Do adults have a right to have children? That’s an important question to consider in our day of reproductive technologies and growing numbers of LGBTQ couples. Consider a recent BBC news article titled “The ‘gay tax’ facing same-sex couples starting a family.” What does this mean?

Well, according to the article:

In England, the NHS will fund in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) for heterosexual couples who have been trying for a baby unsuccessfully for at least two years and meet certain other criteria such as age and weight.

But same-sex couples are often expected to demonstrate their infertility before the NHS will fund IVF – and to do so must pay privately for between three and 12 rounds of artificial insemination.

Couples say they have spent more than £20,000 [$24,000] on the treatment.

In other words, because these lesbian couples are not following God’s design of marriage as one man for one woman, they cannot naturally get pregnant in their relationship, but before the UK government will pay the hefty price tag for these couples to try IVF (a reproductive technology that involves creating babies in a petri dish and implanting usually only some of them in a womb), the government requires a couple to “demonstrate their infertility” by trying (and paying for) multiple rounds of intrauterine insemination first. This has been labeled by some activists as a “gay tax,” and one of the women in the stories the BBC shared said her discovery of this requirement was “the one time in my life I’ve felt discriminated against.”

Now, this story is emotively framed so the reader sympathizes with these women who just want to have a baby—and certainly their desire to be mothers is real and children are indeed a blessing. But does every adult have a right to have a child just because they eagerly desire to have a child?

Let’s strip away the language the BBC used to sway the emotions of their readers and see what we’re really left with: same-sex couples in the UK are upset because it costs them more time and money to go against God’s design for the family so they can purposely create a fatherless or motherless child.

Yes, that’s what they are doing. These women are purposefully creating children who are fatherless, with some unknown sperm donor serving as the biological father and that’s it. And, for gay men, they are purposefully creating a motherless child, with some unknown egg donor serving as the biological mother and another woman serving as the surrogate to grow the child.

And yet we know that both a father and a mother are vital for children—you can’t replace a dad with an “extra mom” or a mom with “two dads.” A mom simply can’t be a dad, and a dad can’t be a mom, because God designed men and women differently—and it shows in their parenting! When we start with God’s Word, we know that children have a right to their parents—a right given by the God who gave children to their parents. But adults don’t have a right to have children, sacrificing the well-being and rights of children on the altar of adult desire. Manufacturing motherlessness and fatherlessness for the sake of adult desire is wrong and harmful to children.

Yes, outlets like the BBC are clever at using emotive stories to sway public opinion, but we need to look deeper and compare everything we read to truth, which is ultimately found in the Word of God. And God’s design for families is clear right from Genesis when he created marriage and, by extension, the family unit:

Genesis 2:24 KJV – “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

What a mess results when people redefine what God has designed and defined!

Ken Ham is an author, speaker, and the founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis and its two popular attractions: the acclaimed Creation Museum and the internationally known Ark Encounter.