Family

On December 13, 2025, The Wall Street Journal described a phenomenon that unsettles precisely because it remains legal. Lawyers act correctly. Fertility clinics follow protocol. Intermediaries coordinate efficiently. Courts apply existing rules. Nothing breaks. And yet something essential recedes. The article does not reveal a scandal. It reveals a void, a space where ethics once operated, now replaced by procedure.

At its core, the story forces a question modern societies have long avoided: what is a family once it is no longer shaped by limits. Family has always been born of finitude. Limited time. Limited attention. Limited capacity to accompany, correct, and transmit. These limits were not weaknesses. They were formative. They imposed responsibility, hierarchy, and care. Family did not arise from abundance, but from constraint.

What happens when those constraints dissolve. When children can be produced at industrial scale. When presence becomes optional. When care is delegated and authority abstracted. Biology continues. Law adapts. Logistics improve. Yet family, as a lived human institution, begins to lose density. It becomes thinner, lighter, less anchored in daily experience.

The article mentions a client who sought two hundred children in order to run his business. Let us suspend judgment and examine the assumption beneath it. It assumes that continuity can be engineered through multiplication. That family can substitute for workforce. Yet continuity has never been numerical. It has always been relational. A family business is sustained not by how many share a name, but by how many share a sense of obligation toward something they did not create alone.

Imagine the second generation. Two hundred children, raised apart, formed elsewhere, connected primarily by documents and expectation. Imagine the third generation, after marriages, alliances, and dispersion. What remains then. A genealogy. A structure. Perhaps a network. But is it still a family.

The professional ecosystem described by the WSJ makes such abstraction possible. Responsibility is divided until it disappears. Ethics becomes procedural. The question quietly shifts from “Should this exist” to “Can this be arranged.” Simply because I can.

So the question remains. If a structure produces heirs but not shared life, succession but not transmission, ownership but not belonging, at what point do we stop calling it a family, and when that word finally collapses, what kind of human order quietly takes its place.

W.