No Mama, No Problem? The Cry that Reveals the Cost of Idolatry
A baby’s primal cry for his mother exposes the idolatry behind surrogacy, IVF, and redefined family.
A five-month-old baby sits in his father’s arms, face scrunched in distress. Over and over, he cries out the same sound: “Mama… mama… mama.”
The man holding him responds with a laugh. “Hey, hey—who do you want? Dada or Pop?”
“Mama,” the baby insists.
“No, there is no mama,” the man replies, still chuckling. “I’m so sorry. You have Dada and you have Pop. Two choices. No mama. Dada, or Pop?”
The baby grows more agitated, his cries intensifying as the adults continue redirecting him with amusement. The clip ends with the infant in visible tears.1
This is not a scene from a dystopian film. It is real footage from Grammy-winning country songwriter Shane McAnally and his husband, Michael Baum. The couple welcomed their son, Texson, via surrogacy in October 2025. What they intended as a lighthearted moment quickly went viral on X, sparking widespread heartbreak and outrage.2
When challenged, McAnally defended the video, telling the Daily Mail that he and his husband found it “hilarious.” After all, the baby is only five months old. “He obviously doesn’t understand English.”
But something deeper is happening here—something the laughter cannot dismiss.
The baby’s repeated cry for “mama” is not a linguistic error. It is the raw expression of a need wired into his very being. And the casual denial, “there is no mama,” lays bare a profound spiritual reality: adult desires have been elevated above the God-given design for how children enter the world and who they are made for.
This moment is not isolated. It is the predictable fruit of a culture that has embraced the redefinition of marriage, the normalization of third-party reproduction, and the commodification of human life through surrogacy and IVF. At root, it reveals idolatry—the exchange of God’s truth for a lie that prioritizes self, autonomy, sexual expression, and personal fulfillment over the Creator’s good order.
All sin, Scripture teaches, flows from this fundamental rebellion. When we place anything—our desires, our “right” to a certain kind of family, our vision of love—on the throne that belongs to God alone, distortion follows. Children become projects to be acquired rather than gifts to be received. Mothers and fathers become interchangeable accessories rather than the complementary anchors God designed. The vulnerable pay the price.
The “There is no mama” video forces us to confront this exchange with unusual clarity. A tiny infant, still months away from understanding language, instinctively reaches for the maternal bond his body knows from the womb. The adults around him, shaped by a worldview that treats that bond as optional, respond not with comfort but with redirection and amusement. The discomfort many feel watching it is not mere sentimentality. It is a moral intuition echoing biblical truth: something sacred has been violated.
A consistently biblical worldview does not shy away from this. It begins with the recognition that idolatry lies at the heart of every distortion of family, sexuality, and procreation. From there, Scripture unfolds God’s original and beautiful design for marriage, children, and human flourishing. Empirical evidence from rigorous studies then reveals the measurable costs to children when that design is set aside. And the specific mechanisms of surrogacy and IVF show us exactly how these adult-centered choices are carried out in practice.
So, let’s examine idolatry as the spiritual root of these distortions, explore what God’s Word reveals about marriage, procreation, and the rights of the child, review what population-based research actually shows about outcomes for children raised by same-sex parents, and confront how surrogacy and IVF function as tools that turn women’s bodies and embryonic life into commodities—enabling the very motherlessness on display in this viral clip.
None of this is abstract theology or dry sociology. It is about a real baby whose cries were met with laughter instead of the comfort he instinctively sought. It is about a culture that has traded the glory of the Creator for created things—and the youngest and most vulnerable who bear the consequences.
The baby in the video does not understand English. But he understands something far more primal. And in his cry, we hear an invitation to examine our own hearts, our cultural assumptions, and our fidelity to the God who designed us male and female, who knits each life together, and who calls us to defend the fatherless.
Let us listen carefully.
All Sin Is Rooted in Idolatry: The Spiritual Heart of the Issue
I hate this phrase, but here’s a hot take (that my friend Nathan loves to debate):
Every sin—every messed-up thing happening in our culture (including this whole “There is no mama” nightmare) traces back to one root sin: idolatry.
The Bible doesn’t dance around it. In Romans 1, Paul lays it out plain: people knew God, saw Him clear as day in creation, but they traded Him in for a lie. They started worshiping what God made instead of God Himself. And once you swap the Creator for the creature, everything downstream goes off the rails.
Paul even calls sexual immorality and greedy self-worship straight-up idolatry (Colossians 3:5). That means when we put our desires, our “right to a family,” our feelings about love, or our sexual autonomy on the throne that belongs only to God, we’re committing the original sin all over again.
