Motherhood Is Not a Machine (EWTN pt. 1)

Behind the scenes of my appearance on “At Home with Jim and Joy”, part one.

Earlier this month, I was invited to EWTN Studios in Alabama to appear on “At Home with Jim and Joy.” What a privilege! The staff was so kind and welcoming. I enjoyed attending Mass in the Chapel and roaming the lovely grounds. This statue was in front of the beautiful guest house where I stayed in the neighborhood just adjacent to the campus:

In preparation for the interview, I was asked to complete a guest form supplying the producers with information about the book/apostolate/mission I was representing as a guest. Below is a photo of my notes taken during adoration as I prayed in preparation:

I felt so covered in prayer as I flew to Alabama on St. Carlo’s first feast day, recording on the anniversary of the sun dancing at Fatima, knowing that the first episode would air on the feast of my patroness (and patroness of all writers, Substack!), St. Teresa of Avila. How amazing to have the Church Triumphant cheering us on in prayer!

Jim and Joy are both just lovely human beings. I was impressed not only by their kindness and their prolife work (the pregnancy center needs a new roof if you can pitch in!), but just amazed at the way they cover the show and its viewers in prayer. They prayed over me. They prayed before the show. They prayed between takes and in short phrases all throughout our few hours together. It was beautiful to see such vibrant faith behind the scenes.

You can watch the replay of that first episode here:

Because of the nature of a talk show, the answers on air were naturally less robust than had I responded in writing. In addition to my interview, I wanted to share my expanded thoughts with you here on Substack for those who prefer written content.

As an added bonus, I have also written up my notes for the questions we prepared but didn’t get to discuss in the interview.

I will be sending out the link and expanded responses for Part 2 here on Substack soon.

Motherhood Is Not a Machine

Discussing my book Reclaiming Motherhood from a Culture Gone Mad

1. What are the roots of our cultural madness?

Philosophically speaking, many of the major developments in modernity and postmodernity essentially echo early Christian heresies about the body like Gnosticism and Manichaeanism. These modern echoes take the form of many lies. In Chapter One of Reclaiming Motherhood, I have a two-page table that lays out these lies out culture tells us alongside the truth the Church offers. One example would be the way that Descartes’s declaration, “I think, therefore I am,” has become the cry of postmodernity: “I am whatever I think I am.” Lies like this, about who we are, the meaning of life, and the search for happiness pervade our culture. The culture says that the purpose of life is to feed out own happiness, defined in whatever terms we choose. In reality, we receive ourselves and our identity as gifts from God, and happiness is found in the gift of self, in becoming who He made us to be. True freedom consists not doing anything we’d like, but in becoming who He made us to be.

The lies go on, but they all go back to same lie: you can be like God. The Father of lies may have a new context, but he really has no new tricks. We live in a culture of self-worship, and we have become our own idols.

(For more on these lies, you might enjoy my book debuting in Lent 2026 The Bellbind Letters: Inside the Devil’s Plan for Your Motherhood. Stay tuned for sneak peaks and preorder information!).

2. Are all technologies neutral?

That is something you will commonly hear. Technologies are neutral. They are just tools. It all depends on how you use them. A gun can be used to hunt food, but it can also be used for murder.

Biotechnologies, particularly reproductive technologies, (and I’d argue many of the new technologies we are seeing) fall into a new kind of category. These are technologies that redefine humanity in some way. The first of these was really contraception: the birth control pill. Then we have abortion, then IVF, egg and sperm donation, and surrogacy. These are mainstream, socially accepted, highly profitable technologies that all dismantle the family in one way shape or form.

The family is meant to be a reflection of the Trinity, this communion of the God who is love. So by severing the family in various ways and dissecting these component parts, we are tearing apart the tapestry of human nature and the central way in which we image God as a human community. We are becoming less loving, less like God, less human, by the use of these technologies.

