The baby-buying business is booming.

Powered in part by affluent gay male couples, for a few hundred thousand dollars they can purchase eggs from a poor woman, pay for a lab-arranged conception, and then "buy" another poor woman to carry the baby through surrogacy — right up until the doctor rips newborn Junior away from her hands and gives him to his two new daddies.

The baby-buyers are calling all the shots here. The women who are poor enough to submit to this have no virtually no voice.

This is evil for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that buying a baby is human trafficking. (And let’s not forget that not every baby-buyer wants to raise a child. Some want to resell. Human trafficking of human trafficking.)

Since we just celebrated Mother’s Day, we need to spotlight this abhorrent practice and how it shapes our view of mothers.

Here's the truth: It teaches us that moms aren't really needed. It teaches us that a woman in a child’s life brings nothing special that two men can’t replicate. The media eagerly publishes stories about gay dads and how they can “bond just as well” with children as the real mother who’s been paid and sent away.

So, ladies: Your contribution as a mother isn't special. Women and men aren’t really that different. You goofy Christians and your “God created two genders” nonsense has been disproved! When it comes to children, we can mix and match parents at will. We just don’t need moms.

This is what the progressive, liberal culture wants us to believe about mothers.

Oops, hold on a second

Well, we might still need women for one thing. Not their feminine nature or anything they bring to the table as a creature different from a man. No, all we need from women are their eggs.

The franken-scientists haven’t yet figured out how to create their own, so for now, we need to use women for their ovaries.

After all, what could be better than flooding the female body with a bunch of hormones in order to harvest their eggs in a procedure that nobody has ever described as pleasant? Oh, and those additional hormones? Yeah, they're implicated in the rise of certain cancers for women undergoing this process.

As Nadya Williams says in her excellent article “The Babies Money Can Buy,” this procedure is “only the latest cost our society is willing to exact from women to go against their biology in order to play the fertility game (as it becomes in the process) by men’s rules. ... Egg freezing, after all, is a lucrative business, largely fueled by women trying to extend their childbearing years. But it is also fueled by men who decide to have children without, well, ever marrying a woman.”

Yes, the “we find women icky” crowd are happy to find a woman who can’t quite make ends meet and buy parts of her to make their new mom-less child.

How is this acceptable?

Oops, just one more second

Because science hasn’t yet perfected a viable alternative womb option, this practice tells women: We need to keep you around for now, but just as an incubator for our lab-made child. Sound good?

Baby-buyers prey on women in desperate financial straits with this generous offer: You can have all the discomforts of pregnancy and all the pain of childbirth, but no baby! Your hormones will be totally wacky afterward, and you’ll probably feel quite sad to lose the little person who grew inside of you.

In fact, as Williams explains:

There are additional emotional costs that are involved in carrying a child for nine months. Pregnancy is the ultimate bonding process for mothers with the baby in utero. The surrogate’s body, hormones, emotions — all these combine to treat the baby as her own, because that is how pregnancy is naturally designed to work.

Yes, the original Designer got it right the first time, and women — and their babies — are the ones who pay this soul-destroying price of separation from the little human they grew. You’ve probably read of cases where surrogates went to court to get a baby back, but savvy baby-buyers make sure their contracts are airtight. Even in cases where they decide they don’t want the baby and want it aborted.

After a woman bids a permanent farewell to the child she carried, maybe she'll receive the extra bonus of recovering from surgery, since some buyers prefer their surrogates to have a C-section. Never mind that the procedure is far riskier, requires a longer recovery, and has been known to cause a lifetime of complications.

The baby-buyers are calling all the shots here. The women who are poor enough to submit to this have virtually no voice.

Again. How is this acceptable?

Now, I understand that not every surrogate is in these circumstances, but we must grapple with the facts as we have them — and they don't paint a pretty picture.

Women and children, last not first

Remember when our culture encouraged men to put women and children first? Yeah, not so anymore. Now, we can just erase women completely.

Case in point: Colton Underwood, who starred on the reality show “The Bachelor” before coming out as gay. He and his now-husband recently bought eggs and a womb to create a motherless baby, then posed in the hospital with the child shortly after taking him from his mother. Afterward, they claimed their child has no mother at all.

Both the woman who carried the baby and the egg donor — completely erased.

Most surrogacy arrangements like this are highly questionable ethically. How did we get to the place where two rich guys can buy or rent a woman’s body parts?

Of course, it's objectionable for anyone to do it. But the fact that our culture is now celebrating two men purposefully creating a motherless child is especially disgusting. It smacks of misogyny, and it hurts the child who was created to be mothered — not just fathered.

How is the child hurt? Because that Designer I mentioned created these little ones to be nurtured on the outside by the person who carried them inside. We know about mother-child bonding: It’s emotional and physical.

Before birth in any pregnancy (including surrogacy), the child’s genetic material crosses through the placenta and circulates in the mother’s blood, according to Dr. Kristin Collier, a bioethicist. The child literally becomes part of the mother. How cruel and wrong for the child to be taken from her. Countless studies have demonstrated other ways in which the maternal-child bond is irreplaceable for a child’s long-term health.

Yes, other situations rupture the maternal-child bond. But this situation is unique because the baby was created expressly to be taken away from its mother, expressly to live a life with no mother. That makes it even worse.

It is ironic that the progressive left embraced the book and TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale" as a rhetorical tool, darkly warning how President Trump or Republicans or pro-lifers want to enslave women and force them into bearing children.

Those "warnings" come from one side of the same mouths that celebrate two gay daddies making not one but two new forever-motherless babies.

Do they not see how we are inching toward a similar dystopian outcome? A woman-rejecting, woman-disrespecting, woman-using, woman-abusing outcome? Do they not see that even in that show, the birth mothers are devastated when their babies — who are products of rape — are taken from them?

And we must remember the children who will never have a mom in their lives. It's a tragic loss for them, just like it is when a young mother dies or some other situation removes a mother from her children.

But at least those kids know who their mother is and sometimes will get a new mom in their lives. Until recently, humans have universally recognized and honored this crucial fact: Children need a mother. And not just daughters, by the way, though it’s sad to think about a girl growing up without her mother.

Yes, our dysfunctional culture is also rewriting the importance of fathers, and two women should not create babies who will never see or know their father. But surrogate fathers are not the same because a man’s contribution to a lab-conception process is much — shall we say — quicker and simpler.

No, this denigration of the role of a mother hits women and children the hardest.

Think about this the next time you see two daddies showing off their new designer baby on social media, which invariably generates likes and positive comments from those who fail to think deeply about this and from those who don’t understand the flawed nature of the research on same-sex parenting.

That research, for the record, is often conducted using participants recruited from LGBTQ advocacy organizations, and it mostly focuses on parental perception, not actual outcomes for children.

Them Before Us, an organization devoted to putting children’s needs before adult “wants” (including the need for a mother and a father), is a great resource for learning more about how to protect motherhood, fatherhood, and children.

There’s never been more of a direct attack on motherhood.

It's not the news we want to discuss around Mother’s Day, but when mothers are deemed unnecessary, that’s nothing to celebrate.