I keep insisting that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as a one-off thing, as somehow separate from the broader revolutionary sexual culture that has come into existence. For example, this from today’s NYT:

The gray-haired entourages, it turns out, are the parents, tagging along to lend support — emotional and often financial — as their daughters turn to the fledgling field of egg freezing to improve their chances of having children later on, when they are ready to start a family.

The technology to freeze a woman’s delicate eggs to be used later, when the eggs being released by her ovaries may no longer be viable, has improved sharply over the past decade. There currently is no single source of data on the number of women who are choosing to freeze their eggs, but doctors in the United States say the practice is slowly growing.

The procedure remains expensive, generally costing between $8,000 and $18,000. And because it offers no guarantees and is still considered experimental by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a professional association, it can seem to some like an extravagant gamble.

But it is a gamble that many would-be grandparents are willing to take with their daughters, even if it means navigating a potentially uncomfortable conversation.

A culture that has come to see the creation of new life as a consumer phenomenon — that is, as something only bounded by desire and preference — is not a culture that can preserve traditional marriage. Things are inextricably connected.