YouTuber Shane Dawson and his husband, Ryland Adams, announced on Instagram the birth of twin boys. The couple used a surrogate and announced the pregnancy in July.
Writing on social media, the couple issued a statement about the arrival of the twins. The surrogate was not mentioned. “There’s no words to express how it feels to be the fathers of these two beautiful boys,” the statement read. “The best day of our entire lives and nothing else will ever compare. We probably won’t be showing much of them in the future but because many of you have been on the journey with us we felt it was right to show the destination. We are so unbelievably grateful.” They have named the twin boys Jet Parker Adams Yaw and Max Chandler Adams Yaw.
The couple has courted controversy surrounding their journey to have children, both because of Dawson’s past comments sexualizing children, as well as how the couple discussed the fertility process.
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Sexualizing children
Dawson has made numerous comments in which he sexualizes or fantasizes about children, describing it as just another “fetish.” In Evie Magazine, Dawson’s disturbing history was spotlighted. “In 2020, a clip of Shane resurfaced that showed himself pretending to masturbate in front of a poster of Willow Smith,” Gina Florio wrote. “She was 11 years old when she released her single ‘Whip My Hair,’ and in the clip, he said, ‘Whip your hair back and forth.’”
He similarly made sexual remarks about a six-year-old follower. “She shows me her Instagram, and first of all, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but she was kind of sexy,’ he said about the [six-year-old] fan,” Florio continued, adding, “’Having sex with children or touching children is terrible, and you should not do it,’ he responded. ‘But, here’s my thing – people have foot fetishes. People have fetishes about everything.’”
Additionally, he admitted to searching for child pornography, including “naked baby” (emphasis added):
[H]e shared an older clip of himself admitting that he searched for child pornography and even typed in ‘naked baby.’ He said he couldn’t understand why anybody could be turned on by that, then followed that up with, ‘But… it was sexy.’
Twitter user @belugasong shared a long thread of many other moments where Shane was caught sexualizing children. In one clip, he was video chatting with a young teenager who was a fan of his. He kept telling her to twerk, and after she finally did twerk for the camera, he told her to ‘show herself.’ In another video, he showed a series of photos featuring young girls wearing some of his merch. He said, ‘I would rape all of you.’
Even worse is an audio clip from ‘Shane and Friends’ where he recalled a moment of asking someone to have sex with his dog. ‘If I had a child, which is the same as a dog to me,’ he said. ‘Well, I guess when they’re a baby you don’t want to picture someone f*cking them.’ His co-host shared a news story of a man who raped a 4-month-old infant and killed her.
Shane laughed and declared, ‘Amazing!’ Then he speculated how exactly the baby would have died during the sex act.
He also sexualized children in person.
“One of them was only 12 years old,” Florio continued. “He asks one of the children to eat a ‘cocktail weenie’ because he checked his statistics and knows he has ‘a lot of child molesters watching.’ He later coerces the child into doing a lap dance on someone else while playing a sexually explicit song in the background. The child’s face has been hidden to protect her privacy. In the next video, he places a pair of large fake breasts on the girl and jokes about how he didn’t know that 12-year-olds could develop so quickly. He asks the dog to lick the fake breasts. He asks the girl inappropriate questions about her genitals and then forces her to dance on top of a table. The video ends with him forcing the girl to ‘breastfeed’ on his chest and asking a woman with large breasts to ‘breastfeed’ the girl.”
As Them Before Us founder Katy Faust pointed out, “Here’s your reminder that (unlike adoption) adults who procure children via #surrogacy undergo no screening or background checks.”
Disturbing attitudes
Both Dawson and Adams made crude, disrespectful jokes throughout the fertility process, including saying how they would tell their future kids, “We bought your mommy!” in regards to surrogacy. They also announced earlier this year that they had successfully created 12 embryos — six for each man — and joked about which to keep, and which to destroy (emphasis added).
Adams: Wait, one, two, three… I have four girls.
Dawson: Four girls, and two boys.
Adams: So we’re opposite … It’s so weird too, because our babies have barcodes. It’s very interesting! So, we need to write this down. So I have four girls and two boys. You have four boys and two girls. This is so confusing! Follow along, everyone. I can’t do math like that!
Dawson: So in total, we have six of each … how is that even possible? Now we have six boys and six girls? It’s cheaper by the dozen, baby! So we have options. What are we going to do?
Adams: Well, it’s interesting though, because it is flip-flopped. Like, the majority of yours are the opposite of what you initially, like, preferred.
Dawson: Well, it’s not preferred. I thought, oh, maybe it would be fun to have a daughter because we don’t really have many girls in my bloodline. That sounds creepy, but we don’t, like, it’s a lot of sons. That actually makes sense, now that I think about it.
Adams: OK, I’m curious, I want to talk to our doctor and know, like, OK, of the four boys, which boy do we choose? You know?
Dawson: I don’t like playing God.
Adams: I don’t either! But no, I’m just saying, like, I wonder if there’s the biopsies, or the lab results tell them which one —
Dawson: We can spin the wheel, and we’ll put a barcode on each side.
Of course, embryos are actual human beings, with their own individual DNA, and genetics, eye color, hair color, gender, and more traits already fully determined. It’s estimated that there are over one million embryos frozen in the United States, thanks to the largely unregulated fertility industry. A Harvard Medical School study found that 62% of children born after being conceived through donor technologies, like surrogacy and IVF, consider it to be immoral and unethical.
“When you are commissioning and swiping your credit card for a product, even one that you want badly, you are participating in commodification, regardless of whether the intended parents are the biological parents of the surrogate-born children,” Katie Breckenridge, operations manager for Them Before Us, previously told Live Action News. “In this case, the products are human beings.”
