Imagine the benefits of setting aside one month in a year to think about families. Like motorcycle awareness month, a month devoted to families can help you see realities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
One such reality is the deep physical, emotional and spiritual bond between mother and child. Last week, I touched on the trauma caused by tearing that bond apart. This week, let’s look at an example of how inattentiveness can cause catastrophic harm.
Consider the delivery room experience. Anybody who has ever been there knows that after the umbilical cord is cut, the bond between mother and child is still fully intact.
When the delivery nurse takes the newborn from her mother, its distress is obvious. It’s not that the perinatal nurse is doing anything wrong. It’s just that the child instinctively needs to be on her mother’s breast.
This primal bond between mother and child did not suddenly materialize out of nowhere. Rather, that bond has been growing for as long as the baby has been growing.
Human beings are social creatures. And that society begins at the earliest stages of gestation.
Considering this deeply human reality positions us to prevent accidental harm to precious people.
Big people tend to overlook little ones. Strong people often harm the weak—unintentionally and to their horror. They don’t have to be malicious, stupid, or uncaring. Harm can happen just because they are focused on other things.
That is what happened with Wyoming legislators in the winter of 2021. They passed House Bill 73, Birth certificates-gestational agreements, by a comfortable margin only to regret it after the governor signed it into law.
Like an oblivious truck driver casually clipping a motorcyclist, they upended untold lives. How so? Because HB 73 fundamentally changed Wyoming’s family law.
Family law exists to protect children by giving legal recognition to mothers and fathers. It thus holds them accountable for the physical, emotional and spiritual well-being of the child.
For a century and a half, Wyoming had defined mothers in the most obvious and natural way conceivable. She’s the person who gives birth to the child. But in 2021, the legislature blew up motherhood by creating a new legal term: gestational carrier.
Suddenly, state power can make a mother not a mother. By fiat they become “carriers”—akin to postal workers and truck drivers.
Such a woman, before she gets off the delivery table, has already lost her status as mother. It is reassigned to a person who may or may not be in the room or even in the country.
In this brave new world, the person who “assumes maternity” does not even have to be a female. Legally speaking, he or she need only be one of two (2) people who have entered into a “gestational agreement” with the “gestating carrier” (W.S. 14-1-401(a)(xiv). Aldous Huxley could not have dreamed up this nightmare.
Curiously, we are never told why there must be two and only two “intended parents.” For inexplicable reasons, twoness has become a moral absolute while mothers have been deleted.
This legal downgrading of mothers is bad enough for the woman who, before the cutting of the umbilical cord, is cut out of motherhood. But at least she has a choice in the matter. The law specifies that she must be over 21 so that she can give legal consent.
But what about the child? What about the other party to the mother-child relationship who is 18 birthdays away from being able to consent to anything.
So, the woman, spent from giving birth and naturally aching to hold her child, has already been stripped of her motherly “rights and duties” (W.S. 35-1-401(a)(xiv)(B)).
And the child is legally motherless.
Empathy demands that we at least try to imagine this experience through the eyes of the child.
That child has spent his entire lifetime developing a relationship with one person. He knows her smells. He knows her voice. He knows her daily rhythms.
He may also know the voice of his father, the boisterous voices of siblings, the singing of a grandmother—even the voice of the preacher.
But on his birthday, this entire world is undone. It’s like his mother died in labor—but worse.
I have tried to imagine his trauma, but words fail me. It becomes too painful to consider.
But consider it we must.
Only when society sees the hideous injustice that this law creates will it demand action. Family Month is designed to raise such awareness.
Anyone who empathetically considers the plight of this child will be driven to reconsider gestational agreements. And if our lawmakers cannot yet see it, we can and should point it out.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
