Libby Immons, editor-in-chief of Postmillennial and a former liberal feminist who woke up to the reality that leftism is a force for destruction, joins Allie to discuss her views on surrogacy and abortion.
00:00:00.000A medical journal suggests brain dead women should serve as surrogates for those who are looking to rent a womb to grow their child.
00:00:08.480This is just one of many examples of the ethical problems with the commercial surrogacy industry, and it demonstrates how grossly unjust the process already is.
00:00:18.020We will be discussing this and other surrogacy-related stories today with Libby Immons, editor-in-chief of Postmillennial and a former liberal feminist who woke up to the reality that leftism is a force for destruction.
00:00:31.900She's got a fascinating perspective that I know you are going to appreciate so much.
00:00:36.760This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers, American Meat Delivered.
00:01:04.680I'm the editor-in-chief at the Postmillennial.
00:01:07.420We are a breaking news and culture outlet, and I've been with the outlet for a couple of years.
00:01:12.940We have a great team, and it's really an exciting time to be working in media, given the amount of backlash against it and how much people are tuning in.
00:02:31.280And one thing that's interesting is these positions, which used to be widely accepted on the left, are no longer particularly leftist positions.
00:02:41.920So it was very interesting to watch the ground shift.
00:02:46.400But you considered yourself on the left, you considered yourself a liberal feminist, correct, even holding all of these views?
00:03:17.460I've watched the feminist movement entirely and thoroughly betray women, destroy women's rights, and destroy, you know, women's ability to make their own choices in a lot of ways with regard to their thoughts and how they want to live their lives.
00:03:33.860It's so upsetting to see what happened to that.
00:03:37.680But in a lot of ways, I think feminism is to blame for the current state of affairs where women are now, according to new research, meant to be called egg donors if they are mothers, which any mother will tell you to mother is a verb.
00:04:15.060But you considered yourself growing up, I guess, a liberal feminist, and I guess certainly in college, it wasn't until, as you said, a few years ago when you said, wow, actually, I'm looking at my views and my values, and they don't align with the current feminist movement or the current left.
00:04:34.720Was there an experience that occurred, or was it just kind of a slow realization that, wow, the left is getting further to the left, especially with the gender madness and what you're talking about, the erasure of women, and wow, I just don't align with that anymore.
00:04:53.100Like, what did that kind of moment look like when you realized, I am no longer a Democrat and I'm voting Republican?
00:04:58.720Well, it was really sort of a slow burn, and I would say that it started closer to 2010, or maybe even a little prior to that.
00:05:08.560But by 2013, the plays that I was writing were satirical.
00:05:14.020They were a thorough send-up of the entire idea that men could become women.
00:05:19.820I was writing about, I had this totally crazy play that my friend and I performed, where one of the characters in the play, who was our boss, decided to be trans and was looking for a uterus transplant and then a surrogate and all of these things.
00:05:38.800So you saw this stuff coming before most of us did.
00:05:41.900If you're talking like 2010, I mean, you must have been really in tune where that movement was headed.
00:05:47.120Yeah, well, I was there sort of where it was beginning, which was in the arts.
00:05:53.520So a lot of this emerged from the extremely leftist arts movement.
00:06:00.000And arts didn't used to be necessarily leftist.
00:06:02.960They were focused on aesthetics and beauty and honesty.
00:06:06.160Certainly, that was the kind of theater that I was interested in making.
00:06:10.920And the idea started to emerge while I was in grad school.
00:06:14.360I watched it morph from the artist being, you know, meant to be telling the honesty and truth of their own heart and their own vision and what they could see of the world.
00:06:25.960And it started becoming that artists needed to be activists.
00:06:29.980And the idea of art activism started to emerge.
00:06:32.820And I remember thinking and talking to colleagues and saying, isn't that actually just propaganda?
00:06:37.440That's what propaganda is, is when you take an artistic form and you warp it to to do the work of a political movement.
00:07:15.360And there was no way I was going down that road.
00:07:17.720So I ended up I ended up being a little bit on the outs with my artistic colleagues, even prior to my complete turn away from the entire leftist agenda.
00:07:31.720And I specifically want to talk to you about your passion, not for, but against surrogacy and the surrogacy industry.
00:07:40.520As you know, this is not something that a lot of people talk about or even think about.
