Daily Wire & The Progressive Right: Jeremy Boreing is Wrong about IVF & Surrogacy
Long before the Daily Wire launched the infamous Leftist Tears tumbler, I was a loyal supporter, and I have no intention of withdrawing that support now. Essentially, if I ever had the privilege of joining them for a cigar and whiskey on Backstage, these are the topics I would raise for discussion. So, if you’re an antisemite looking for some juicy roast about the DW and Jewish space lasers, take a hike. I think all the guys are great, but some are just morally misguided.
The Daily Wire (DW) has done immense good for our society, especially by elevating discussions about faith and morals into the mainstream. But recently, Jeremy Boreing made a post on X endorsing IVF and surrogacy. Granted, he qualified it, but he did so in a way that will only breed apathy about IVF on one hand, outright acceptance and use of it on the other, and downplay support for those who recognize these fertility technologies as evils.
When the left wants to “trans the kids” and legalize infanticide, Christians and DW share a common enemy, but this does not mean they share the same moral conclusions. I want DW and other like-minded companies to be the best force for good they can be. But it would be foolish to think that a conservative movement arguing that artificially creating children, homosexuality, pornography, and money as a sign of virtue will create a culture where Christianity thrives.
That said, my first critique is of Jeremy Boreing and his recent support of IVF and—to my surprise—surrogacy.
Jeremy Boreing is Wrong About IVF and Surrogacy
About a week ago, the President signed an Executive Order aimed at increasing the availability and affordability of artificial conception, i.e., IVF and surrogacy. Many pro-life influencers, most of them Catholic, took to social media and argued against this EO. This created tension within the “conservative Christian” coalition that elected Donald Trump.
As the pro-life Catholics—with a few Protestant exceptions—argued against the use of IVF, I presumed the DW would stand alongside their Catholic allies, not against them. Jeremy Boreing proved that hypothesis wrong with the following post.
There are three main problems with his argument. First, it doesn’t even call out the fact that babies are sacrificed for a mother and father to have a child. Second, he gives no argument for how it should be practiced. Third, he says that just because we do something the wrong way now doesn’t mean we can’t do it the right way later. In this context, the wrong way now is the killing of kids. So how does he intend to develop IVF technology to a morally acceptable state without the killing of kids? He doesn’t explain this part because it’s already happening; his argument reduces to, “Well, if I can’t beat them now, I’ll wait till it’s morally acceptable to join them later.”
He also says we should “create a framework that prevents the deliberate destruction of embryonic life,” and he adds, “To be clear, I think we can.” But how exactly does one do this without the loss of embryonic life? His statement seems to imply, “I don’t think this is a good technology, but I like where it could lead, so I’m here for it.”
But let’s grant Jeremy’s position that it can be done “ethically.” This will ultimately undermine the family structure in a way similar to how the gay “marriage” and transgenderism debates did, but from another angle.
The Undermining of the Family: Who Are the Parents?
The left is typically credited with undermining the family, but Christians like Jeremy Boreing are doing the same when they promote IVF and surrogacy. Jeremy’s support of IVF and surrogacy is a blunder I did not expect from him.
Understandably, a Protestant like Jeremy Boreing, who appears to rely more on reason alone than scripture alone, might stumble ethically on IVF. But there are no positive arguments for surrogacy in the Bible. In every instance, it is seen as the first cause of political and generational turmoil. Furthermore, if Jeremy thinks surrogacy is morally permissible for Christians, does he also believe polygamy is morally permissible? One could argue there is more implied support for polygamy in scripture than for surrogacy—to be clear, polygamy is morally wrong.
In the book Contraception Deception, author Patrick Coffin retells a story he heard from a former abortionist and Catholic convert, Dr. Bernard Nathanson. According to Nathanson, there was a legal case in California where an infertile couple purchased sperm from a donor, eggs from another donor, and rented another woman’s womb (five parties are now involved)—all to produce a child the parents eventually abandoned. Coffin writes:
Dr. Bernard Nathanson related a story to Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests For Life regarding a California trial that sounds more like a Monty Python sketch than a real life case. An infertile couple (where both partners were sterile) hired a reproductive technologist to mix a male donor’s sperm with a female donor’s egg. The resultant embryo was implanted in the womb of yet another party (a surrogate mother) and she delivered the baby nine months later…At the time of the trial, the child was eight. The litigation was meant to answer the legal question “who are the parents?” As that question began to be asked, the original couple that paid for all this. . . filed for divorce. . .Who indeed are the parents?. . . Legally speaking, it’s a moot question. The judge eventually placed the child in a foster home.1
While I could not find this exact case, it’s not hard to find others like it. Just do a quick search of surrogacy court cases using Grok 3.0, and you’ll discover cases like this happen fairly frequently. According to a law firm out of Pennsylvania, parents paid a surrogate to use the husband’s sperm, and then the couple divorced. The husband used the surrogate as a babysitter for three years! After three years, he married another woman who was later discovered to be an alcoholic. According to the law firm’s description of the case, a legal custody battle between the father and the surrogate/biological mother (she used her own eggs) ensued:
The father terminated the relationship between the child and the surrogate because he had remarried. The new wife had some problems, however, including one with alcohol. She had accumulated a number of DUIs and had her driver’s license revoked but continued to drive with the child in the car and with the blessing of the father. In addition, the child was placed in a temporary facility numerous times when her father and stepmother were not prepared to take adequate care of her.
Upon hearing this information, the surrogate filed a custody complaint and was named the child’s temporary guardian. This caused the father to file his own lawsuit, claiming the surrogate had violated the original agreement. In addition to custody, he is seeking thousands in financial compensation.2
Upon hearing this information, the surrogate filed a custody complaint and was named the child’s temporary guardian. This caused the father to file his own lawsuit, claiming the surrogate had violated the original agreement. In addition to custody, he is seeking thousands in financial compensation.
