Back in January 2021, the then-17-year-old YouTube star turned Nickelodeon child actor announced that she was, like so many of her generation, identifying as LGBT – although she declined to specify where on the spectrum she landed.
She had previously dated male TikTok star Mark Bontempo; after her coming out announcement on social media, she has only dated women, including social media influencers Kylie Prew and Avery Cyrus (if you have no idea who those people are, that’s fine – I don’t either).
Since then, Siwa has become a reliable attack dog for the LGBT movement, pushing LGBT content to her enormous audience and claiming that the Hallmark Channel’s longtime focus on the “traditional family” constituted discrimination.
The latest news about Siwa highlights another trend: “LGBT people” purchasing children and renting women – “surrogates” – to gestate and birth them. According to an interview with Cosmopolitan, the 21-year-old celebrity explained that she plans to have three babies – “triplets” – using three different surrogates. “Because I’m gay as s***t and I have to plan a pregnancy much different than a straight person,” she said. “I actually want to take three eggs, fertilize three eggs, and have three surrogates.”
“So, technically, they’ll all be the same batch, but they would all be born separately,” Siwa continued, oblivious to how grotesque it is to refer to babies as a “batch,” and she does not say how many children would be artificially created in order to produce three live births. “I’m gonna have my surrogates, my babies, then maybe their birthdays will land on different days, and they can be like triplets, but like, not.” Siwa, who is single, even knows what she wants to name these children: Freddie, Eddie, and Teddie – “FET” for short.
She joked that she would divorce any partner who refused to go along with her plan but added that this is important enough that she would clear it soon into a relationship. “That is something that I talk about very early on with a partner,” she said. “FET is coming, and they will be here in three years, whether you like it or not.” Having kids, Siwa said, is important to her. “On the personal side of my life, since I was 12, I cannot wait to be a mom. I cannot wait to have babies. I want to have so many. I feel like I’ll have kids pretty early – but obviously, me having kids is a lot bigger process.”
Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire commented on the news on X. “‘The same batch,’ she says of her own future children,” he wrote. “At this point, we need to treat people who use surrogates with the same contempt and disgust we heap on human traffickers. Because they are human traffickers.” Walsh isn’t merely using his characteristic hyperbole here — the European Union has listed surrogacy alongside illegal adoption, forced marriage, slavery, and prostitution as “exploitation” and “human trafficking.” Allie Beth Stuckey of The Blaze added, “Should be illegal.”
Katy Faust, a human rights activist and co-author author of Them Before Us: Why We Need A Global Children’s Rights Movement, concurred. “JoJo Siwa announced her plan to have three babies through three different surrogates, noting she had ‘a sperm donor already lined up,’” she told me. “Siwa has her own extensive line of merchandise ranging from clothing to toys to household items largely targeted at children. She has received criticism for promoting her brand so extensively within her YouTube content that it blurs the lines between entertainment, consumerism and her own persona.”
“Now it seems she’s merging all three into her pregnancy plans,” Faust continued. “Her persona of being a gay woman requires her, she says, to ‘plan a pregnancy much different than a straight person.’ Surrogacy is the ultimate consumer venture, with selection of the genetic father, sex selection post conception, and even the possibility of selecting for eye color with advanced screening. With baby names Freddy, Eddy, and Teddy already locked in, the children will likely be revenue-generating additions to her popular YouTube show. While surrogacy is obviously growing in popularity among people who identify as LGBTQ, it is always an endeavor of the better-off.”
As Faust pointed out, the surrogates are the invisible women in this scenario. “If she goes through with this, JoJo will employ three women who occupy much lower rungs on the economic ladder,” Faust noted. “But she herself will never be a surrogate for anyone. In surrogacy, the rich buy and the poor sell. What is also certain is that even though these children will likely want for nothing materially, they will want a father. Correction, they will want their father. Further, they will lose a relationship with the only person they know the moment they’re born, their birth mother, dehumanizingly known as the ‘gestational carrier’ in the world of #BigFertility.”
In short? “JoJo will get her designer children, and probably a bump in her YouTube revenue. But it will be at the expense of three children who likely will suffer attachment and identity struggles, and the father hunger so common in children who grow up without a dad.”