The Ick Is Strong with This One

Sometimes the ‘ick factor’ just isn’t wrong. Many ethicists sneer at disgust as a moral compass, and sometimes they’re right. For instance, much of the enduring prejudice against homosexuality, male in particular, stems from little more than a reflexive ‘ick’ at bum-sex. Which is why legendarily flaming comedian Julian Clary said he made so many bum jokes.

But is the ick factor always wrong, by definition? After all, pro-incest advocates can make all sorts of arguments to defend incest, but the ick just won’t go away. Philosophical great David Hume famously observed that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ Those passions include the ick.

Commercial surrogacy is another issue where the ick factor is strong. It only gets stronger when it comes to gay men exploiting commercial surrogacy. Especially when the poster-boys for the trade are the likes of Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, who became Britain’s first gay surrogate parent in 1999.

Drewitt-Barlow has long had a strong whiff of ick about him. After all, he openly stated that commercial surrogacy was “just buying a baby”. He also made his unrepentant misogyny more than apparent. He boasted about paying a model £50,000 to be an egg donor because he didn’t want his child to be “ugly”. When his children were praised for being attractive, he said, “Well, you get what you pay for!” He added that if any of the children hadn’t “come out right”, they would have placed them for adoption. He also said he would never allow a lesbian to be an egg donor, as he believes they are all “fat and ugly”.

As it turns out, there was another, very good reason, to feel icky about the flag-bearer for gay commercial surrogacy.

Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 57, was charged with multiple offences on Friday alongside Scott Drewitt-Barlow, 32.

Both men, of Danbury, Essex, will appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court later.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said the men have been charged with arranging or facilitating travel of another person with a view to exploitation, as well as sexual offences including rape.

The offences are alleged to have occurred between 2013 and 2026. Prosecutors say the pair used their wealth and status to target, groom and exploit young males.

Drewitt-Barlow’s long-standing insistence on commercial surrogates undergoing c-sections so they could not see the babies they carried fits the same dehumanising pattern. “I don’t want my children coming out of a woman’s vagina,” he once explained. The women were paid and then required to vanish from the child’s life. The children were products, delivered on demand and on his terms.

This is the core problem with commercial surrogacy. It turns women into rented wombs and children into commodities. The system has almost no meaningful oversight. Anyone with enough money can essentially buy a child with minimal screening to ensure that child is going into a safe home.

The Drewitt-Barlow case is not an isolated horror. Registered sex offenders have used surrogacy to obtain children in multiple jurisdictions. In Pennsylvania, a Tier One sex offender convicted of child sexual abuse and possession of child abuse material was able to access assisted reproductive technology because there were no equivalent restrictions to those placed on adoption. In the Baby Gammy case, a registered Australian sex offender and his wife abandoned one twin with Down Syndrome in Thailand but were allowed to keep the other child.

Counting down to the next ‘shock’ revelations…

Shane Dawson and husband Ryland Adams are new parents!

The YouTube stars announced the arrival of twin sons Jet Parker Adams Yaw and Max Chandler Adams Yaw via surrogate on Dec 7 in a heartwarming post on Sunday.

Many of their other posts are not quite so “heartwarming”.

YouTuber Shane Dawson and his partner Ryland Adams have made numerous videos and statements sexualizing children (though they haven’t been arrested or charged with sex offenses). Dawson has ‘joked’ about raping children, and admitted to repeatedly searching online for videos of child sexual abuse, including the victimization of babies.

Even worse is an audio clip from ‘Shane and Friends’ where he recalled a moment of asking someone to have sex with his dog. ‘If I had a child, which is the same as a dog to me,’ he said. ‘Well, I guess when they’re a baby you don’t want to picture someone f*cking them.’ His co-host shared a news story of a man who raped a four-month-old infant and killed her.

Shane laughed and declared, ‘Amazing!’ Then he speculated how exactly the baby would have died during the sex act.

The ick factor exists for a reason. When the people most loudly celebrating the ‘just buying a baby’ model turn out to be charged with rape and trafficking, the disgust is not prejudice. It is a rational response to a system that treats both women and children as products to be purchased, used and discarded. No amount of rainbow branding changes that fundamental reality.

There is no doubt that gay men can be, and frequently are, good and decent parents. Loving homes come in many forms. But commercial surrogacy is not about family formation in the ordinary sense. It is a market in human beings that deliberately severs the child from the woman who carried and birthed it, often with contracts designed to ensure she has no further contact. That structure is inherently exploitative of women and leaves children dangerously exposed to predators who would never pass the scrutiny applied to adoption.