Tuesday, August 16, 2022 – AlbertMohler.com – Albert Mohler
And thus, we shift to another headline that demands our attention. I’ve been watching this for days, and much like in the Bible you hear about the little cloud that appeared on the horizon and then the flood that eventually came, well, we’ve been looking at this story as kind of a cloud on the horizon, the size of a man’s fist, and now, all of a sudden, it’s a much bigger story. It should be a much bigger story still, that is, this should be something that Americans know more about and more Americans know about, but as you hear the story, I think you’re going to understand why so many in the elite media and academia and among the powers that be don’t want to touch this at all.
In this case, the news story takes us to Pasadena, California, and to a couple. In this case, a man and a man, and according to the report, they are recording to the law in California legally wed. Albert and Anthony Saniger. Now, they are in news there in California because they are suing a fertility clinic, not because they didn’t get a baby, but because they got the wrong baby. In this case, the wrong baby they got was a girl baby rather than a boy baby.
Here you have a same-sex couple, legally married according to California, filing a lawsuit against a clinic known as HRC Fertility, and charging them with breach of contract, medical malpractice, negligence, and fraudulent concealment also. Just throw in a violation of The Unfair Competition Law and The Consumer Legal Remedies Act. Why? They would accept only a boy. They demanded a boy, and furthermore, they thought they had bought a boy, and they ended up with a girl, and thus, breach of contract.
Now, notice the fact that something really weird is going on here. Indeed, weird on top of weird. We’re talking about a medical, technological revolution. A revolution in human reproductive technologies that staggers the mind. I’ve been writing on this issue now for more than two decades, and at least at this point, there’s a little bit of progress among Christians in understanding what is at stake. I think more Christians probably now understand the inherent moral challenges of surrogate parenting, and more and more are understanding the inherent moral challenges with such things as test tube babies, as they are popularly known, or in-vitro fertilization procedures.
The reality is Americans tend to think technology is a good thing, technology liberates, we should support technology. Well, notice what that has now brought when it comes to human reproduction. Let’s just state the obvious facts. These two men, California may declare them to be legally married, but they cannot, no matter how hard they try, produce a baby, neither a girl nor a boy. They cannot produce a baby, so it takes multiple technologies for them to have a child the way they demanded here to have a child. It requires in-vitro fertilization technology. It also requires what is known as surrogacy. That means the hiring of, well, let’s just state the obvious, a woman capable of carrying a child.
You also need not only a womb, you also need an egg. That also requires a female and, thus, a new technological industry of assisted human reproduction has emerged in the United States and elsewhere. The medical toll is staggering. The moral toll is staggering. Consider here that it requires these two men, if they are going to accomplish what they want to accomplish, to hire a firm and also to hire a womb and to secure somehow purchasing an egg, and the process of creating a human embryo, actually multiple human embryos in the in-vitro fertilization context. Then, what they demanded in their contract was sorting the embryos in such a way that only male embryos would be implanted in the womb they had hired in order for the child they demanded and said they had paid for to be a boy and only a boy. That means explicitly not a girl, and yet when the baby was born, guess what? She’s a girl.
Now, one of the saddest aspects of this entire story is that these parents in all of the statements made about the child who was born, which is, after all, a girl, they do not refer to her as a girl. They don’t refer to her really as a person. It’s as if she’s a product and not the product they ordered. They’re charging the fertility clinic with negligently, recklessly, and/or intentionally transferring a female embryo to their “gestational carrier.” NBC in Los Angeles reports, “Throughout the process, the Sanigers were explicit with HRC that they wanted only male embryos transferred to their gestational carrier, and the defendants represented that the Sanigers would get to select the exact embryos which had an identified gender to be used in each transfer, that according to the suit.”
Thus, they say, that the firm and the doctor were negligent and reckless, and maybe even they were saboteurs. They intentionally transferred a female embryo against the express and contractual wishes of the two men who established the demand, who paid for the contract, and who ended up with a deficient product, a girl. A website known as LGBTQ Nation went on to say that the couple alleges, “They spent around $300,000 for several rounds of IBF and to the surrogate, and expect their costs to skyrocket,” notice these words, “because they still plan on having two boys in addition to their daughter.”
