“There’s No Mama”. When Babies Remember What Adults Have Forgotten

On 16 April, Shane McAnally, the Grammy-winning country songwriter, posted a short Reel from his life. His husband, Michael Baum, is holding their five-month-old son Texson Ray, born through a surrogate the couple commissioned. Baum asks, “Dada or Pop?” The baby babbles something close to “mama”. Baum recoils, then replies: “No. There is no mama.” The baby cries. Both men laugh. The caption reads, “who’s gonna tell him?”

The clip was filmed as comedy and millions laughed along. What makes it worth a second look is the babble underneath the joke. Infants across every culture reach for “mama” before almost any other word, at roughly the same developmental moment. The syllable tracks a biological orientation that precedes language.

He was doing what a human infant does: calling for Mama.

You can see Baum recoil at the child before he speaks.

“No Mama”.

For a viewer sympathetic to the household, that reaction reads as lighthearted. For anyone willing to take the baby seriously, it reads as something harder.

The child was reaching for the woman whose heartbeat had surrounded him for nine months, and Baum told him she did not exist. The baby’s own body knew otherwise.

The Primal Wound

Katy Faust of Them Before Us describes this severance as the “primal wound” of surrogacy. A gestating mother and her baby share a bloodstream, a hormonal environment, and an acoustic world.

By the third trimester, the infant recognises her voice and prefers it to every other. Birth marks the first day they are physically apart, after nine months of continuous contact.

Commercial surrogacy is engineered to terminate that relationship on schedule. The gestating woman agrees in advance to hand the baby over and usually to have no further contact. When the commissioning parents are two men, the design ensures the child will never know her. Commissioning parents are paying precisely for that outcome.

Jennifer Lahl of the Center for Bioethics and Culture calls this the replacement of kinship with contract. The industry’s vocabulary is transactional: intended parents, gestational carriers, genetic material, delivery. A child produced this way has no legal mother by design. His origin is a purchase order, an invoice and receipt.

Why The Rest of The World is Moving The Other Way

American entertainment culture presents surrogacy as self-evident progress. Most of Europe disagrees. France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland already prohibit commercial surrogacy. In late 2024, Italy declared it a “universal crime“, permitting the prosecution of Italian citizens who commission surrogates abroad.

The European Parliament condemned the practice as an assault on human dignity in 2015 and reaffirmed the position through successive resolutions, culminating in the 2024 EU Directive identifying surrogacy exploitation as a form of human trafficking.

The reasoning is secular: renting a woman’s womb commodifies her, and contractually separating a newborn from his mother harms him. Those judgments have survived legislative scrutiny in countries no one would call theocracies.

Why Singapore Has Held the Line

In 2018, the High Court permitted a Singaporean doctor to adopt the biological son he had commissioned through a US surrogate, on the narrow basis that the child’s welfare required it. The court was candid that the arrangement had circumvented Singapore’s public policy, and Parliament took the hint.

When Section 377A was repealed in November 2022, Parliament simultaneously introduced Article 156 of the Constitution, entrenching the Legislature’s power to define and protect marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

The Adoption of Children Act 2022, passed in the same session, restricts joint adoption to couples whose marriage is recognised in Singapore. The minister who moved the Bill was explicit: the Government does not support same-sex family formation through adoption, and does not endorse “planned and deliberate single parenthood as a lifestyle choice”.

Two arguments will be fielded against this position over the coming decade.

1. The first is the demographic appeal: total fertility has collapsed below 1.0, any child is better than none, and any willing adults ought to be welcomed into the project of child-rearing.
2. The second is the autonomy appeal: women and men who want children without a spouse should be free to commission them.

Both treat the child as a variable to be produced and the parental configuration as a downstream detail – when in fact, it is essential.

A society that cannot persuade its own people to marry and raise children together does not fix that problem by manufacturing children without mothers or fathers by design.

Two Fathers Can’t Replace Mum

A common response to any of this is that two loving parents, of any sex, can raise a child well. Even if the empirical claim were settled, which it is not, it answers a different question. The question raised by Texson Ray’s babble concerns whether a child has a legitimate interest in being raised by his mother, not whether two men can care for him competently.

Mothers and fathers do not contribute identical inputs in interchangeable quantities. Maternal voice, hormonal synchrony through pregnancy, and the specific patterns of maternal touch shape infant neurodevelopment in ways researchers can now measure.

A male caregiver, however devoted, cannot reproduce those inputs. A household structured around two fathers arranges the child’s life around the mother’s absence.

Donor-conceived adults have become increasingly vocal about what that absence costs. The pattern in their testimony is consistent: dislocation from their origins, a hunger to meet the biological parent the adults in their lives thought irrelevant, and resentment at being told their curiosity is ingratitude.

Researchers call it “genealogical bewilderment“. The industry prefers to ignore the data. Olivia Maurel, born through surrogacy in the United States and now a leading abolitionist voice, has made the cost of this erasure public in her own words.

Texson Ray is five months old now, and in fifteen years he may watch this clip. He will see his father tell him his mother does not exist, while he cried for her.

Who is Owed What?

The modern intuition treats children as something adults who want them are entitled to acquire. The older intuition holds that children are owed certain things by the adults who bring them into the world, and that their mother and father are among those things.

Fortunately, most of the world today still speaks that older and more correct moral grammar.

The laughter on the Insta Reel is the sound of a culture that has forgotten it. Two men who paid to acquire a child found it funny when the child asked for the person they had arranged for him never to meet.

The little boy will grow up; the video will not disappear. And the woman he cried for, whoever she is, will still be somewhere, carrying her own half of a story the men in that clip decided he was not entitled to hear.