Mother Used to Mean Something

For thousands of years, the word mother meant something specific. The role of a mother meant you had created a child. You had gone through a unique human experience of creation, gestation, and birth. You had risked your life. You had created life.

Imagine someone pointing to your child and asking, “Who is this?” You would have said: “My child.” If they pushed back and asked you to justify the claim, you would have talked about being the one who birthed them. They came from you. In modern times, you could have even offered a DNA test. Down to their very blood running through their body, you were connected. It was not an idea or a feeling. There was only one door through which a human being could come into this world, and that was through the creation of two people, emerging from a woman. That made you mom.

I (Josh) said “used to mean something”, because today’s culture has, without many people even knowing the assault was underway, begun to dismantle and degrade what the word “mother” means. What was formerly contained in one person, we have now decided is purchasable, divisible, and optional. New criteria determine who bears the title of mother. The world that once answered by pointing to a biological truth now defers in favor of an adult fantasy.

The trinity of motherhood

For all of history, the word mother described an indivisible triad, all irreplaceable for the human child. Bound up in one remarkable woman were three roles fulfilled at once. She was the originator, responsible for half the child’s genetic makeup. She was the gestator, undertaking the nine-month miracle that turns egg and sperm into a living, breathing child. And she was the sustainer, the one who nourishes and raises the child, feeding her from her own body. Originator, gestator, sustainer, all the same person. That trinity of motherhood was not a philosophical abstraction. It was a provable reality and evolutionary necessity. It held for thousands of years across every culture humans have built, not as a cultural invention. It was the structure of human reproduction itself.

The dismantling of that unity did not happen all at once. It happened in stages, as emerging technologies made possible “innovations” that threatened to redefine the words “mother” and “child”. Each evolution normalized the separation of one role from the others, until the trinity was no longer a unit but a set of purchasable, disposable services that could be arranged in a myriad of combinations.

Phase One: The Loss of the Caretaker

The first separation is the exception in our story. Adoption as a response to tragedy arose when children lost the final piece of the triad: the mother out in the world, the one who would sustain and raise them. This occurred when death, abandonment, or tragic circumstances made caretaking an impossibility. In those cases, a righteous society sought someone to step into that role.

What is essential to understand about adoption, and what distinguishes it from everything that we must discuss next, is that adoption fundamentally recognizes the loss a child suffers. Its framework has always recognized the mother, the woman who created, gestated, and birthed the child, as the ideal preferred person to fill that role. She was the default. Any other arrangement would, in the eyes of the child, be an unnatural replacement. That second-best status was not an insult. It was a moral acknowledgment. Any replacement had to be a response to and involve a serious loss.

This is why adoption requires vetting and a legal process. The new caretaking mother had to demonstrate she could safely provide what the child had lost, as much as would be possible. The vetting was the moral acknowledgment in legal form. The law treated the loss with the gravity it deserved. Importantly, this was the trinity being disrupted by tragedy, not by design. The law stepped in to try to mend a wound, not create one. Two of the three pieces, the originator and the gestator, were still held together in the woman whose loss the system was acknowledging.

If you are an adoptive parent reading this, please hear me clearly: you are not who I am writing about. The argument that follows is not aimed at you. Adoption, done as it was meant to be done, is one of the most beautiful responses a society can have to a child’s suffering, and adoptive families carry on that responsibility every day. What I am about to describe is a separate practice that has borrowed adoption’s tools and sometimes its language to do something adoption never authorized. You are on the side of the children. The people I am writing about are not. If you’d like to read more about that distinction:

Adoption did something else as well. For noble reasons, it built the legal mechanisms required to transfer parental rights and attach them to another individual. That mechanism was intended for the child who experienced loss. Selfish adults later attempted to co-opt this pathway for a different purpose entirely. But instead of following the protective standards of adoption, courts and legislatures have established a new pathway to parenthood based on “intent.” Rather than taking serious account of the best interest of the child, as adoption does, or recognizing the weight of the loss the practice inflicts, this new pathway engineers that loss in advance. Parental rights are assigned because an adult paid for them.

Phase Two: Reproductive Technology and the Loss of the Gestator

What came next was different. With the rise of IVF, surrogacy, and egg and sperm selling, society began to call into question the other elements of motherhood. We had already seen in practice that the caretaker role could be transferred to others when tragedy required it, albeit not without costs to the child. These new practices began to ask whether the rest of the relationship could also be acquired and severed by adult choice.

Surrogacy outsourced the gestator role. An adult could now contract another woman to carry and birth a child on the buyer's behalf, bearing for nine months the medical risk, the bodily toll, the dangers of childbirth, and the bond a contract would require her to sever at the moment of birth. The contracting adult pays to have all of this borne by someone else.

