Punch The Monkey Reminds Us That Babies Need Their Moms

Every once in a while, an animal captures the hearts and cameras of people all over the world.

There was Harambe, whose death nearly a decade ago sparked an ongoing debate about the value placed on human and animal lives, and the Washington D.C. giant pandas, whose exit and reappearance fueled headlines for literal years. More recently, the creatures creating conversations were Moo Deng, a baby pygmy hippopotamus at a Thailand zoo, and later Pesto the Penguin, a resident at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium in Australia.

The latest manifestation of this animal phenomenon is primate Punch, a baby Japanese macaque whose mother abandoned him shortly after his birth in July 2024. In an effort to lessen the blow of rejection for Punch, the zookeepers at Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan offered the monkey a stuffed orangutan as consolation.

Clips of Punch clutching the plush in stressful and lonely moments tugged at the heartstrings of the internet. When the adult monkeys in Punch’s enclosure tried to put him in his place, scolding that the zoo insists is normal and necessary for the infant monkey’s development, in-person onlookers and online viewers everywhere demanded justice for their parasocial baby.

Worries that Punch would never find his place in the pack mounted, but the keyboard warriors and the publications capitalizing on Punch’s moment let out a collective sigh of relief last week when the monkey was seen snuggling up to a new “friend.”

Why are people so invested in the the other monkeys’ embrace of Punch? Well for one, everyone knows that a stuffed animal is a sad and frankly unsuitable substitute for Punch’s mother and his long-term socialization.

Therein lies the irony of Punch’s situation and rise to fame. At the end of the day, a baby monkey such as Punch is an animal designed to adapt and overcome despite less-than-ideal circumstances. What happens when humans are subjected to similar maternal separation — especially maternal deprivation by design?

We see this demonstrated in assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy, where children are commissioned for creation, sometimes using purchased sperm and eggs, and gestated in another woman’s womb. The moment these babies are born, they are taken from the only mother they’ve known, the one who has nurtured them for nine months, and handed to virtual strangers.

This is a form of rejection, much like Punch suffered. Except in this case, the familial loss experienced by the child is deliberate. It’s one thing for a child to suffer a loss and find a remedy in a child-centered solution like adoption. It’s another for the institution itself, such as in third-party reproduction, to be the cause of that loss. Even if a surrogate willingly hands a baby over and everything appears legally airtight, that child will still be the product of an arrangement that considered his rights and needs last.

This immediate separation is known to cause irrevocable physical, emotional, and mental harm to the infants, the surrogate mothers, and the legal parents of the children. Additionally, kids whose womb-made attachment bonds are severed in early childhood are more likely to suffer stresses that result in trauma and even some physical ailments.

The compassion for children created in these multi-billion-dollar surrogacy industry arrangements, however, is nowhere near the sympathy Punch received. In fact, the industry is cheered — even by people who claim to be conservatives.

Despite the fact that surrogacy makes procreation and pregnancy transactional, creates morally and ethically reprehensible quandaries, hurts women and babies, has a strong overlap with human trafficking, and reeks of corruption, the manufacture of motherless children continues and has even grown in popularity in recent years.

A motherless monkey is certainly a tragedy. Yet the pain Punch suffers daily due to nature taking its course does not compare to the pain hundreds of babies born to surrogate mothers suffer each year due to the unjust prioritization of adults’ needs over children’s rights. Motherhood simply cannot be replicated by an IKEA stuffed animal or surrogacy.

Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.