I am 100% against surrogacy and I do not support it being legal anywhere, in any context, whatsoever. But I also believe that same sex couples who are married or civilly partnered should be allowed to adopt a child. Whether you think Pete Buttigieg is doing a good job or not should not influence how you feel about him and his husband adopting a child. And yes, two men can raise a child together. If they had the child through surrogacy, then yes, I would be angry about it, like I was with Tom Daley, Neil Patrick Harris and especially the elderly Elton John. But that is not the same thing as adopting a child who was rejected by both his biological parents.

You can argue that homophobia was a factor in the public backlash from a bunch of plonkers on Twitter - of course, the majority of people on Twitter are plonkers anyway. But misandry could also be a factor in this. Now I will say this: a child does benefit from being with his birth mother for the first six months of his life. This isn’t because the birth mother is female, but this is simply because the baby was in the mother's womb for nine months and is adapting to being outside of her womb, and the birth mother is the person the child is the most familiar with. But if the birth mother doesn’t want the child and wants to give him away immediately, then it doesn’t make a difference if two men, two women, or a man and a woman take the child. The child has never been in the bodies of two lesbians who adopt him, so why would he be better off if they adopted him than if two gay men adopted him? However, so many people take the importance of the child’s bond with his or her birth mother and interpret it to mean that the father is not important. To a point where there are idiots who call it "babysitting" when a father is looking after his own child, but that’s another topic for another day.

Yes, the father cannot breastfeed his child, but he can still do everything else for his child and even provide alternatives to the mother's breastmilk, like formula. He can still change nappies, blow noses, change clothes, wash the baby, cuddle the baby and make sure that the baby doesn’t get killed. The mother may have had that maternal instinct from birth, and that is only because she had the baby inside of her for nine whole months, so the instinct has already been fully developed. The father's paternal instinct can also develop as he bonds with the child to point where it’s complete and he’s just as capable of looking after his kid as the mother is. Which is why I recommend that new fathers spend as much of their freetime as possible with their newborns to speed up the development of their paternal instincts. In fact, many fathers feel their pregnant wives' bellies as often as they can so that development starts early. But so many people do not see that, and think that the father is only there for financial support. Which is dumb, because obviously if the father is only good for financial purposes, how come children raised by single parents are more likely to drop out of secondary school or go to prison? There are a lot of good single mothers out there, who raise their children exceptionally well, but those single mothers had help raising their children from their friends, their relatives and members of their communities. And just like that, successful single fathers had help as well.

To end this rant, I will outline the best outcome for a child who’s birth mother does not want him and wants to give him away as soon as the umbilical cord has been cut: the father raises the child. He’s the biological father, so his sperm helped to create that child, he is 50% of that child’s DNA. Before any adoption gets approved, the father should be tracked down, and only if he doesn’t want the child or if he’s not in a position to raise the child should the child be given up for adoption. Even if the father is single has has never changed a nappy in his life, the child is still better off being raised by him than anybody else. He can always get help from his parents, friends, relatives or even the community. And I say this as someone who wants to ban single individuals from adopting children or accessing IVF threatments. Now, obviously the father should be encouraged to move himself and his child in with his parents or anybody who offers a bedroom for a few months, or have somebody he trusts come live with him for a few months, so he’d be able to take more time off work to bond with his child. But it’s better for the child to be raised by his father than for the child to be adopted.