00:07:45.880And even on the right, as you know, most people don't really have or I wouldn't even say most people.
00:07:52.640I would say most people in the comment, the commentator realm don't seem to have a problem with it.
00:07:58.580And I have been after I talked to Jennifer Law, whom I know, you know, and my eyes were kind of opened like, oh, my gosh, I didn't even really think about the fact that this was happening.
00:08:09.680When I started talking about it, when I would post about celebrities going, you know, going through the surrogacy process and I would criticize it.
00:08:17.620I would get messages from Christian conservatives, people on the right saying, you know, I thought you were pro-life.
00:08:43.520And most people don't want to be educated because it puts them in the awkward position of having to go against something that a lot of even so-called conservatives are for.
00:09:58.880Um, I had been researching about surrogacy prior to that because I had actually been commissioned to do a play at the Williamstown Theater Festival in, I want to say, 2007, 2008, something like that, where I was working with a director who specifically wanted to do a project about single motherhood by choice.
00:10:18.100Um, she was getting older, she did not have a partner, she was wondering what her options were, and so we had gotten into it.
00:10:26.040Um, I ended up doing a lot of research into sperm donation.
00:10:29.400I discovered that people are meeting each other online due to ancestry apps and things like that, finding that they have all been the product of the same sperm donor.
00:10:40.720And I started digging into surrogacy as well as to what that looks like.
00:10:45.520There was also a radiolab report, which I, which was some time ago at this point, it might have been 2008, I'm not entirely sure, uh, that talked about a gay couple from Israel who had purchased eggs from a woman in Estonia.
00:11:00.200Um, and then those eggs were mixed with sperm from, from both men, both men wanted to be fathers.
00:11:08.320If I'm remembering the details correctly, that, uh, embryo was then implanted in an Indian woman in Nepal.
00:11:16.120Nepal does not allow Nepalese women at the time to go through surrogacy, commercial surrogacy.
00:11:22.200India did not allow surrogacy, so women from India who sought the income from being surrogates would go to Nepal and be surrogates there.
00:11:57.280What kind of creature has just been manufactured to be motherless?
00:12:01.340And I got to thinking about the manufacture of motherless orphans and what that means for the future of humanity, what that means about how we value motherhood, how we value our children, how we value their futures and their understanding of who they are and where they come from.
00:12:20.200All of us, when we look at our mothers, we say, you know, I have her nose.
00:12:50.600Everything has to be created for this child.
00:12:53.120And that's true of so many who are manufactured through commercial surrogacy.
00:12:58.200And I do make a distinction between voluntary surrogacy and commercial surrogacy.
00:13:05.220I think they are two vastly different things.
00:13:07.620As in, um, as in voluntary surrogacy versus commercial, you mean like, um, personal, like a sister carrying, uh, something more along those lines.
00:13:49.720But I totally agree that there are fewer moral and ethical questions there because of everything that you just mentioned.
00:13:56.720You're not completely detaching that person from their family history, from their biology, who they are.
00:14:03.380You are creating so many degrees of separation for that child from their origin.
00:14:08.500Because not only do you have to go back to the woman who just saved you, you also have to go back to the woman who's, you know, whose eggs you actually came from, whose body you actually came from.
00:14:41.360Well, I know that there have been a lot of ethical questions regarding the adoption industry.
00:14:46.860And for sure, there have been questions raised about, you know, international adoptions and whether or not the agencies facilitating those international adoptions are doing so ethically and with the families and children in mind.
00:15:02.120However, I feel that with adoption, it's substantially different and my family would not be the family that it is, you know, my extended family without adoption.
00:15:11.180And I'm very grateful for the women that gave up my family members so that they could be in my life.
00:15:16.900And I know that it's been difficult for those family members to reconcile having been, you know, internationally adopted.
00:15:25.040But I do think there's a difference in that these children already exist.
00:15:33.960We are not creating them to fulfill our own desires and whims to be biological parents.
00:15:41.280We are instead accepting the gift of life that God has given us and that God has given these children.
00:15:48.160And we are seeking to create a family from human beings that already exist with God's love.
00:15:53.840And I think that that's a huge difference.
00:15:56.660I feel that in a lot of ways when we undertake surrogacy, what we are doing is we are saying, you know, our biological material is so incredibly important that we need to rent women and buy babies in order to further that line.
