(LifeSiteNews) — Despite the complaints leveled by Left and Right over the “politicization” of the 2026 Winter Games, the Olympics have always been political. During the Cold War, Olympic stadiums hosted proxy duels where the West and the Soviet empire could do battle bloodlessly. In 1972, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September chose the Munich Olympics to perpetrate a massacre of Israeli athletes. Communist China’s brutal human rights record dogged the Games in Beijing in 2008 and 2022.

This time around, it is the culture wars that have been front and center — and gold medal-winning U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu has become something of a lightning rod. LGBT activists have been upset to discover that Liu had, at some point, deleted social media posts supportive of the LGBT movement and removed all references to her “preferred pronouns.” Liu appears to have identified, at some point, as “she/they”; that phase passed, and the very feminine Liu was officially recorded as female.

Now, another aspect of Liu’s unlikely journey has become a subject of discussion: the fact that she was conceived through IVF, birthed by a surrogate hired by her father, and raised motherless by a single man. “A political refugee and a lawyer, he decided at age 40 to start a family on his own,” Anna Gibbs reported at Slate.com. “He has since fathered five children through a pair of surrogates and anonymous egg donors.”

Gibbs writes:

Research shows that in the U.S., single-father households have increased roughly fourfold since 1960; the total number as of 2016 stood at about 2 million single dads — or 17 percent of all single parents — living with children under 18. The majority of those fathers were divorced, separated, or widowed. So being a single father by choice is a rarer phenomenon, and doing so via gestational surrogacy, in which the surrogate mother bears no genetic link to the child she carries, is rarer yet.

Gibbs, predictably, thinks this a good thing, and highlights the fact that homosexual couples often use surrogacy to purchase children that they cannot conceive naturally. She then insists that IVF and surrogacy are essential, using Liu to make her case. The issue, Gibbs writes, is “the problem of access” — some states and indeed many countries do not permit surrogacy, and some European nations consider it a form of human trafficking. For journalists who believe that IVF and surrogacy are necessary for same-sex couples to procure children, Liu is a convenient example.

It is worth noting, however, that darker conclusions can and have been reached about Liu’s origins. On social media, some noted that the figure skater was an example of why “designer babies” are desirable, implying that if parents can have their embryonic children graded, discarded, and selected for specific traits, they, too, can have a child as successful as Liu — even if it means destroying a dozen or more siblings. Grim eugenics undergirds the logic of the “fertility industry” and the design and sale of human children.

Every human being is created by God and possesses inherent dignity and worth, and Alysa Liu’s life is worth celebrating. But it is revealing that Gibbs does not consider whether Liu and her siblings ever longed for their mothers. Liu obviously adores her father, and that is a beautiful thing to see. But fathers, no matter how loving they are, cannot be mothers. Saying that mothers are essential and that being motherless is tragic should not be controversial. We can admire Liu and smile at her warm relationship with her father and still see a tragedy for what it is.

Journalists like Gibbs do not consider such questions. They see the fact that Liu likely does not know who her biological mother is and probably never met her as an opportunity to advocate for procedures that cost countless embryonic human lives and business transactions that involve renting the bodies of women and commodifying children. They advocate for a grim business that involves treating children as products — and point to Liu as a good product that helps them make their sales pitch.