How Legalizing Surrogacy Helps Activists ‘Queer Babies’

In December, gay father Balázs Boross published “Queering babies: (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy” in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. The essay “explores how encounters with [a surrogate baby] disrupt or confirm normative expectations about the ‘babyness’ of babies, the ‘parentness’ of parents.”

Boross suggests “surrogate babies are queer creatures by default,” “given their prenatal history,” and “that queerness can serve as a window into the queerness of all babies.”

Evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright condemned the “autoethnographic account” as depicting the “sexualization of infants.” He noted the somewhat “animalistic and perverse” nature of Boross discussing his daughter’s instinctual search for a breast during early skin-to-skin contact, and framing the connection between parent and child as inherently “gendered

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