00:16:12.960And I don't think any of us can possibly come up with that as anything other than our own desire.
00:16:37.160You are adopting a life that has already been created, who needs a loving home, whose mother is saying, I can't take care of this child versus purposely creating a child to take them away from their mother or father or both.
00:16:53.480In some cases, depending on what the circumstances.
00:16:57.620And it's interesting what you said about this is really about adult desires.
00:17:02.760We really are placing children in this case, children that are part of this commercial surrogacy industry on the altar of adults.
00:17:10.600Those whims, those adults are not willing to adopt, they say, and this is kind of message that I get a lot.
00:17:15.860Well, you know, you have biological children, so you have no idea what it's like to long for a biological child and to not be able to fulfill that for whatever physical reason, whether it's a gay couple or whether they're dealing with infertility or something, something like that.
00:17:31.880And it's true in the sense that I do have biological children, but that doesn't change what you just said.
00:17:38.820That doesn't change the fact that the child in this case is being created to go through a process that is not natural and may very well be harmful.
00:18:02.460And then he tweeted with his partner, after six weeks in wonderful Canada and tearful farewells to our incredible surrogate and friend, it's time to go home to Lisbon with our new family member, our most beautiful hand luggage.
00:18:15.900Canada, you are a shining light of democracy and equality.
00:18:18.560Thank you for letting us fulfill our dream.
00:18:22.420And they post a picture with what I'm assuming is a beautiful little baby girl.
00:18:27.840I mean, there are so many parts to every single line of that tweet that, to me, points to the injustice of surrogacy.
00:18:38.200The first being, well, we keep puppies with their mothers longer than six weeks.
00:18:44.480Like, how do you think this is an indication of part of the problem with commercial surrogacy?
00:18:48.380I think it's just a complete foray into narcissism, and I think that it's a shame.
00:18:54.700And I do wish the family all the best, and I hope that they have a wonderful future, and I wish their child all the best as well.
00:19:02.740I do feel, however, for the difficulty that this child will have upon realizing that they have no mother and that they intentionally were created to have no mother.
00:19:44.860You really just want the best for them, and you want the best for the family, of course.
00:19:49.740But it is a shame that this is how they sought to undertake this.
00:19:54.220And I do feel that it is in service to the fulfillment of desire, as opposed to keeping the interests of the created child in mind.
00:20:09.300I mean, children need a mother and a father.
00:20:20.640And sometimes that makeup isn't possible.
00:20:24.380Sometimes the mother or the father dies.
00:20:26.220Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances where that's not possible.
00:20:29.720But as you mentioned, to purposely manufacture a situation in which a child does not have a mother or a father, these two men may be great dads.
00:21:52.120But I recently spoke out about it on a podcast on Timcast.
00:21:56.500And I was I was met with excessive vitriol after that.
00:22:00.000And I was just like, well, that's really your problem, everyone, because I'm not going to change my views based on your whims.
00:22:06.860And I think it's interesting there have there are a lot of Christians who will push back against this idea that surrogacy, commercial surrogacy, the commercial surrogacy industry is an abomination against women and children.
00:22:20.300And Christians will push back against that.
00:22:22.600And it's very hard for me personally to reconcile my Christian faith with the idea that women should be rented and babies should be bought and sold.
00:22:31.260I just don't see how that's something that God and his infinite wisdom is looking for human beings to do.
00:22:39.760And you must have some sort of God complex when you undertake to manufacture children to satisfy your own desires for posterity and legacy.
00:24:16.580And I know that, you know, children of surrogacy are going to feel that as they grow up.
00:24:22.060They're going to know that they have no mother.
00:24:24.240And I mean, that book, that classic book, Primal Wound, written a long time ago, I mean, it talks about the wound that happens in adoption.
00:24:35.520Like, I believe that adoption is beautiful and redemptive.
00:24:38.000That's not to say the adoption industry doesn't have its problems.
00:24:41.260I mean, we saw that horrible story out of Georgia where those two men adopted this special needs child from a Christian adoption agency, horrifically abused them, all that stuff.
00:24:49.140So I think that there are plenty of problems, but adoption in itself is a beautifully redemptive process where you're taking that life already created, giving them a loving home.