That’s exactly what’s happening here.
A culture that says “love makes a family” and “adults should get whatever kind of family they want” has already bowed the knee to the idol of self. Once that idol is on the throne, kids stop being gifts from the Lord and start becoming custom-ordered projects. Women’s bodies become rentable equipment. Embryos become disposable material. And a five-month-old baby crying for his mama gets laughed at and told, “Sorry kid, there is no mama.”
That’s not parenting. That’s the fruit of idolatry dressed up as progress.
The men in that video weren’t just having a cute moment. They were acting out the logical endgame of a worldview that’s been saying for years: “My desires define reality. Biology doesn’t matter. Covenant doesn’t matter. What I want is what’s right.” And when the baby—who can’t even speak English yet—instinctively reaches for the one relationship God wired him to need first, the response is laughter and denial.
This is what idolatry always does. It promises freedom (“Everyone deserves to have kids how they want!”) and delivers bondage. It promises compassion and delivers commodification. It swears it’s being kind to adults while stomping on the weakest and most vulnerable.
James 1:27 couldn’t be clearer: pure religion is looking after orphans and widows in their distress. But when idolatry reigns, we don’t protect the fatherless; we manufacture more of them on purpose. We design families around the intentional absence of a mother or a father, then act shocked when the kid cries out for what’s missing.
Brothers and sisters, we have to be honest about the root. This isn’t primarily a policy debate or a science disagreement. It’s a heart issue. It’s a worship issue. We’ve traded the glory of the immortal God for Instagram-worthy family photos and the warm feelings of “love wins.”
And the babies are the ones left paying for it.
That’s why we can’t soft-pedal this. A biblical worldview starts with calling idolatry what it is—rebellion against the Creator—and then looks straight at what God actually designed instead. Because once you see the root clearly, the rest of the picture comes into brutal focus.
The Biblical Worldview: God’s Design for Marriage, Procreation, and the Rights of the Child
If idolatry is the root problem, then we need to get clear on what God actually designed in the first place. No cultural spin. No modern redefinitions. Just straight from Scripture.
It starts in the beginning.
God created us male and female in His image (Genesis 1:27-28). Then He gave the command: “Be fruitful and multiply.” That wasn’t a suggestion—it was part of what it means to bear His image. Genesis 2:24 fills it out: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Jesus Himself quoted this in Matthew 19 and doubled down on it. One man. One woman. One flesh. Covenant union. Open to life.
That’s the pattern. Not two dads. Not two moms. Not “love makes a family” as the highest good. Marriage isn’t primarily about adult fulfillment or self-expression. It’s about the one-flesh union that reflects Christ and the church and is naturally ordered toward welcoming children.
And those children? They aren’t accessories or rights we demand. Psalm 127 calls them “a heritage from the Lord… a reward.” Psalm 139 says each one is fearfully and wonderfully made—knit together by God Himself in the womb. Jeremiah 1:5 reminds us God knows us before we’re even formed. From the moment of conception, that little life has dignity because it bears the image of God.
Scripture also makes clear that mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. They bring distinct, God-given gifts to the raising of a child. Think Proverbs 31—the strength, wisdom, and nurturing care of a godly mother. Or Ephesians 6:4—fathers training and instructing their kids without provoking them to anger (I’m working on this with the rest of you). These aren’t cultural stereotypes. They’re reflections of how God wired creation.
Here’s where the video hits like a gut punch.
That baby wasn’t confused about English. He was doing something far more primal. As Katy Faust pointed out in response to this exact clip, the sound “mama” (or something damn close to it) “…shows up in nearly every language on earth? Chinese, Arabic, Spanish. Cultures separated by continents, histories, and entirely different linguistic families — and yet they all landed on the same sound for the same person?”3
Why? Faust goes on: “‘Ma’ is one of the very first sounds a baby can make. It’s the natural position of the mouth during nursing. Long before a child understands words, he forms that sound. And who answers? …the woman whose body he knows.” The one wired to answer. Humanity didn’t invent “mama.” We simply recognized a universal reality baked into our biology.
The baby in that video wasn’t babbling nonsense. He was reaching for the mother he was made in to know and who was made to love him. And instead of comfort, he got laughter and a casual “there is no mama.”
That denial isn’t just cold. It’s a rejection of the created order itself. That sound is creation itself bearing witness against our rebellion.
Scripture warns us what happens when we mess with this design. Look at the messes in Genesis alone—Hagar brought into Abraham and Sarah’s marriage (Genesis 16), or the surrogate drama with Leah and Rachel (Genesis 30). Third parties inserted into procreation brought strife, jealousy, and generational pain. God wasn’t vague: the one-flesh union is meant to stay that way.