We’re also told they planned ahead, “The Sanigers said they had decided on their kids’ names and even got Gmail addresses for them before they were married in 2013. They wanted two boys, and now they say that they will have to pay a lot to have their two boys because of the fertility clinic and the doctor,” again, there’s the language, “being negligent, reckless, or worse.” LGBTQ Nation, by the way, tells us that earlier this year, the tables were turned. “A lesbian couple in New York State sued a fertility clinic after they were assured that their baby was going to be a girl, but turned out to be a boy.” We’re then told that the two women went to a fertility clinic, “Where they were told that the clinic could determine the chromosomes of the embryos created with one partner’s eggs and donor sperm that the other partner would later carry.”
You following all of this complication? Are you following the rejection of the entire Divine plan for the perpetuation of the human species and human reproduction? Are you noticing the sinister shift in language about all of this? Parenthood is now coming down to something that, frankly, is just a sales purchase made about a commodity, which is supposedly a human embryo. You’ll notice that deficient embryos are simply not going to be accepted. I mean, you wouldn’t accept a deficient dishwasher, you wouldn’t accept a deficient vehicle. For crying out loud, you wouldn’t accept a deficient smartphone, so why would you accept a deficient human being, even if the deficiency, by the way, is simply that you ordered a boy and you got a girl?
The men claim that the financial impact on them is going to be staggering, that’s their word, as one report says by CBS, “Because they ultimately will be raising three children rather than the two sons for which they had planned.” By the way, the statement released by the fertility clinic said, “At HRC Fertility, our mission is to provide world-class care. We have helped thousands of people, including the couple involved in this lawsuit. The couple ideally desired a baby boy, but were blessed with a healthy girl. To their dissatisfaction, we have sought to address their concerns. Every child,” says the clinic, “has value and limitless potential, regardless of gender.”
That’s an interesting statement made in the public defense by this clinic. You’ll notice they say, “Every child has value and limitless potential, regardless of gender.” Well, we as Christians absolutely, fundamentally, non-negotiably agree with that, but it’s pretty hard to take as a moral message coming from a clinic that commodifies the entire process of human reproduction and, thus, seeks to redefine what it means to be human. You treat human beings like commodities, and guess what? People expect the commodity they pay for.
I decided to take a closer look at this story. It turns out that the two men, upon a little investigation, are involved in what’s known as a unified shopping wallet, and this is a consumer product, either an app or another kind of program. It’s known as nate, and the headline is that nate, again, that’s the brand, has announced, “nate True Colors campaign intended to raise funds for LGBTQIA+ organizations.” The press release tells us about one of the men, “As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, nate founder and CEO Albert Saniger has been active in furthering diversity in the tech space and creating opportunities for underrepresented members of the community.”
Another headline comes up, and it comes up from Great Britain, where Pink News, that’s very similar to LGBTQ News in the United States, you’re talking here about a movement website, as in LGBTQ movement. It found itself in a bit of controversy when it ran an article about the Sanigers in which included the statement from the Sanigers, again, identified as a married male couple, a same-sex couple, a homosexual couple. In other words, just exactly who you think Pink News would celebrate, but they included their statement about the unacceptability of a girl, and guess what? That has offended some others in the Pink News community.
Lest you think this just means that women were offended by two men who basically bought a baby and didn’t get the baby they wanted because the baby was a girl, no, it’s a lot more complex than that. We’ll simply end on this as evidence of where confusion leads. It always leads to greater confusion. This is where moral rebellion leads. It always leads to an even deeper rebellion. “Many social media users pointed out the hypocrisy of Pink News recognizing the infant in this case as female, while over the years consistently backing ‘the right of transgender women to assert their own identity and branding an acknowledgement that transgender women are members of the male sex as anti-trans and misgendering.”
No, the offense here is not what you thought it was. It wasn’t in dismissing basically and insulting the inherent dignity of a baby girl, it was saying, “Well, she hasn’t told us what she is yet.” Evidently, it’s wrong to say up front baby boy and baby girl. Folks, I just have to underline the basic fact, and that is that what we are witnessing around this is a rejection of creation. It is a rejection of God’s plan and, frankly, it’s the embrace of irrationality, but there are very real victims.
The victims of the transgender revolution and, now, the surgical procedures, which are being facilitated for very, very young people. We just have to name them for what they are, but also the fact that a little baby girl is now being told in court and throughout the media of the world that she was profoundly not wanted. She isn’t the baby the two men had ordered, demanded, and paid for. She’s an unacceptable product.
Understand something else. The people who are telling us that this is the truth are the people who are telling us with their own words that they are the moral progressives.