00:25:47.520But he also created the family for that sense of belonging.
00:25:51.220So, I mean, that's exacerbated many, many times when you're talking about surrogacy.
00:25:56.300When you realize that your mom was picked out of the catalog, has no connection to you whatsoever, does not care about you, does not feel anything for you.
00:26:05.740Doesn't know that you exist, but you have her eyes, you have her laugh, you have her propensity to, you know, I don't know, to do math, whatever it is.
00:26:16.420And then the woman who carried you is also probably, maybe she's still thinking about you at some point.
00:26:51.540And with adoption, too, you have the potential for open adoptions where the child can still know who their parents are.
00:26:59.180And perhaps, you know, parents have children and they're not able to care for them.
00:27:03.360And open adoption, I think, gives at least an avenue to have an understanding of where you're where you came from, you know, where your ancestry came from.
00:27:14.060And even as you have the opportunity to be raised in a loving home, you know, maybe you can get a little bit of both.
00:27:21.320And I think that that's very valuable, too.
00:27:25.420This kind of segues, well, what we were talking about a couple of minutes ago, Des, when you were on TimCast, you mentioned that you were going back and forth with Jeff Younger.
00:27:35.000And I'll just remind everyone who that is.
00:27:36.560That is the Texas dad who went through that horrific, horrific story where the mother of their twin boys was saying that one of the twin boys was actually a girl trying to transition the little boy at a young age.
00:27:48.900We're talking like six, seven, eight years old to be a girl.
00:27:59.920Apparently, they've moved to California so she can pursue this whole transition thing.
00:28:03.380I have so much sympathy for Jeff Younger, and I'm so sad about the whole situation.
00:28:08.220But he made a comment on Twitter and then, I guess, repeated it on TimCast when you were also on TimCast, basically saying, look, in order for men to preserve their progeny, they just need to use surrogates, not mess with the wily women out there who are going to basically take our sons and castrate them.
00:28:26.500You know, I understand his pain, but I don't agree with him.
00:28:29.600I just want to play everyone, y'all's interaction on TimCast and then get your commentary on it.
00:28:36.540You'll see that I was swarmed by feminists when I suggested that men may have to start using surrogacy and adoption if they want to have children.
00:28:46.040And a lot of conservatives and religious people are really mad at me right now over that.
00:29:34.380I just loved your response to that and just even your attitude in the face of all of that, because I'm sure that all of the people there probably had maybe a slightly different view than you.
00:29:45.680So just like add on to that a little bit.
00:29:48.280That consent piece, I think, is so important because that is what I hear a lot.
00:30:29.020But for some reason, people think that it's perfectly fine for women to consent to sell themselves into being gestating wombs for the whims of, you know, whoever wants to buy those babies.
00:30:42.720And so, yeah, we have historical and legal precedents that you're not allowed to sell yourself into slavery or indentured servitude.
00:30:51.860And that's sort of something that I think is very akin to commercial surrogacy.
00:30:57.260Also, I think that when we look at the industry itself, no one wants to consider the toll that it takes on women's bodies.
00:31:07.000And there's a couple of things that's important to consider and realize, which is that women, when they undertake surrogacy, they have to go through intensive IVF.
00:31:18.520IVF, as we know, you get pumped full of hormones.
00:31:21.740You get implanted with a bunch of embryos.
00:31:24.920But women who undertake surrogacy with the egg of another woman also have to take drugs that prevent organ rejection because it's the same process.
00:31:34.880A woman's body, a human body, doesn't want somebody else's liver.
00:31:39.000And a woman's body, a woman's uterus doesn't want somebody else's egg.
00:31:42.600So you have to take these kinds of drugs as well.
00:31:45.020Additionally, in the surrogacy industry, the only women who are eligible to become surrogates already have gone through pregnancy.
00:31:56.640So now you are a woman who is selling her body and your children get to watch you sell your body.
00:32:02.460Further, if you are married, which a lot of American surrogates, this is a big industry in the United States, not just in Canada, and many European countries, it's illegal.
00:32:23.840They are watching you undertake this sale of your body and then the sale of what would be another child or a brother or sister.
00:32:32.920And I think that that would be incredibly detrimental to the family.
00:32:37.000Could you imagine being as emasculated as that if you're a man and you're home and you have a family and you're meant to take care of your wife and your children and do all of that and then you watch your wife sell her body to another for another man's whim?
