, and they always have. But their use of these technologies never required rewriting the definitions of “mother” and “father.” Other concerns about reproductive technology aside, an infertile husband and wife who conceive through in vitro fertilization still fit the existing legal categories of mother and father. Two men or two women never will, regardless of the technology.
That mismatch, not fertility science itself, is what drove the 2017 UPA revision. The drafters said so themselves, framing gendered parentage terms as a “constitutional infirmity” that had to be resolved once same-sex marriage became the law of the land. Same-sex marriage did not invent reproductive technology, but it did prevent the law from acknowledging the biological realities of parenthood.
What the courts de-sexed in law, schools increasingly de-sexed in the classroom. The National Education Association’s 2020 checklist encouraged teachers to replace “mom and dad” with terms such as “family” or “caring adult” and to avoid heteronormative language.
Entertainment also presented the new cultural script. According to GLAAD, LGBTQ representation on television rose sharply in the decade after Obergefell, reaching a record high in the early 2020s. Preschoolers encountered families with two mothers on Doc McStuffins. Elementary-school children were presented with motherless and fatherless families in The Loud House and The Bravest Knight. Teenagers watched The Fosters, which centered on two married mothers raising biological, foster, and adopted children.
The legacy of Obergefell has not simply been the redefinition of marriage. It has been the unmaking of the American family through the erasure of mothers and fathers in both law and culture.
That erasure is not abstract. It has a face: a newborn girl named Madison Halsey, whose birth announcement included neither the name of the woman who contributed half her DNA nor that of the woman who carried and delivered her.
The law recognizes her father and an unrelated man, whose presence, the author argues, statistically increases her risk of abuse and neglect. She will grow up in a culture that tells her she is “so lucky” to have lost her mother at birth.
Eleven years after Obergefell, the choice before us has become impossible to avoid. The law can uphold a child’s right to her own mother and father, or it can uphold same-sex marriage. It cannot coherently do both, because same-sex marriage requires the state to manufacture a form of parenthood that biology cannot produce. Every mechanism built to manufacture it comes at a child’s expense.
The church built its social-justice credentials by defending children whom the world had trampled: the orphaned, the trafficked, and the aborted. It cannot outsource this cause. A newborn girl has been legally and permanently denied her mother, and self-proclaimed Christians on the right responded with congratulations. If the church will not say what Obergefell cost Madison, no one will.
Katy Faust stands as a preeminent authority empowering you to confront the ethical complexities of surrogacy, reproductive technologies, and the sanctity of marriage. Her mission involves dismantling contemporary myths surrounding the family. You can engage with her advocacy at thembeforeus.substack.com.