A biblical worldview sees every child as having a God-given right to the mother and father their Creator intended. Not because society owes adults whatever family structure they desire, but because kids are image-bearers who thrive best when they receive the complementary love and influence of both a mom and a dad. Deliberately creating motherless or fatherless homes through technology isn’t compassion. It’s playing God with other people’s lives.
Believe it or not, this isn’t harshness. It’s honesty. God’s design isn’t a cage, it’s the path to flourishing. When we trade it for idols of autonomy and desire, the weak get crushed. And right now, the weakest among us—babies like Texson —are the ones crying out in the middle of our cultural rebellion.
What the Data Actually Shows About Child Outcomes
Now let’s be honest about the numbers.
You’ve probably heard the talking point a thousand times: “The science is settled… 75 out of 79 studies show kids raised by same-sex parents turn out just fine, or even better.” It’s repeated like gospel in the media and academia. Katy Faust and the team at Them Before Us took a hard look at that claim and basically torched it.4
Here’s the problem with the famous Cornell “What We Know” project: most of those studies are junk science when you apply basic standards. They used convenience samples—recruiting from pride parades, LGBTQ+ Facebook groups, fertility clinics, and activist networks. That means you’re not getting a random cross-section of families. You’re getting wealthier, more educated, highly motivated people who know the study is trying to prove their family setup is awesome. Tiny sample sizes. Heavy reliance on what the parents themselves report about their kids (of course they’re going to paint a rosy picture). Short timeframes. And almost no serious comparison to stable, intact biological mom-and-dad homes.
When Faust and others applied real rigorous standards (large random or population-based samples, actual child-reported outcomes instead of just parent surveys, and proper controls for family stability) the “75 out of 79” number collapses. Dramatically. It’s more like marketing than serious research.
Dr. Walter Schumm, a longtime professor of applied family science at Kansas State University with over 250 peer-reviewed articles and decades of experience in family research methodology, reached a similar conclusion in his exhaustive 2018 book Same-Sex Parenting Research: A Critical Assessment. After reviewing nearly 400 studies, Schumm showed that many of the “no differences” claims fall apart under proper statistical scrutiny. He highlighted how relationship instability is often higher in same-sex parent couples (especially lesbian couples), how children are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual, and how parent self-reports frequently paint a rosier picture than what shows up in child-reported or objective measures.5
So what do the better studies actually show?
Mark Regnerus’s New Family Structures Study—a large, nationally representative sample of young adults—dropped some devastating numbers. Kids who grew up with a mother in a same-sex relationship were 11 times more likely to report having been “touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver” (23% versus just 2% in intact biological mother-father homes). Those with a gay father were about 3 times more likely. The rates of being forced into sex against their will were also dramatically higher.6
Paul Sullins, working with massive datasets like the National Health Interview Survey, found children with same-sex parents had roughly twice the rate of emotional problems overall. But the sexual abuse numbers are especially gut-wrenching. In some analyses of married same-sex parent households, reported child sexual abuse by a parent or caregiver spiked as high as 38%—compared to near zero in stable biological married homes. The longer the child lived in that environment, the worse the outcomes got.7
Let that sink in.
We’re not talking about minor statistical blips. We’re talking about real kids—image-bearers of God—facing significantly higher chances of being sexually violated in the very home that was supposed to protect them. And a major driver appears to be the deliberate absence of biological ties. When you remove the natural safeguards that come with a biological mother or father, vulnerability skyrockets. Non-biological adults in the home (which is guaranteed in surrogacy and donor setups) correlate with much higher maltreatment risks. Same-sex relationships also break up at higher rates, and that chaos piles on more damage.
This is the ugly underbelly that polite society doesn’t want to discuss. Deliberately engineering motherless homes through surrogacy isn’t just depriving a child of a maternal bond—it’s creating an environment where the risk of abuse climbs sharply. The data from the strongest studies keeps screaming the same warning: trading God’s design for adult desires comes with a body count, and too often the victims are the smallest and most defenseless.
Biological complementarity isn’t just a nice theory. Moms and dads bring different strengths that aren’t interchangeable. When you stack the deck with intentional motherlessness, you’re playing Russian roulette with a child’s safety and well-being.
The post-Obergefell reality makes this even clearer. Once the Supreme Court redefined marriage, the floodgates opened for surrogacy and IVF aimed squarely at same-sex couples. What we’re seeing isn’t random bad luck. It’s the predictable fallout of declaring that mothers and fathers are optional and kids are a commodity adults can order up.