00:34:00.400How desperate are they for money that they are willing to sell their bodies and to endure all of the terrible consequences that come with prostituting yourself?
00:34:11.540And really, is it truly consent when you are at the point of desperation that you are willing to do absolutely anything just to get by?
00:34:21.720Many of these women, especially the women in places like Ukraine and Nepal and places like that, technically they are consenting because they are signing on the dotted line.
00:34:32.920They are doing it out of powerlessness and helplessness and desperation.
00:35:06.420Think about all of the sick stuff that people could consent to that we still say, sorry, that's not legal or that's immoral or whatever.
00:35:13.880Just because someone consents to something doesn't mean it's right.
00:35:17.120And even if you do obsess over this consent-based morality model, which, as we're about to talk about, is really, really flimsy, the child doesn't consent.
00:35:25.560The child isn't consenting to this whole process into being bought and sold.
00:35:34.040And I think that it's crazy also with prostitution, which I also compare it to.
00:35:38.360You know, I've said that surrogacy is like prostitution, except you're getting screwed for nine months.
00:35:43.120I think that it's also true that it's hard to say, if a woman is consenting to prostitution, is she really consenting to having sex with 20 men per day for money?
00:35:54.240Is there any amount of money that would make you willingly do that day after day?
00:36:00.060I can't imagine a sum that I would be comfortable if I had a daughter or my sisters or myself to go through with something like that.
00:36:23.120And people also don't realize like, okay, we're not even just talking about the baby that gets to be born, their consent and their well-being.
00:36:30.860Like you just said, the woman has to go through very intense IVF.
00:36:34.160A lot of times that means that not everything that's implanted makes it.
00:36:39.420So you're talking about multiple miscarriages in some cases, in a lot of cases, cases that I know about these, um, the couple that's buying the baby from first the egg donor, then, you know, using the surrogate's body.
00:36:51.460They want to pick out certain embryos.
00:37:15.900I guarantee there is not probably a single commercial surrogacy situation in which there was like one embryo created, one embryo implanted and one baby born.
00:37:27.000I guarantee you at every single commercial surrogacy situation, you are looking at basically abortions, like in some cases, because you're going into it knowing that you are going to kill those children or placing children in a situation, you know, is dangerous.
00:37:42.840On top of all of that, the pregnancy itself is very dangerous for the mother and child in surrogacy for the reasons you've already mentioned.
00:37:51.200And there was a case actually of a woman who underwent surrogacy, didn't know who the client was.
00:37:58.420Turned out the client was a man who lived in his parents' basement and had no family other than that and who was undertaking parenthood on his own.
00:38:06.920Um, and when he found out that all of the embryos that she had, um, you know, been implanted with survived, he asked her to abort some.
00:38:24.840There was another case where it turned out that the person who was the man, again, a single man who was buying children from a surrogate was actually intending to use them, um, you know, for really nefarious purposes.
00:38:40.740Um, and that was, I think in Australia, I was following that case and yeah, I mean, really difficult things.
00:38:48.060And what kind of single man wants to raise children all by himself without a mother ever being in the picture?
00:38:54.660It's one thing to have a divorce, you know, and then you're raising the child, but you know, this is absolutely, um, this is not something that I understand why a man would want to do that, would want to, uh, take a mother out of the picture entirely.
00:39:10.960Yeah, I know every single red flag that I have goes up when I hear that a single man wants to go through the surrogacy process for a child.
00:39:24.340I mean, I think commercial surrogacy should be illegal in general, as it is in many countries, by the way, a lot of people don't.
00:39:53.660It took us a while to get to it, but this kind of goes back to what we were talking about, about how flimsy this whole consent based morality model is because it just so quickly leads to, well, what is really consent?
00:40:06.820Like, does it really, does consent really matter in all circumstances?
00:40:11.600I mean, we see obviously all of that with the gender madness, but we also see it when it comes to surrogacy.
00:40:17.540And this is a line from Redox or a headline medical journal floats concept of using brain dead women as surrogates through whole body gestational donation.
00:40:28.720An entry from the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics is prompting outrage from women on social media after theorizing that the bodies of vegetative or brain dead female patients could be utilized as whole body gestational surrogates.