Gestational surrogacy required IVF as its enabling technology. IVF was sold to the public as a treatment for infertile heterosexual couples who wanted to raise their own biological children. The sympathetic case was the wife whose body could not conceive in the ordinary way, who needed medical help to bring her own egg and her husband’s sperm together. Her grief was real. Most people, when they imagined IVF, imagined that couple.

But what IVF actually did was create human life in a laboratory, outside any woman’s body. Once the embryo existed in a petri dish, it could be transferred anywhere. It could go back into the woman whose egg had been used. It could go into a different woman entirely. The sympathetic case of the infertile wife cracked the door, but it swung much wider than the case that justified it. The technology of creating embryos outside the body meant those embryos could be placed in any contracted body. The infrastructure built to serve infertile couples became the infrastructure that made surrogacy possible. The gestator could now be a separate person from everyone else in the arrangement, and the law was forced to step in and adjudicate which mother counted most: the woman who created the child through her egg, the woman who carried and birthed the child, or the woman who would raise the child. The trinity had never required a hierarchy because the three roles had always been one woman. Now the courts were being asked to invent one.

Phase Three: The Same-Sex Father and the Loss of the Originator

Once the processes of gestation could be acquired as a service, the question that followed was inevitable. Why not complete the market and purchase the other elements? Why not replace the creator side as well? The technology that had been built to help infertile women carry their own children, and to help heterosexual couples acquire children through surrogacy, was the same technology that could now serve a different population entirely. Two men, rendered infertile not by condition but by design, could use it to acquire a child of their own.

The technology made it possible for them to buy the originator and the gestator as separate services. The origin mother provided the egg. The gestational mother carried the pregnancy. The two men paid each of them to relinquish their claim and then took the child home. Some of them go further than that. They hire a female nanny to provide the daily caretaking. They hire a wet nurse, or pay for breast milk, so the child has access to what only a woman’s body can provide. They surround the child with women performing the functions of a mother while insisting the child has no mother, because the two men are all the child needs. They claim that a father can take over the mother role, even though neither of them is a mother in any biological sense. They have purchased the originator. They have purchased the gestator. They have purchased pieces of the caretaker. And then they call themselves the parents and refuse to acknowledge that anyone they paid was the child’s mother.

What is striking about this is what the technology still cannot do. Even at the maximum dismantling possible today, the two men cannot erase the woman who made the child. A woman’s egg was used. A woman’s body gestated the child for nine months. A woman gave birth. The biological reality of the child’s origin is intact. The two men can paper over it legally. They can write their names on the birth certificate. They can refuse the title of mother to anyone. But the child still came from a woman, and from another woman, and the absence the two men have engineered is a legal fiction, not a biological one.

Once that arrangement is permissible, the rest follows. One man, or two men, or five men. Two women raising a child with no father. A single contracting parent of any sex with services purchased from anyone. The terms mother and father lose their definitional content entirely. They become labels that contracting parties may apply to themselves in whatever combinations they choose. There is no supreme arrangement once you are no longer constrained by biological definitions, because the constraints were what made the arrangement supreme. To denounce any particular form, to say that some configurations are better for children than others, becomes bigotry by the logic of the system itself.

Mother used to mean something. Now we are at the threshold of saying it does not have to mean anything in particular. Mother is whatever the contracting parties have agreed to call themselves. The biological reality that grounded the word for thousands of years has become one input among many that the legal system may or may not honor.

The Threshold Ahead

What this demonstrates is that we have separated mother as much as the technology will currently allow. The caretaker can be replaced. The gestator can be contracted. The creator can be purchased. The maximum dismantling of the trinity has been reached within the limits of present technology. But those limits are about to fall.

Two technologies in development are approaching the point where they will remove the last places a woman is structurally required. In vitro gametogenesis, the growing of eggs and sperm from ordinary cells, would allow a child to be created without an egg from any woman at all. Artificial wombs, already used to gestate premature lambs and being developed for premature human infants, point toward a future in which a child could be gestated without any woman’s body. Combined, these technologies would produce, for the first time in human history, the possibility of a child whose existence does not require a woman at any step. The thin biological floor that has remained under the concept of motherhood, the floor that even the most aggressive current arrangements cannot remove, would be gone. A child could be brought into existence with no mother in any sense of the word. Not a missing mother whose absence is mourned. Not a contracted mother whose contribution was paid for. No mother at all.

The question this raises is the one the entire trajectory has been pointing toward. Will we tolerate the complete erasure of mother and rob the child of that role entirely in their life? Is mother optional?

This is the question we ask today, and it is the question we will be forced to answer tomorrow. What do we believe about a mom? And what do we owe a child?

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About the Author:

Josh Wood serves as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

He lives with his wife and their four children in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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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.

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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