In a recent interview on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recounted how he and his husband came to acquire their two children. He described scrolling through “different lists” of babies, sorted by race, and remarked—almost in passing—that there was “a discount” on non-white children. The tone was casual, the moment brushed aside. But the details are unsettling. Who were these babies’ mothers? How did a male couple suddenly “become parents” to two newborns at the same time? Even Saturday Night Live has managed, in a recent skit, to satirize the bizarre incongruity of this arrangement. And yet, in polite society, we’re expected to nod along as if none of it requires explanation.
We rarely ask such questions aloud, even as they become more pressing. The cultural taboos around same-sex adoption, surrogacy, and the commodification of children have not disappeared—they’ve merely been reversed. What was once considered transgressive is now celebrated. Expressions of concern for the well-being of children are now denounced as bigotry. And, worst of all, what was once unthinkable—that children could be manufactured, sold, and deprived of their mother or father by design—has been reframed as progress. This is not a personal indictment of Buttigieg or his partner, who undoubtedly care deeply for their children. But the casual way this story is told, and received by Schulz’s panel of comics, reveals how far our cultural imagination has shifted regarding what family means. In different ways, both the left and the right have begun to treat the family not as a natural institution grounded in human nature and moral order, but as a tool to be molded, a commodity to be optimized.
On the left, the family is increasingly seen as a construct of the will. In this vision, family is whatever arrangement best serves the expressive needs of the individual. Surrogacy, donor conception, same-sex parenting, and even polyamorous co-parenting are embraced not as exceptions, but as manifestations of a deeper principle: that adults have the right to design their families however they wish. The child, in this schema, is less a subject of rights than an object of desire.
The highest good in liberal modernity is autonomy—the freedom to shape one’s own identity and life without external constraint. But children represent the opposite of autonomy. They are not chosen but received. They impose obligations and require sacrifice on the part of the parents. And so, in order for the liberal order to fully extend into the realm of procreation, the child must be transformed into something one can plan, purchase, and possess.
Surrogacy is the clearest example of this transformation. It severs the bond between mother and child by design, turning pregnancy into a service, motherhood into a contract, and the child into a product to be delivered on demand. A woman’s very womb becomes just another sector of the economy. Likewise, same-sex parenting presupposes that the child can be deprived of either a mother or a father in service of the adult’s fulfillment. This is not to deny that homosexual couples can offer affection, support, and a deep commitment to their children’s well-being. Many do. But disordered affection cannot erase the natural, irreplaceable roles that mothers and fathers play in a child’s development. In this practice, children become the outward stamp of approval on same-sex unions, signaling to the world that homosexual parents are no different from heterosexual ones.
This is not to say that all such parents are unloving or malicious. Many sincerely seek to provide care, stability, and affection. However, as Chief Justice John Roberts remarked during his dissent in Obergefell, what is being sought is not entry into an institution but a redefinition of an institution that predates the very legal order that aims to redefine it. That redefinition recasts family not as the millennia-old, organic outgrowth of man and woman joined in lifelong union, but as an assemblage of preferences and legal arrangements. One can support legal protections for same-sex couples while still acknowledging that such recognition marks a substantive shift in the meaning of marriage itself. Within this new framework, the child becomes a lifestyle accessory, curated to fit adult expectations of what their “marriage” ought to look like. But as Aquinas wrote, love is willing the good of the other, guided by reason and ordered to nature. A love that willfully severs children from their origins, or treats their identity as a matter of design and desire, however outwardly affectionate, departs from this order. It risks becoming a form of injustice—not because the intent is malicious, but because the structure itself fails to honor the child’s full humanity.
Yet the commodification of the family is not confined to the left. On the right, a new natalist movement has taken root—one that seeks to revive childbearing not for the sake of the child, but for the survival of the nation. Conservative thinkers, politicians, and influencers urge families to “have more babies” to combat demographic decline. As the Tradwife movement has gained popularity online, nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland offer financial incentives to boost fertility. The goal is not merely to affirm family life, but to preserve a cultural or civilizational identity. Children become demographic foot soldiers in the battle for national continuity. Even in the American context, where policy remains more restrained, this logic is present in the growing chorus that sees family as a hedge against cultural decay.
This natalism, while superficially tethered to a pro-traditional family agenda, shares with the left a tendency to instrumentalize the child. It shifts the focus from the intrinsic goodness of the family to its utility in a larger social project. Instead of being welcomed as gifts, children are counted as statistics—units of national resilience. The anxiety is understandable. Western nations are facing plummeting birth rates, and a civilization that does not reproduce cannot sustain itself. But numbers alone are not enough. Burke warned against abstract political theories that divorced tradition and moral sentiment from the structures of society. Still, there is wisdom in recognizing the need for cultural renewal and demographic stability. Many proponents of natalism are rightly concerned about the collapse of the family and are motivated by a desire to preserve what is good and true. But means matter, and this new natalism risks becoming an abstraction: replacing reverence for the natural family with a cold demographic calculus. It answers the commodification of the child by the left with a commodification of its own.
While the American right has not fully embraced the commodified view of children and parenthood, owing in part to the enduring influence of Catholics and Evangelicals within the MAGA coalition, some prominent figures are drifting in that direction. Consider former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s infamous tweet lamenting that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” by “celebrat[ing] the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ.” The vision here is unmistakable: childhood itself becomes another arena for productivity and national utility, where children are no longer ends in themselves but future cogs in a technocratic machine. In Vivek’s America, children are to be optimized from birth, their playtime traded for test prep, their humanity subordinated to performance in “a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.” It is a world in which the family is no longer a haven for love, leisure, and moral formation, but a factory for producing globally competitive outputs. Is that a country worth living in, or a culture worth preserving?
Both visions—the left’s radical individualism and the right’s nationalist pragmatism—share a common flaw. They treat the child not as a person with inherent dignity, but as a means to an end. Whether as an expression of identity or a guarantor of national survival, the child becomes something to acquire, manage, and deploy. But children are not tools or trophies. They are not the solution to adult loneliness, nor the vanguard of civilizational revival. They are “a heritage from the Lord,” made in the image of God, with a right to be born into a stable, loving home, raised by the mother and father who conceived them—full stop.
The family is not an arbitrary construct, but a reflection of human nature and moral reality. It begins with the union of man and woman, ordered toward the generation and formation of new life. It is the original community, where children learn what it means to be loved, to obey, to forgive, and to trust. It cannot be reinvented to suit our whims, because it is not ours to reinvent. The family is a gift—received, not designed; nurtured, not engineered.
As with many such issues, these debates often stir deep emotion. They touch on people’s most intimate hopes and identities. But beneath the disagreement lies a shared human longing—for connection, for love, for family. So, to recover the dignity of the family and truly fulfill that longing, we must resist both the expressive individualism of the left and the demographic engineering of the right. We must recognize that the child is not a project or a pawn, but a gift to be received in love and raised in truth. A just society does not ask how the family can serve its ends. It asks how it can serve the family. Only when we remember this can we hope to restore the integrity of the institution upon which all others depend.