00:40:41.320The article, originally published in November 22, it's titled Whole Body Gestational Donation.
00:40:47.180It proposes that it may be a may be viable to utilize the donated bodies of women for gestational purposes in the same manner that donated organs are used.
00:41:04.440And I think generations of science fiction writers that we have their work tell us exactly how terrible this is.
00:41:11.220We can read Brave New World and we can see that creating pods made out of made out of women's organs in order to create a new group of human beings is not an acceptable way to go.
00:41:23.080And it actually, not only is it immoral to that woman, but I think that what it spells is a very deadly and unpleasant direction for humanity.
00:41:33.080When we create children that have no past, who do these children belong to?
00:41:40.300When we create children that have no way to figure out who they are or where they're from, what kind of futures can we expect them to have?
00:41:49.920And what kind of quality of life can we expect them to have?
00:41:54.420And how are they supposed to treat other human beings?
00:41:57.680How are we supposed to have any value of each other if we don't have any, you know, provenance of ourselves?
00:42:05.120Oh, my mother is that brain dead woman in the hospital there.
00:43:08.720We're not here for just to further ourselves.
00:43:12.100So this Darwinian approach is not in keeping with our best selves at all.
00:43:17.980And if anyone thinks that consent in any way would be involved in this, even when it comes to the family, like, you haven't been paying attention.
00:44:11.360You need to make sure you're talking to the baby, playing music to the baby, reading books to the baby.
00:44:16.160You need to make sure that you're eating all of these things, that you're moving around, that you're not laying on your back.
00:44:20.340You know, like, all these things that a brain-dead woman can't do.
00:44:23.400So not only are you not thinking about her at all from the so-called bodily autonomy crowd, but you are also not considering, once again, the well-being of the baby.
00:46:34.140We embrace euthanasia, murdering young people because they say that life isn't worth living for whatever variety of reasons instead of trying to talk them out of it.
00:46:44.700And we embrace the dissolution of the family.
00:46:47.800We embrace the dissolution of mothers.
00:46:50.440We embrace the dissolution of biological sex, which is actually a remarkably beautiful thing.
00:46:56.720We don't look at ourselves as, you know, creatures who are here at God's grace or searching for God's grace.
00:47:05.940We don't consider the meaning of life anymore.
00:47:08.620We consider the meaning of our own desires.
00:47:11.740We consider how to fulfill our whims at any given moment.
00:47:16.040You know, eat, eat, eat all the cake, have all the sex, manufacture all the children, you know, whatever stage of life you're in.
00:47:24.440There's a way to justify the fulfillment of your own personal desires, you know, using technology, using whatever you want.
00:47:35.660And I just don't think that it spells a good future for humanity.
00:47:39.960It spells a future for humanity where death is at the center of our culture.
00:47:44.420And that's really not life should be there.
00:47:47.940Man, there's so many other things that I want to talk to you about.
00:47:51.300It's really all the consequence of exchanging the God of scripture for the God of self.
00:47:55.680I mean, that has what seems like petty consequences, pursuing whatever makes you happy in the moment, even if it hurts other people, relationships and things like that.
00:48:12.540But as you mentioned, Canada is pushing euthanasia.
00:48:16.780And it's not just for, not that it's okay in this case either, but it's not just for the elderly who have, who are dying of cancer.
00:48:23.940But as you mentioned, it's also young people who have a really good chance of surviving a sickness.
00:48:29.580And yet they are being told, well, you should probably just kill yourself.
00:48:32.940And then we've got a Yale professor, the New York Times reported, who suggested that mass suicide for old people in Japan could possibly be a good thing because there's so many old people, so few young people.
00:48:43.440I kind of don't understand how that solves the problem of needing more babies.
00:48:48.600But what we're seeing across the board is, I'm sure you would agree, is just the denigration of life because, again, we've replaced God with the self.
00:48:57.980And so we no longer believe that human beings are made in God's image.
00:49:02.320We no longer believe that human beings have souls and innate value, which is what, by the way, Western civilization was built on and why we have come to it.
00:49:09.860Which is what makes democracy possible.
00:49:12.520Yeah, that's what makes democracy possible.
00:49:14.360And when you say that we've replaced God with the self, we have so thoroughly done that.
00:49:19.240And we have replaced the soul with gender.