Contraception severs unitive and procreative dimensions of sexuality and this has had a whole cascade of consequences predicted in Humane Vitae in the 1960’s, which all come down to essentially tearing apart marital love and responsibility. These consequences ripple all the way to effecting the way we think about and understand gender. If sex is just for pleasure, then our unique identity as men and women become irrelevant and parts are interchangeable.

Abortion is clearly destructive to maternal love especially, to the child, but also in the way we think about pregnancy as conditional. A society that accepts abortion thinks about our children from the outset in a fundamentally different way that a society that views children as gifts meant to be accepted with unconditional love. We essentially say there are things that disqualify you, through no fault of your own, from our human community. And parental responsibility—let alone love—becomes entirely conditional.

With IVF, surrogacy, and gamete donation, we have technologies that appear to be in service of creating a family, but what they are doing is shattering the family by hollowing it of its essential meaning. No longer can we look to the language of the body, as Pope St. John Paul II gave us in the theology of the body, to instruct us about our purpose. We are shutting down, hijacking, and manipulating the body to create products for consumers. That behavior has a very different kind of effect on human virtue and love.

Of course, all that says nothing about the inalienable dignity of those created with IVF, and should not discount that some parents who are turning to this technology are doing so out of great love and desire for their family. It is, in fact, the Church’s great regard for the dignity of every human life and for the sanctity the family, that she cries out against these practice. What we are accepting along with the use of these technologies is the sacrifice of God’s plan for the family.

And that is not even getting into the horrific consequences when things like surrogacy and sperm and egg donation go wrong. There is just headline after headline of atrocities cascading down as a result. Doctors inseminating patients using their own sperm without their knowledge (more than 50 that we know of), so-called “extra” children being sold on the black market, children purchased and raised in captivity by pedophiles, surrogates forced into abortions because the buyers changed their minds (or just dying because this is not as safe as Big Fertility wants us to believe it is, and long-term studies are scant because they don’t want to know).

Of course, it is essential to recognize and affirm the beautiful desire that causes couples to turn to this technology, but when we hold that in tension with the real atrocities that this industry causes, we can’t morally continue to support it. The desire of some families for children does not justify continuing an industry that is so harmful across the board.

3. How do reproductive technologies such as IVF and surrogacy, but now also genetic selection of embryos, warp parental love?

Someone might agree with me that the industry is terrible, arguing that we need to practice it in such a way that there is minimal loss of life, and no “leftover” embryos on ice or being “donated” to science for human experimentation. This person might argue that we need more regulation to bring the protections for children to a similar standard as we have for adoption, but that there isn’t anything wrong in principle with loving parents using this technology to create their family. In other words, everything that is wrong with IVF is a practical problem, and if you changed those things, the actual ability of a doctor to help a family have a baby is good.

The Church has pointed out distinct problems that make this technology inherently immoral. The first is that it violates the dual purposes of our sexuality for unity and procreation. It is the flip side of contraception, which tries to allow unity without procreation (though I would argue it actually impedes unity as well), and IVF pursues procreation without unity. The Church also says that children have a right to be born out of the union of loving parents. Technologies like surrogacy and gamete donation violate that right.¹

To expand on that a bit, we can look at what happens, for example, to the concept of “mother” in something like surrogacy. We are ripping motherhood into its component parts. We have biological motherhood (egg donor), gestational motherhood (surrogate), and social motherhood (intended parent). IVF may entail any combination or all three. The process is very risky for egg donors, for IVF mamas and surrogates, and for the baby. In some cases, surrogate mothers’ names are not even recorded on birth certificates. The facts of the birth are wiped out, their identities erased entirely from the process. They aren’t even being referred to as “mothers” anymore in legal contracts. They are “gestational carriers” which makes them sound like have a disease.

