Big Fertility Is Just Modern-Day Harems For Billionaires

History is littered with powerful men who collected women the way empires collect territory, for the express purpose of producing as many children as possible. The dehumanizing “harems” that modern civilization rightly rejected are now returning under a new name: Big Fertility.

A recent Wall Street Journal profile of Pavel Durov describes the tech mogul paying women to bear his children using his sperm. Durov has reportedly said he wants to help fight infertility, framing his mass reproduction as altruism rather than indulgence. He has publicly boasted that he has more than 100 of his own children, enabled by artificial reproductive technology.

He is not alone. Chinese billionaires have used international surrogacy to produce dozens of children — sometimes more than 100 — via U.S. surrogates. They need not even touch American soil; a freshly-purchased U.S. citizen is delivered to their nanny-stocked Chinese nurseries. National-security concerns aside, it exposes what Big Fertility could always become: the reduction of children to strategic assets in a global power game.

Then there is Elon Musk, who has openly declared that having many children is a moral duty to save civilization. Musk has at least 14 publicly known children, many conceived through IVF, surrogacy, or relationships intentionally structured around reproduction rather than marriage. He has said that “smart people” need to have more kids — and has used reproductive technologies to curate which women will bear them.

The methods are new. The logic is ancient.

King Solomon famously accumulated 700 wives and 300 concubines. Scripture does not celebrate this excess; it condemns it. Solomon was operating outside Old Testament guardrails for marriage, and the results were catastrophic: rivalry among wives, injustice among children, and generational infighting that fractured his household and ultimately his kingdom.

Genghis Khan conquered vast territory across Asia and Europe and impregnated so many women that geneticists estimate 1 in 200 men alive today carries his Y chromosome. His legacy was not family flourishing but domination, rape, and children scattered across an empire.

In sultanates across the Islamic world, harems were not personal excesses but formal institutions, routinely housing hundreds of concubines at a time. Their purpose was explicit: to produce heirs and secure dynastic power. A woman’s value rose only if she bore a son, and children were ranked, isolated from their fathers, and often pitted against one another.

Across cultures and continents, the pattern is unmistakable: Polygamy and mass reproduction have been routinely employed by powerful, wealthy men and always result in inequality among women and injustice among children.

Christianity rejected this model outright. While Scripture describes polygamy, it never prescribes it. Every biblical example ends badly. The Christian moral revolution insisted that men govern their sexual power, commit to one woman, and give their children the daily, devoted love of both a mother and a father. As a result, Western civilization has largely rejected sex and the family as a vehicle for male legacy-building, instead understanding the union as one of mutual obligation, child protection, and paternal investment.

From billionaires to the Joneses next door, we are now abandoning that hard-won moral progress at the hands of laboratories and lawyers.

Big Fertility markets itself as a compassionate branch of the medical world that exists to help infertile couples. But what it facilitates is a return to harem logic: powerful men outsourcing reproduction to multiple women, scaling child production beyond any human capacity for love, presence, or responsibility.

No matter how wealthy or well-intentioned a father may be, there is no world in which a man with 14 children by multiple women, let alone 100 or 1,000, can provide the daily paternal love and formation children require. Decades of social-science research confirm what common sense already knows: Children thrive when they are raised by their own mother and father, committed to each other and to them, every day, all their life.

Children also crave identity. Those conceived through sperm or egg donation face elevated risks of identity confusion, anxiety, and grief when they do not know (or are deliberately deprived of) half of their biological heritage. For children born through surrogacy, the wound begins at birth, when they are intentionally separated from the woman who carried and bonded with them for nine months.

These harms exist in every third-party reproduction arrangement. But for children mass-produced by billionaires, the injury is compounded. On top of the identity crisis and mother or father deprivation, they have been designed specifically as strategic offspring, assets, or future executives. Some are intended to take over businesses. Others will be married off to consolidate wealth or influence. This is not parenting. It is dynasty management.

Worse, the same moral logic that permits billionaire harems also underwrites so-called “benign” uses of third-party reproduction: single motherhood by choice, same-sex parenting arrangements, and infertile heterosexual couples using donor gametes. The scale may differ, but the injustice is the same. Children are intentionally deprived of their mother or father and told they should be grateful because otherwise they would not exist. Big Fertility insists this is progress. It is not. It is civilizational regression.

This injustice has roots on three levels.

Culturally, we have embraced the lie that mothers and fathers are optional and that biology is irrelevant to children’s well-being.

Legally, we have enshrined adult desire as the governing principle of family formation, abandoning child-centered protections that once restrained exploitation.

Technologically, we have developed tools that allow children to be manufactured, designed, bought, and sold — turning human children into a commodity.

We must reject all three. That means telling the truth about what children need: their own mother and father in the same home. It means wielding the law on behalf of the vulnerable by banning the sale of sperm, eggs, and wombs. And it means rejecting technologies that instrumentalize children, no matter how advanced or lucrative they become.

For Christians, this moment carries particular urgency. We are commanded to defend the fatherless (and motherless), not to stand by while they are manufactured.

Modern harems are still harems. They are just facilitated via lab coats and legal contracts and permitted by a passive church. Children deserve better than to be the collateral damage of billionaire ego and technological excess. And it’s our job to defend them.