Wire Mother Nation

On celebrity, surrogacy, and a culture of attachment disorder

In 1958, scientific researcher Harry Harlow committed atrocities. Harlow felt a need to “prove” that humans and other primates require contact and comfort from a caretaker in infancy in order to develop normally. And he was not content just asking his mother about the topic. So Harry Harlow decided to torture some baby monkeys (and their mothers, who usually go unmentioned in discussions of the Harlow monkey experiments).

Harlow took infant monkeys from their mothers and placed them individually into cages with two sculptures vaguely resembling female monkeys. He called these sculptures “surrogate mothers.” In each cage one sculpture was made only of wire and wood while the other was padded with foam rubber and terrycloth.

The monkeys were assigned to one of two experimental groups. In the first group, the wire monkey had a milk bottle to provide food and the cloth figure did not. In the second group only the cloth structure had food.

(I’m going to pause now and breathe in the face of this horror show.)

You’ve probably heard how the experiment panned out. Unsurprisingly the baby monkeys preferred the soft “mother” to the wire one. The babies in the first group would go to the wire sculpture only for food, then cling to the soft figure for most of their days. The babies in the second group spent little to no time pressing their bodies against the hard edges of the wire and wood “mothers.”

I couldn’t help but think of the Harlow monkey studies when I saw some celebrity news this week. Former NSYNC singer Lance Bass admitted that the twin children he purchased through surrogacy preferred the soft body of his mother to his own jacked male physique for the first year of their lives. The former teen heart-throb now adult gay icon told Yahoo! News lifestyle reporters, “The first year, they wouldn't give me any love. They never hugged, they never wanted to snuggle, and I was so upset about it. Because they would do that with my mom. My mom would come over and boom, they’d snuggle with her.”’

The same week that the lifestyle editors of Yahoo! ran the story on Bass’ experience, Khloe Kardashian opened up about difficulties bonding with the child she hired another woman to gestate and birth. (She and Bass both paid surrogate agencies and fetility doctors and lawyers a whole lot more than they paid the surrogate mothers, but that is for a later post.)

On the show The Kardashians, Khloe appeared distressed and admitted that surrogacy was a “mindfuck.” She called the process “transactional.” She said she felt disconnected from the infant.

Her billionaire sister Kim, who has also purchased children through surrogacy, chimed in to reassure Khloe the bonding would come later. Kim Kardashian then asserted, “I do think that there is a difference when the baby is in your belly — it actually feels your real heart. Think about it. It touches your organs.”

What a fascinating hypothesis that growing and birthing a baby creates a different bonding experience than purchasing one. Maybe a modern-day Harry Harlow could design an experiment so we can find out if this is scientifically true or just an anecdotal claim.

By now you should understand that the members of the Kardashian family serve as high-end trendsetters for global capitalism. This is the family that launched the mainstreaming of transgenderism with Bruce Jenner in 2015. The Kardashians are always selling “lifestyle” products. And we are all keeping up with the Kardashians.

The Kardashians sell body modification, face tuning, plastic surgery and so much more. As part of their work for the transhumanist biomedical industrial complex, the Kardashian sisters are selling the trend of surrogacy.

Lifestyle branders promote surrogacy as feminist, saying it gives women more choices regarding reproduction. Critics of surrogacy are painted as anti-choice. Surrogacy proponents insist that women (with enough money to pay) should have the right to rent other women’s bodies, and women who need money should have the right to sell their bodies. A recent article in the The New Yorker proposes that women won’t be equal to men until they too can reproduce throughout their entire lifespan, and surrogacy is essential to this aim.

More than female CEOs or female astronauts, surrogacy epitomizes the end game of “equality feminism.” Women can now insert their genetic material into (poorer, less powerful) other women, then come back in nine months to collect a baby as their rightful legal property. Just like men have done since the dawn of patriarchy.

Surrogacy is also sold as essential to LGBTQ liberation. The LGBTQ community represents a huge market for Big Fertility. Same-sex couples and queer individuals face challenges having babies the old-fashioned way and Big Fertility is intertwined with the gender industrial complex. Pediatric gender clinicinans admit that puberty blockers and cross-sex synthetic hormones create infertility in children given this line of treatment, necessitating buying eggs and sperm and surrogates on the open market later in life.

Trans poster child Jazz Jennings, who has been exploited by Hollywood to sell all things trans, boasted that he planned to use his sister as a surrogate should he want to have children in the future. Jazz told Cosmopolitan, “since my sister has my same DNA, I’m convincing her to carry the baby for me. We’ll take my hubby’s sperm and throw it in there and fertilize it.”

Wrapped in the rainbow flag, the surrogacy industry is beyond critique. Any nay-sayers are obviously bigots and transphobes.

Despite social pressure to embrace surrogacy as part of “the new normal,” many people are starting to have misgivings. Something about the process feels wrong to people whose instincts about mothering and humanity remain intact. Plus, weren’t we just starting to admit that adoption has the potential to really mess people up? Won’t surrogacy create similar attachment issues? Maybe we should put the brakes on this social experiment that satisfies the desires of adults but might be creating problems for children.

Enter the controlled opposition. The current articles on disrupted bonding are part and parcel of the surrogacy marketing blitz. This is not an admission of guilt or a warning to slow down and think twice about the mainstreaming of surrogacy.

The Kardashian sisters and Lance Bass and other stars are not coming clean about surrogacy. They are doing what is required of them in the entertainment world. Billions of dollars are at stake.

These stars are playing their role in social engineering. They have handlers and marketing teams and every bit of press they release is designed to sell more of what they are selling. The “truth” they are telling is doing its intended job of making people think they aren’t just a bunch of heartless baby buyers.

By admitting they feel strange about the “transactional nature” of surrogacy, the Kardashian sisters are telling those who might be considering surrogacy that it’s ok to feel uneasy about renting a working class woman and buying a baby. It’s normal to feel disconnected and detached from the baby. Like Kim says, it’s different that being pregnant and birthing because the baby wasn’t “touching your organs.” This serves to get out in front of the inevitable horrible feelings some women and men will have about participating in this atrocity.

The stylish sisters are selling ambivalence as part of the package. “Sure, it’s baby buying (i.e. transactional). Sure, it’s weird to rent a woman who is selling her body because she needs money. Sure, you’re going to have bonding problems.” That’s just the messy, trendy, high-ticket market of surrogacy. Now a word from our sponsors. (Cut to a pharmaceutical ad for an anti-depressant or a drug to treat a once-rare autoimmune condition.)