Then, we have sperm donation or egg donation in which biological parents give away their children for money in a bizarre real-life Rumpelstilzchen situation. The couple who accepts this child end up unintentionally in this situation of “reproductive infidelity.” This type of infidelity is difficult to grasp because it used to be impossible to reproduce without sexual infidelity (for the full argument on this, see Ch 9 of Reclaiming Motherhood). As we see with IVF using donor gametes, reproductive infidelity has become its own kind of wrong. The Church always refers to a couple, not either individual, as suffering infertility. Isolating one or the other spouse as “the problem” may be helpful diagnostically if it helps heal the underlying cause, but leaving that spouse behind to pursue biological union with another is deeply harmful to the unity of the marriage. In addition to the guidance the Church offers, we hear echoes of these harms from the voices of couples themselves. Actress Gabrielle Union said watching her husband have a baby with a surrogate made her feel “like dust scattering in the wind.”

Today, we have pronatalist eugenics startups in Silicon Valley assigning genetic scores to embryos that are intended for IVF so parents can select particular traits. We have robots in Mexico doing the actual work of IVF, so its not even done by human hands in these cases, and some researchers are even using AI to pursue genetic editing of these embryos to design them for specific traits.

All of these practices promote a self-centered approach that commodifies children and makes them products to fulfill adult desires. They are being bought and sold. In at least one case, a Virginia judge cited legal precedents from the sale of slaves to adjudicate a custody dispute over frozen embryos. Human embryos are now legally considered “chattel.” All of this centers around an approach that focuses on control and grasping, rather than acceptance and receiving and renders us less able to freely love. These technologies warp love into something that is conditional and make an idol out of motherhood and family.

4. What does it mean to practice spiritual motherhood in a culture that is so lost?

All women are called to spiritual mothers, which encompasses a great. The aspect of spiritual motherhood that I discuss in Chapter 12 is our prophetic call. We have a prophetic call by virtue of our baptism. We are called into Christ’s role as priest, prophet, and king. As Christ’s prophets, we are called to denounce injustice. We are called to proclaim freedom to captives.

We are also called to witness the truth to those around us. We have the fullness of truth in the Church. Who are we to withhold that? It is a spiritual act of mercy to instruct the ignorant.

Some may object: “What if the ignorant don’t want to be instructed?” Of course, we want to proclaim the truth lovingly with as much tact and kindness as we can muster, but we can’t shy away from this responsibility because we are afraid of conflict. That would be like seeing a child in the street and saying, “Listen, Officer, I would have moved the child out of the way of that bus, but I’m not the parent. Who am I to judge that parental choice to let the toddler run out into the street?” No, of course we would grab the child and relocate her and not fret over whether the parent felt judged by us saving her.

Spiritual motherhood requires that we proclaim the truth out of love for neighbor. People might not always appreciate this. My own kids certainly don’t always appreciate this. That doesn’t mean I just simply people please them and refuse to correct them when they are in error. Sharing the truth is an act of love. We should do it kindly, though even if we are as kind and tactful as possible, it won’t always be received well. And that is fine. Jesus said to shake the dust off. But at least we won’t have abdicated our duty by remaining silent.

5. This can feel so heavy and dark. How can we maintain hope in a culture of death?

It is dark and it is heavy. But we were made for such a time as this. At every point in Church history, things have been dark. We are in the midst of a battle. Every age has its own signs of the times. This is the ground on which our fiat takes form. This is the call. We don’t need to bemoan the state of the world. That isn’t what the world needs. We need to call upon the Lord, asking that His grace fill us. It ultimately isn’t up to us, and Christ has already won. We need to pick up our rosaries, keep uttering “let it be,” and go out to do the next right thing.

1. The two relevant documents for readers who wish to dive into the Church’s exact words are Donum Vitae and Dignitas Personae.

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If this reflection stirred your curiosity, please share it so others can join the journey. Together, we’re learning how to live our faith thoughtfully and uphold the dignity of every person in an age of advancing technology.

Find more at www.snstephenson.com or on my podcast, Brave New Us.