Do Step-Parents Matter?

Our TBU staff defends biology in Lima, Ohio

Earlier this week, I (Nick) drove to Lima, Ohio, to testify before the city council about a billboard campaign Them Before Us has placed around the country. The message is simple. Only ten words long, but ten words that have generated an enormous response: “No child has two dads. No child has two moms.”

We knew it would ruffle feathers, but when you’re fighting a legal and cultural establishment increasingly built upon the desires of adults over the rights of children, that’s kind of expected.

Some of the response billboards included:

Both at the hearing and online, one can notice a version of the same objection over and over: “So, you think adoptive families are fake? You think stepparents don’t count? You think my remarried mom and her husband aren’t real parents to me?”

No. That is not what the billboard says, and it is not what we believe. But the fact that so many people heard it that way—or have been coerced into hearing it that way by the very LGBTQ crowd that benefits most from such confusion—tells us that additional clarity is important because the distinction we’re drawing is really the whole ballgame.

A Statement of Biology, not a Statement About Love

Here is the claim on the billboard, and the claim I made at that meeting, stated in different words: every single person reading this article was conceived by one man and one woman. Not two men. Not two women. Not a single parent working alone. Not a “throuple.” One man, one woman, full stop. That is not an inherently religious or political claim. It is a claim you can verify with a paternity test or even AncestryDNA. We didn’t invent this fact, and we can’t undo it; we’re just refusing to pretend it isn’t true, because state legislatures increasingly are, and that makes kids suffer for the whims and desires of adults.

That claim is entirely compatible with adoptive families and stepfamilies being real, loving, and worthy of full legal recognition. Nothing about “every child has a mother and a father” denies that adoptive parents are parents in every sense that matters legally, relationally, and practically. That would be a really strange claim for an organization founded by an adoptive mom and former adoption industry executive to make.

Stepping In vs. Deliberately Cutting Off

So, where’s the line our billboards are drawing? The line is this: there is a profound moral difference between stepping in to repair a broken situation and manufacturing brokenness on purpose.

Adoption exists because something has already gone wrong—a death, an abandonment, an abuse finding, or a parent unable to care for a child. Adoptive parents did not create that loss. They show up afterward and absorb tremendous burdens to give a child stability they would not otherwise have. The same is true, in a different way, of a stepparent who marries into a child’s life after a divorce or death. Neither one authored the child’s loss of a biological parent. Rather, they are responding to it.

Surrogacy is entirely different in kind, not just degree. In a surrogacy arrangement, the child’s separation from one or both biological parents isn’t a tragedy the arrangement is responding to. Instead, it’s the product being purchased. The contract is signed, a child is created, and the plan from day one is that the woman who gestates and delivers the child will hand that child to someone else and, typically, never have parental rights or even ongoing contact. The loss isn’t incidental; it’s the deliverable. The same is true of anonymous sperm and egg donation, where a child is deliberately conceived to be permanently severed from all knowledge of, and connection to, one entire side of their biological identity.

That is the distinction our billboard is making, and it’s the distinction that gets lost when people hear “no child has two dads” as an attack on the family down the street that happens to include a stepdad. In reality, it’s an argument about what adults shouldn’t be permitted to engineer into existence on purpose versus what adults valiantly do to clean up after something has already broken. And the truth is that LGBT couples regularly choose to create that brokenness through IVF and surrogacy rather than make use of adoption…because a biological connection actually matters to them too, but largely for their own sake rather than the sake of the child they create.

Why the Distinction Matters for Child Safety, Not Just in Philosophy

Saying every child is the offspring of one man and one woman isn’t some kind of abstract point about origins disconnected from practical reality. That claim ought to have profound impacts in child welfare law. During my testimony, I asked the council a pointed question: how many laws does Ohio have requiring a background check, a home study, or a sex offender registry search before a child conceived via surrogacy is handed over to the people who purchased that child? The answer is zero. Compare that to adoption, where home studies, background checks, and post-placement supervision are standard practice precisely because we’ve learned, sometimes at children’s expense, that unrelated adults gaining custody of a child requires vetting.

I also raised a second, uncomfortable data point in the testimony: one of the highest-risk environments for a child to live is a household where they live with an unrelated adult male. Just do an internet search for news stories including the words “mother’s boyfriend.” We’re not saying that to indict single mothers or their partners, but because biological relationship is protective, and law and culture ignore that at children’s expense.

Adults Absorbing Loss vs. Adults Manufacturing It

If there’s one sentence to take from all of this, it’s this: adoption and remarriage are adults sacrificing to absorb a child’s loss; commercial surrogacy and anonymous donor conception are adults arranging for a child’s loss to happen in the first place, for the adults’ own benefit. Both situations can produce loving homes, but love is about much more than simple sentimentality and emotion. Biology still matters, even when love is present, and only one side of those arguing treats a child’s severance from a biological parent as an acceptable cost of doing business. News flash: it’s not us.

That’s the conversation we came to Lima to start, and it’s the conversation we intend to keep having in city councils and statehouses across the country—not because we think adoptive and blended families are anything less than real, but because we think children conceived into surrogacy and donor arrangements deserve the same protection and honesty that we already extend everywhere else in family law. (Side note: how strange is the argument that our side “denies the existence” of certain groups or individuals just because we’re highlighting the reality for children? None of that denies the physical existence of a human being. But I digress.)

If you think children deserve a mother and a father—and when that’s not possible, deserve honesty about what was lost—join us. Them Before Us is a movement working city council by city council, statehouse by statehouse, to put children’s rights at the center of family policy. If this testimony resonated with you, consider partnering with us to help us keep showing up in rooms like the one in Lima this week.

We are ordinary people with an extraordinarily (and sometimes offensively) ordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility.

Bonus

Check out Katy’s recent interview with the folks at Answers in Genesis about our billboards and why it’s important to highlight the ideal for children even as we support the adults sacrificing for children who have suffered loss.

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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