Look, the data isn’t perfect. Family research is messy and politicized on all sides. But the strongest, largest, population-based studies (backed by careful methodological work from scholars like Faust and Schumm) keep pointing in the same direction: kids do best—by a wide margin—with their own married biological mom and dad. That’s not hate. That’s reality staring us in the face.
And here’s the brutal part: these patterns aren’t random. They line up exactly with what Scripture warned us about. When you trade God’s design for idols of desire and autonomy, the harm isn’t theoretical. The baby crying for “mama” in that video isn’t just an anecdote. He’s living proof of the cost—and far too many kids are paying an even steeper price in silence.
Surrogacy and IVF: Mechanisms That Turn Children into Commodities
Homosexual relationships—much less the legal unions built around them—are fundamentally against God’s creation order. They reject the male-female complementarity woven into our very biology and the one-flesh covenant Scripture declares good. And from that rejection flows a river of idolatry that bastardizes God’s good creation and treats babies made in His image as customizable products rather than sacred gifts.
That’s the machinery we’re looking at now.
For gay male couples wanting biologically related kids, the standard playbook is commercial gestational surrogacy. They choose an egg donor, hire a woman to carry the child, and drop tens of thousands of dollars to make it happen. The baby is conceived in a lab, grown in a rented womb, and handed over like merchandise. No mama. No covenant. Just a transaction designed from the start to deliver a child into a home that deliberately excludes half of God’s design.
That’s exactly what Shane McAnally and his husband did. Their son Texson was engineered this way. And when that little boy cried out for “mama”—the primal sound his body knew from the womb—the two men laughed and told him, “There is no mama.”
This isn’t a parenting fail. It’s the entire point of the arrangement. Surrogacy doesn’t just allow motherlessness—it requires it. It turns a woman’s body into a rentable vessel and the child into a contractually delivered product. The baby isn’t born into a family reflecting God’s pattern. He’s transferred like property to satisfy adult desires.
The “no mama” video exposes the cold reality in living color. A five-month-old infant, still months from real speech, instinctively reaches for the mother he was made for—and gets met with laughter and redirection. That moment isn’t awkward or funny. It’s a heartbreaking picture of what happens when idolatry overrides creation order: the weakest are sacrificed on the altar of self.
IVF is the engine driving the whole corrupt system and it doesn’t just ensnare those in open rebellion against God’s design. Well-meaning heterosexual couples, including many sincere Christians, have also been sold a bill of goods here. They’ve been told that their deepest happiness and personal desires must be fulfilled at all costs, even if it means stepping outside the created order of covenant marriage and natural procreation. In chasing the good gift of children, they too can end up conforming their lives to the idol of self rather than conforming their desires to the image of Christ.
To my brothers and sisters in Christ who are walking through infertility: I want to say this gently but with all seriousness—pursuing IVF often means participating in the very system that treats embryonic life as disposable and separates procreation from the marital covenant God designed. The desire for children is good and holy, but we are called to submit even our deepest longings to the Lord rather than grasping for them through means that involve the routine creation and destruction of image-bearers. This is not easy counsel, but faithfulness to Christ sometimes requires saying no to good desires pursued in the wrong way. There are faithful paths of trust, adoption, and contentment in Christ that honor Him more fully. Let us not be conformed to the patterns of this world, even when the pain is great.
In vitro fertilization routinely creates far more embryos than will ever be used; often dozens per cycle. The “extras” aren’t gently set aside. They are murdered. Conservative estimates put the total number of embryos lost, discarded, or deliberately destroyed through IVF procedures since the first test-tube baby in 1978 at over 270 million.8 That’s 270 million unique human beings (45 Holocausts!!)—each with their own distinct DNA, each fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. Secular humanists can deny their humanity all they want in this life, but every single one of them will be recognized as such when they stand before their Creator on judgment day.
Success rates remain mediocre, so the overproduction and slaughter continue. Gay couples rely on this technology heavily because natural procreation is off the table in their relationships.
Here’s the brutal truth: IVF doesn’t just enable surrogacy. It industrializes the bastardization of God’s design. Innocent babies become inventory to be graded and culled. Wombs become leased space. Children become the end product of adult contracts, adult lusts, and adult rebellion against the Creator. The same labs churning out babies for same-sex arrangements are quietly murdering the unwanted “extras” by the millions.
This is full-blown commodification—turning image-bearers into designer products. It rips procreation away from the marital act, away from covenant love, and away from the mother and father a child was made to know. It laughs in the face of Psalm 127 (“children are a heritage from the Lord”) and treats little ones like accessories you can order to match your lifestyle.
