Buying fatherhood: The devastating toll of our rent-a-womb society

Charlie Calkins waited. He waited for the stars to align. He waited for the right woman to appear, for the perfect partner to materialize. None of it happened. So he improvised. He became a father anyway.

This is America in 2025: a country where men bypass marriage as if it were a tollbooth. Where fatherhood is recast as a consumer choice. Where children risk becoming accessories to adult ambition.

The real question facing modern masculinity isn’t how to become fathers without wives. It’s how to become men worthy of wives in the first place.

The Atlantic tells Calkins' story in its recent celebration of this trend, dressing it up as progress, as evolution, even as a solution to masculinity’s supposed crisis.

But it isn’t progress. If anything, it’s the very opposite.

Motherless by design

These aren’t men widowed by tragedy or abandoned by partners. They're men who have deliberately chosen to design motherless homes. Not by accident, but by intent. Not through misfortune, but through willful selfishness. Here are men so allergic to commitment that they would rather hire wombs than marry. So determined to avoid the risk of family life that they would orphan their own children from birth.

And the science isn’t debatable here. Single-parent homes breed absolute chaos, the sorts of problems that ripple through every part of society. They fuel crime, academic failure, and emotional wreckage on a scale too obvious to ignore.

Boys without fathers are far more likely to end up in gangs, in prison, or dead in their 20s. Girls without fathers often become teenage mothers, repeating the cycle before they have a chance to escape it.

The absence of mothers brings its own devastation. Boys without them wrestle with wild anger. Without her steady hand, they lose their way. Lacking her love, they grow restless, reckless, and resentful. Girls without mothers face higher risks of depression, self-destruction, and fractured identity, deprived of the model that teaches them how to become women.

Broken homes, broken bodies

The wreckage is measured in blood and sometimes bullets. The Minnesota trans-identifying shooter’s parents were divorced, just like the parents of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer. Many other mass shooters share the same broken background. Wounded families breed wounded children, and some grow up to wound others.

Contrary to what the Atlantic claims, these “single dads by choice” aren’t fixing masculinity’s crisis. They are the crisis. Real masculine leadership builds institutions. It doesn’t turn family into a transaction. Marriage isn’t optional prep work. It’s boot camp for parenthood. It’s the daily grind of sacrifice and commitment, the training ground where men learn to put someone else first. Those skills don’t arrive with a birth certificate.

Formation by fire

A man who skips marriage skips character formation. He chooses the drive-through version of family — fast, convenient, and ultimately empty. Can’t find the right woman? Rent one. Struggle with relationships? Delete the requirement. Find commitment too complicated? Engineer around it entirely.

But family isn’t supposed to be engineered. It’s forged in fire, through conflict, through reconciliation, through the daily miracle of two people choosing each other again and again. Children need to see it. They need both perspectives. They need the security of parents bound by more than biology.

These “single dads by choice” are emotional adolescents. They’ve found a loophole in human nature, a way to get what they want without ever growing up. And it won’t be these dads who pay the price. It will be their children.

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Image composite: Rainbow photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images; Photo of Brandon Mitchell from Pennsylvania Sex Offender Registry.

Picture that child 20 years from now: sitting in a therapist’s office, wrestling with abandonment issues he can’t name. Struggling to understand why his father’s desire for parenthood mattered more than his own need for a mother. “But Dad wanted me so much,” he'll say. “He went to such lengths.” Yes, he did. Every length except the one that mattered: learning to love a woman, to commit to building something together, to create a real family instead of a designer arrangement.

The real question facing modern masculinity isn’t how to become fathers without wives. It’s how to become men worthy of wives in the first place. How to shoulder the work of partnership, build something bigger than yourself, and pass on stability to the next generation.

Single fatherhood by choice doesn’t answer this challenge. It surrenders to it. And it feeds a cultural shift that Americans should recognize as dangerous.

Structure of responsibility

For centuries, the basis of a healthy society was marriage between a man and a woman. That union produced not only children but continuity, a structure of responsibility that connected men to the work of family and women to the security of partnership.

The breakdown of that bedrock was gradual — first through the normalization of divorce, then the redefinition of marriage itself, first into a cultural abstraction, then into same-sex unions, then into same-sex adoption. At every turn, the essential was downgraded to optional and the optional was elevated to a right. Marriage no longer stood as the pillar of family life but as a lifestyle choice, easy to embrace or evade. And the cost is clear. Children without two committed parents pass that damage on, multiplying it across generations.

The question is not whether single parents can be heroic — many are. The question is what happens when a society normalizes broken homes and calls it progress. When the exception becomes the expectation, everyone suffers.