Mother’s Day should be one of those celebrations that elicits only happy feelings: you know, “motherhood, baseball, and apple pie.” But the reality is we need to think a little more deeply about the state of motherhood in the developed world.

I’ve regularly written about the parcelization of motherhood. Modern artificial reproductive technologies have sliced and diced the human reality of motherhood into “genetic,” “gestational,” and “social” components. Our quasi-gnostic culture wants us to pretend that the “social” component — who raises the child — is the real motherhood, and that the biological origins or genetic reality doesn’t count. (To allow that to count would be to question the sacred dogma of pro-aborts: “we don’t know when life begins.”) The culture pretends that carrying a child is just, well, a logistical venue; consider that many surrogacy contracts stipulate “no contact” between the newborn and the “intended parents.” (Consider also the odd verbal expression that treats the woman carrying the baby as the “surrogate.”) On May 11 — American Mother’s Day — the Israeli Supreme Court had to confront the consequences of this mentality and pretend to be Solomon again. A clinic had “mixed up” whose child a fertilized ovum was and implanted her into the wrong couple. When discovered, the genetic parents sued to get the child back but the surrogate and her partner, who have had the child since birth, wanted to raise her. The Court ruled 4-1 (here) that the child stays with the surrogate and her partner. Its logic was that such would be the outcome of a genetic donor contributing to a surrogate/adoptive pregnancy, so the outcome should be applied here even though the genetic parents were never donors.

One can argue the theoretical aspects but the best riposte I ever saw to the dissection of maternity wrought by artificial reproduction is a picture of three women: the egg donor, the carrier, and the recipient (usually with the big checkbook) and the question: “Who gets the Mother’s Day card?”

The social approval given to in vitro fertilization is part of this problem (N.B.: it is hard to publish something even in the Catholic press if one is too explicitly critical). Yes, we all love pictures of the “poor couple who can’t have a baby now blessed with one.” But we must not run from the reality that IVF says in principle that having a baby is not necessarily connected with conjugal sexual relationships. Which means having a baby does not necessarily imply participation of a man and woman. Which means a baby does not necessarily have a right to a “mother” and a “father” or — for that matter — necessarily to “two parents.” Which means having a baby does not necessarily have a connection to marriage. Which means having a baby is not necessarily a human act but a procedure, which can be done “naturally” (for those who prefer this) or “artificially” (for those who prefer that). All these things are consequences of saying how a baby is created is irrelevant as long as that it is created. And that will have implications for maternity.

The vigorous fight occurring over so-called “transgender rights” means that the very identity of “mother” is under debate because the very identity of “woman” is disputed. Far from being a natural reality that every person normally only had to open his eyes to identify, “woman” has now become two things: a state-of-mind on the part of not the viewer but of the viewed, and a costume to be donned by psychological choice. That, in fact, is the social consequence of Justice Ketanji  Brown Jackson’s coy deflection of the question, “what is a woman?” with her response that she needs to consult with a biologist. Indeed, that answer itself is both true and false: womanhood is biological, but her evasion comes not from science but ideology that has nothing whatsoever to do with biology.

Finally, the identity of “motherhood” is now claimed by some to be tied up with the rejection of motherhood. A recent article from the Hastings Center — the premier American thinktank for secular bioethics — argues that advocacy of adoption for women who do not/cannot raise their own child is unjust unless linked to an absolute right to abortion. The “logic” is that motherhood must be an “option,” whereas adoption-without-abortion is some kind of forced-but-amputated motherhood. And while this bioethical argument seems extreme, the fact that post-Dobbs there is a significant cross-section of American women who claim they will not “risk” motherhood absent an assured “right” through birth to abandon that identity through abortion means that the oxymoronic logic of murderous motherhood has taken cultural root. It means we are falling into a notion of “motherhood” independent of life, its giving, and its protection.

Mother’s Day should be an occasion for unqualified joy in the reality of bringing a new life into the world, a reality even the angels do not enjoy. But the sad fact is that reading the “signs of the times” requires also acknowledging many disturbing anti-signs.