The idolatry we named at the beginning isn’t abstract anymore. It’s operational. When you reject God’s creation order from the start, everything that follows becomes twisted: women reduced to breeders, babies murdered by the hundreds of millions, and kids like Texson reduced to props in someone else’s story—born crying for a mama who was intentionally erased.
The “There is no mama” clip isn’t a weird one-off. It’s the logical, predictable endpoint of the entire system. A system that prioritizes adult desires over a child’s most basic God-given need and then mocks the resulting pain.
God never designed life to be this transactional, this cruel, or this dark. He gave us something far better—a pattern rooted in covenant, biology, and love that actually protects the vulnerable instead of exploiting and destroying them.
But we’ve traded that good gift for something hellish. And both Scripture and the data keep showing us exactly what it costs the least of these.
A Final Word: Returning to a Biblical Worldview
The baby’s cry cuts through all the noise.
“Mama… mama… mama…”
A tiny voice, barely five months old, reaching for the one relationship God wired him to need first. And the response? Laughter. Redirection. “There is no mama.”
That single viral moment is more than an awkward family video. It is a brutal revelation—a snapshot of where idolatry ultimately leads. When we reject God’s creation order, when we elevate our desires above His design, when we treat babies made in His image as products to be ordered and delivered, the weakest among us pay the price.
That’s it. I know this is a long one, but we’ve walked through it all.
Idolatry is the root. It begins when we swap the glory of the Creator for the worship of self, autonomy, and “my happiness above all.” From there flows the rejection of male and female complementarity, the redefinition of marriage, and the machinery of surrogacy and IVF that turns wombs into rentals and children into disposable inventory.
Scripture stands as the unchanging standard. One man and one woman in covenant union. Children as a heritage from the Lord, fearfully and wonderfully made. Mothers and fathers bringing distinct, irreplaceable gifts to parenthood. The universal cry of “mama”—stamped into human biology across every culture—testifies that even creation itself knows what our rebellious hearts try to deny.
The data confirms the cost. Flawed studies aside, the strongest research shows kids raised without their biological mother and father face higher rates of emotional brokenness, behavioral struggles, and even sexual abuse in the very home meant to protect them. The absence of natural safeguards matters. Deliberate motherlessness matters. The patterns aren’t accidental; they’re the predictable fruit of trading God’s good design for something lesser.
And the mechanisms supporting it all—surrogacy and IVF—lay the evil bare. Hundreds of millions of embryonic lives, each with unique DNA and bearing God’s image, have been murdered in labs while babies are delivered into intentionally motherless homes on demand. Well-meaning couples, including Christians, have been sold the same lie: that personal fulfillment justifies stepping outside the created order. The result is the same cold commodification.
This is not progress. This is not love. This is rebellion dressed up as compassion—and the babies are crying out in the middle of it.
But here’s the hope:
God’s design is not cruel. It is good. It is life-giving. The pattern He gave us—covenant marriage between one man and one woman, open to the gift of children—protects the vulnerable instead of exploiting them. It reflects the faithful love of Christ for His bride. It honors the image of God in every little one.
The church must return to this biblical worldview with courage and clarity. We cannot soften what Scripture declares. We cannot look away from the harm being done to the least of these. We must grieve with the children who are born into these arrangements. We must repent where we ourselves have bowed to the idols of happiness and self-fulfillment. And we must proclaim unashamedly that every child deserves the mother and father their Creator intended for them.
The baby in that video is still crying. Not just for “mama,” but for a culture that will once again honor the God who knit him together.
May we have ears to hear.
May we have the courage to repent.
And may we return to the beautiful, life-giving order our Father designed from the very beginning.
Such a powerful, clear and necessary post, Chris! Thank you, and thanks be to our Almighty God and Savior, for the time and energy and wisdom given you by the Spirit of God, in sharing this with us.
Wow, Chris! I cannot separate any one section of this article to say how much I like, appreciate, admire and rejoice about it. It is all so importantly spoken of and exceptionally well written!
You have put into words many of my own thoughts and substantiated through research articles what has only been a whisper in my heart and mind.
Thank you, friend, for following the Word of Truth and sharing Him with others!
In Christ,
Robin
P.S. We are watching some of these things happen in our family right in front of our eyes! Our granddaughter, Kit, was born through IUF, (In Utero Fertilization), meaning that the donor sperm was injected into the uterus at the right time to unite with our daughter-in-law’s egg. Even though Kit has a mama and a “daddy”, (our daughter, who thinks she’s a man), it’s extremely sad to know she is a negative statistic, loved by God and us, but already showing signs of her parent’s aberrant behavior. Aberrant according to The Truth! Come quickly Lord Jesus!