Why Dave Rubin’s Use of Surrogacy Should Give Conservatives Pause

A fter Dave Rubin tweeted that he and his partner were welcoming two IVF babies later this year, it didn’t take long for some wag to make an Office meme juxtaposing their glossy reveal picture with Pete and Chasten Buttigieg’s infamous “hospital bed” photo. As the line goes, “Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures.”

In fact, there is one significant difference: While Pete and Chasten were holding adopted newborn twins, Dave and David hold ultrasounds of babies in surrogate wombs, carrying their own genes — one matched to each man with a shared egg donor. It’s the culmination of a long and costly process for the couple, which Rubin began documenting in Don’t Burn This Book and describes at more length in a video announcement. As the Twitter reveal went viral, congratulations began streaming in from some surprising sources, including anti-CRT firebrand Chris Rufo, BlazeTV, PragerU, Libs of Tik Tok, and other self-styled “right-wing” media voices. Even Ron DeSantis’s press secretary joined the chorus.

Meanwhile, some took silence as consent from strong social-conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, who had vocally condemned the Buttigieg adoption. When pressed on Twitter by YouTuber Mark Dice, Walsh accused Dice of bad faith but made it clear that he would judge Rubin consistently. “There are indeed many ‘conservatives’ who’ve surrendered these fights,” Walsh replied, “but I’m not one of them and will never be one.”

Indeed, while it would be superficially satisfying to nail any of the affirming accounts on hypocrisy charges, I found no evidence that they actually disapproved of Pete and Chasten’s family expansion, either. Most likely, they didn’t, which indicates that this is not a case of hypocrisy. It’s a case of collective culture-shift. From the left side of the aisle, Sam Seder at Majority Report points out that right-wing voices have been loudly beating the drum about LGBT indoctrination in public schools. Why, then, would they be unconcerned that two children might be “indoctrinated” by two daddies? The reason is simple: They are “culture warriors” for the culture of 2022, not 2012.

Rubin accurately diagnoses this in his video announcement, when he observes that, post-Obergefell, “most people just want to live and let live.” He doesn’t “see any real issue anymore with conservatives and gay people.” “Conservative” according to whom, though? As far as Rubin is concerned, he’s “left the Left.” But where is “the Right”? Apparently, making haste to meet Rubin halfway, along with other sensible moderate people who also favor low taxes, closed borders, and a free market. In essentials, unity.

But a few still refuse to budge. In a new video, BlazeTV podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey goes on record that she “definitely disagreed” with her distributor’s decision to make a statement “that seemed to be representative of the company as a whole.” Speaking for herself, she argues compellingly that with no commitment to biblical morality or the nuclear family, the center cannot hold. Conservatism shall not live by anti-wokeness alone. “We can be anti-woke, we can be anti-left-wing, we can be anti-post-modern nonsense together. But you can only get so far playing defense. You can only get so far saying what you are against. You can’t win if you’re not building, and you can’t build without a foundation.” Stuckey also notes the irony that many of the same people congratulating Rubin spent that week protesting Lia Thomas’s ill-gotten NCAA championship. If they’re so concerned about “female erasure,” what of the women “erased” in Dave and David’s announcement picture — both the surrogate mothers and the egg donor, selected on the egg-shopping equivalent of Tinder? (That’s Rubin’s analogy, not mine.)

Rubin later joined Blaze TV host Glenn Beck to discuss the announcement and its fallout, acknowledging the “legitimate fears” of conservatives who withheld affirmation. “Uh-oh,” Rubin imagines them worrying, “if we move the line, they’re gonna keep going!” Where “they,” in Rubin’s mind, are “the Left.” As if buying eggs and renting wombs in dystopian homage to traditional domesticity isn’t “throwing the line in the back of a truck and hitting the open road,” to quote a phrase I’m stealing with permission from my friend Ben Sixsmith. Beck was cloyingly conciliatory in reply, despite his interesting comment that the Mormon Church has historically been “the clearest” on God’s design for marriage.

But let’s, for a moment, be fair to Dave and David: They are going through motions that many infertile straight couples have already normalized for them. Though of course, for straight couples, infertility is a bug, not a feature. For gay couples, the elaborately abnormal is by design the only path to an imitation of the normal. As Rubin jokes in his announcement, “It wasn’t as if Mother Nature was on our side.” This means that, in practice, the problem of gay parenting and the problem of the lab baby aren’t fully separable.

Still, one can bracket the former while debating the latter, as Mary Harrington does in her Unherd piece sharply challenging the ethics of “gestation for hire” across the board. The unfolding horror of BioTexCom’s Ukrainian “orphans” shows with brutal clarity how quickly dreams can turn to nightmares. It’s past time for everyone to rethink the whole commodifying game, to count the cost of our irresponsible refusal to accept life’s tragic limitations.

But Rubin doesn’t see himself as irresponsible. To the contrary, he sees this process as an assumption of responsibility, after insisting to his younger partner for years that he wanted a career more than children. He cites none other than Jordan Peterson as the catalyst for his epiphany that life is about more than career. It’s about taking on meaningful tasks. It’s about leaving a legacy. It’s about making sure there are more people behind you “to go on and fight for the good things” in this crazy, messed-up world.

It’s a touching pro-natal message. That is, until you read the section on abortion in Rubin’s book, where he reveals that he and his family had collectively decided they would “terminate the pregnancy” if they discovered a severe disability. This immediately follows a paragraph affirming abortion as a “right of women.” Significantly, in all the talk of how heavy and “difficult” it would be for Rubin to abort his hypothetical disabled child, there is no mention of how the invisible woman carrying this child might feel, or how she, too, might “wrestle with the consequences” for years to come.

This particular house of ethical horrors may be avoided by gay couples who choose the adoption route instead — as, indeed, Pete and Chasten Buttigieg did. But their dual-hospital-bed pose still symbolized the inevitable female erasure of all such family units. This still, rightly, makes people uncomfortable. As I gauged reactions after Rubin’s announcement, many said that while the lab baby/surrogacy angle was the most disturbing element for them, their concerns wouldn’t vanish if that element were removed. The maternal void would remain.

The two pictures may in some important senses be different. They may not raise all of the same questions. And yet, they are also the same picture, in that they extend the same artfully curated invitation to normalize. They are two variations on the same theme: man’s willful refusal to listen to Mother Nature, when Mother Nature is trying to tell him something.