Just to drive the point home, there was another case where a surrogate was pressured to get an abortion because the child had severe defects, but ironically, the surrogate was “pro-life” and did not want to get an abortion. In a defiant and extremely ironic statement, she said:
“I told them that they had chosen me to carry and protect this child, and that was exactly what I was going to do,” Kelley said. “I told them it wasn’t their decision to play God.”3
Finally, there was another case reported by Live Action News in which a surrogate was pressured to get an abortion after she took a sip of alcohol.
This couple feared their baby might have been harmed by the alcohol, and apparently feared other bad things might happen to him or her due to an ‘untrustworthy’ surrogate, so their “solution” was… to execute the child.4
In all these cases, IVF and surrogacy per se—which Jeremy favors—act like acid on an already weakened cultural understanding of the institution of the family. This doesn’t even cover the cases where fertility clinics implant the wrong embryos! In all such cases, the rights of the mother, father, and child are completely obliterated in an epistemic nuclear bomb. IVF and surrogacy will have the same effect on the family that gay “marriage” had on matrimony. It will only further secularize the sexual act.
The obvious question for Jeremy is: How on earth does he intend for IVF and surrogacy to be done “properly”? He conveniently left that part out. The truth is, there is no way to obtain the ideal forms of surrogacy or IVF that do not involve children being lost, murdered, or commoditized; both forms lead to the undermining of the family and the trafficking of men, women, and children in a culturally “acceptable” way.
Furthermore, there is no way to remove the incentivization of using discarded, damaged, or healthy embryos for research. There is also no way to prevent a new cultural mind virus from infecting society with the belief that children can be created by any means necessary. We’ve tried these kinds of things before with contraception and divorce, and it did not end well for society.
None of these conclusions are consistent with a Christian ethic, unless, of course, you believe morality is discovered the same way scientific truths are: hypothesize, experiment, examine the results, and chart your path.
Daily Wire and Progressive Christianity
What Jeremy demonstrates, along with his colleagues, is that the Daily Wire is more a product of the liberal and pragmatic philosophies that have dominated Christian morality since the 1930s. Transgenderism is evil, says Jeremy Boreing, and I agree with him. But so is transhumanism, and the idea that Christians can experiment with whatever technology satisfies their deepest urges simply because the Bible doesn’t condemn said technologies will ultimately lead to a Christianity indistinguishable from secularism. Whether it’s transgenderism or transhumanism, both lead to a church run by scientists.
It is not a coincidence that Jeremy is a Protestant with ethical standards that are myopic and transhumanist in outlook. In the end, every Protestant is his own priest, prophet, and king. He ultimately believes morality is determined by individual reason, not institutional authority inspired and led by God.
Jeremy is a product of modern Protestantism influenced by modern philosophy, which ultimately reads its own history the same way Marx read Western history: We were oppressed by moral dogmas, but Protestantism’s greatest strength is that it can always be wrong. Every generation must reinterpret scripture to prove the previous generation did not have the true gospel—we must negate tradition to progress toward the future. His worldview is grounded more in pragmatism than morality. His position, at least on IVF and surrogacy, ultimately reduces to utilitarianism: So long as it doesn’t kill babies and it works, you can do whatever you want.
In short, the Daily Wire and some of its founders are progressive, but in a different way. They rightly decry transgenderism, racist DEI policies, and the totalitarian left that tried to gain the right to inject whatever they wanted into our bodies, but then claim IVF and surrogacy can be done ethically and that the church should accept homosexual relationships as good. Just as a theist may know an atheist is wrong, that doesn’t mean the theist is a Christian. Some of the greatest arguments for God’s existence came from Muslims (e.g., the Kalam Cosmological Argument). Similarly, the Daily Wire and its leaders have demonstrated that they are a powerful force against the insanity of the left. Unfortunately, they have also shown that, on some significant moral issues, they are more likely to submit to men of science than to men of God.
As Hannah Arendt, author and philosopher during World War II, writes in The Human Condition:
In religion it was not the belief in salvation or a hereafter that was immediately lost, but the certitudo salutis — and this happened in all Protestant countries where the downfall of the Catholic Church had eliminated the last tradition-bound insitution which, wherever its authority remained unchallenged, stood between the impact of modernity and the masses of believers…The radical change in moral standrads occuring in the first century of the modern age was inspired by the needs and ideals of its most important group of men, the new scientists.5
— DR
Coffin, P. (2018). The contraception deception: Catholic teaching on birth control. Emmaus Road Publishing. 165.
Arendt, H., Allen, D. S., & Canovan, M. (2018). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press. 277.
Having been separated from the early Church and the natural law tradition, many Protestants have an ad hoc view of morality. For example, they will argue that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and yet simultaneously support IVF, not releasing that by replacing the unitive and procreative act of marriage with technology they have undermined their own position on marriage.
I used to support the DW, but had to stop after the way they treated Candace Owens.
I've always really liked Matt Walsh, even before he joined DW, and I like Knowles, too. I worry that Ben exercises undue influence over the other commentators when it comes to issues related to Israel and Gaza, and I fear that was a big motivation in their ostracization of Owens. I don't think you have to be an antisemite to say Israel has done some pretty rotten things (and I don't support Palestine, either). I agree with Ben on a lot of things, but the war in the middle East is understandably a blind spot for him.
But I've always had issues with Jeremy. He has consistently given bad moral takes over the years, like minimizing the problems with pornography, and this latest take on IVF is no surprise. He should stick to running the company and making business decisions. That's his forte, not political commentary.