General Assembly weighing regulation of surrogacy’s ‘Wild West’

Catholic Review ^ | 3/26/14 | Maria Wiering

[Welchie25]

Parent and child rights, abortion, and baby-selling are among issues coloring the debate among Maryland legislators over a gestational surrogacy bill passed by the Senate March 20 and awaiting action by the House Rules Committee.

The Maryland Catholic Conference supports the Maryland Collaborative Reproduction Act (S.B. 208) as amended, in order to protect the parties involved – intended parents, surrogate mothers and the children surrogacy arrangements produce.

As the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic bishops, the MCC does not support surrogacy, and in past years has simply opposed similar legislation.

“We would prefer a ban,” said Andrea Garvey, the MCC’s associate director for respect for life. “Right now that is not politically feasible, so we’ve tried to raise our concerns and found that many people agreed with us, that surrogacy, at minimum, has to be highly regulated.”

Garvey testified on the bill in both the Senate and House of Delegates Jan. 30.

There are no federal laws on surrogacy, and state laws range broadly. Maryland has no surrogacy laws, and does not regulate commercial surrogacy, or a pregnancy initiated through in vitro fertilization with the intention that the child will be raised by someone other than the gestating mother. The “intended parents” may pay the surrogate mother in excess of her medical expenses.

The bill passed by the Senate has been amended to include some measures the MCC advocated for: requiring a contract between the surrogate and intended parents to be drafted and receive judiciary review before the pregnancy, protecting the surrogate mother from coercion to abort, and requiring surrogacy brokers to be licensed by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Without the amendments, the bill seeks to “institutionalize the wild, wild West” of Maryland’s surrogacy landscape to favor the intended parents, Garvey said.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Maryland “Freak State” PING!