The Guardian has a piece titled, “‘We are expected to be OK with not having children’: how gay parenthood through surrogacy became a battleground.” Writing about a gay couple in Brooklyn, the reporter says:

When it comes to the fear that gay surrogacy erases mothers, [Nicholas] Maggipinto is defiant. “Our family will be a motherless family,” he says, tapping his finger on the table again, “I won’t tiptoe around that.” But the creation of that family doesn’t depend on the exploitation of women. “We’re not using a woman’s body. We are accepting a woman’s generosity to use her own body in a way that she agrees with.”

There are many reasons to be concerned about surrogates’ well-being. For instance, sometimes surrogates change their minds or disagree with the contracting couple on whether to abort babies in the case of twins or triplets. They are often poor and, like prostitutes, out of options. But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the woman choosing “to use her own body in a way that she agrees with” does so enthusiastically and without pressure (financial or otherwise) — what about the child?

The woman’s body isn’t merely being “used.” A lasting bond is formed between the woman and the child she carries. While tragic circumstances can deprive a child of knowing one or both of his parents — and it can be generous, in such cases, for others to step in through adoption or foster care — to deliberately engineer these circumstances is selfish.

Yet you can understand this gay couple’s sense of entitlement given that heterosexual couples have also been putting their own desires ahead of children’s interests for years.