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Washington state is set to legalize commercial surrogacy, a move children's rights advocates say amounts to the selling of babies, bases the definition of a parent on "intent," and opens avenues for child abuse and other horrors. Just before 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, the Washington state House of Representatives passed the "Uniform Parentage Act," along party lines with every Democrat in favor and every Republican opposed. The bill had previously passed the state Senate with total Democratic support and three Republicans. The state's Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, is expected to sign the legislation. "For House Republicans, this bill was a...

France on Wednesday kicked off a marathon round of talks designed to inform the country’s legislation on bioethics, with the government hoping to avoid a repeat of the poisonous debate that hijacked the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The six-month consultation, involving scientists, medical practitioners and legal experts from across France, will lead to a revised bioethics law, slated for later this year. It will touch on a broad range of subjects, from legalizing euthanasia to the development of artificial intelligence. Some of the topics up for discussion represent a political minefield in France, and President Emmanuel Macron will be keen...

A foreign same-sex couple battling a local Thai surrogate for custody over their infant daughter said Wednesday their lives had been "destroyed" by the 14-month legal war that has prevented their family from returning home. Manuel Valero, from Spain, and his American husband Gordon Lake, both 41, were blocked from leaving Thailand with their daughter Carmen after the surrogate refused to sign necessary paperwork following the birth last January.

A California surrogate mother filed a lawsuit Monday to protect one of her unborn triplets from being aborted by the biological father. The New York Post reports that the babies’ biological father is demanding that one of the triplets be aborted because he only wants two of the children. The unnamed Georgia man threatened to not pay surrogate Melissa Cook if she refused to abort one of the babies.Despite the pressure, Cook refused to abort the third triplet. She was 17-weeks pregnant in November when her story first gained national media attention."They are human beings. I bonded with these kids....

I’m sure you’ve seen them in the media: attractive, well-off, smiling parents holding adorable infants created by third-party reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Of course, the narrative goes, this development is a win-win for all. Who could object to children being created for those who through either infertility or biological sex are unable to reproduce? But this picture hides the highly profitable fertility industry’s dirty secrets. It ignores what is required to create these children: exploitation, health endangerment, and the commodification of human life. An honest look at the facts and circumstances surrounding third-party reproduction and ART should...

A gay couple from the United States said on Wednesday their lives were being "destroyed" after a Thai surrogate mother refused to sign papers allowing them to take their baby out of Thailand. The controversy is the latest over surrogacy in Thailand after several cases last year including accusations that an Australian couple abandoned their Down Syndrome baby with his birth mother, taking only his healthy twin sister back to Australia. In the latest case, Gordon Allan Lake and his Spanish husband, Manuel Valero, say Thai surrogate Patidta Kusolsang, who is not the baby's biological mother, decided she wanted to...

Fashion designers Domenico Dolce, right, and Stefano Gabbana are facing criticism after Dolce's comments about "synthetic babies" drew the ire of many and prompted Elton John to call for a boycott of their designs. Fashion designers Domenico Dolce, right, and Stefano Gabbana are facing criticism after Dolce's comments about "synthetic babies" drew the ire of many and prompted Elton John to call for a boycott of their designs. By The Rev. Dwight Longenecker Italian fashion designers Dolce&Gabbana waded into a gay rights hurricane last week by criticizing same sex marriage and “designer babies.” The storm started when Stefano Gabbana...

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently announced it will review a November decision by the Sixth Circuit Court—which represents Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee—that upheld marriage as between a man and a woman. Will the Supreme Court side with the two judges in the majority, or with the one dissenting judge? The majority ruling dismisses any possibility of a constitutional right to gay marriage, while the dissent focuses on an entirely different question of whether gay parents are as good as straight ones. The latter controversy is something that the majority decision explicitly refused to weigh in on, so...

A year ago The View co-host Sherri Shepherd announced she and her husband Lamar Sally were going to have a baby using a surrogate. The procedure was to use Shepherd’s eggs and the womb of a stranger. Shepherd said at the time that she had found “a drama-free uterus” and that “we’re putting in our eggs and Sal’s sperm and we’ll let you know how it progresses.” It turns out not to have progressed very well either for a baby or for the marriage. TMZ reported this week that Shepherd’s eggs and Sally’s sperm did not work and that she...

“The View” host Sheri Shepherd reportedly wants “nothing to do” with her unborn child now that her marriage has folded. Shepherd reportedly used IVF to conceive a child with her husband Lamar Sally but now is not interested in caring for the baby, who is being carried by a surrogate mother.This story demonstrates one of the problems with in-vitro fertilization. The first problem for the pro-life movement is that the surrogate mother or the egg donor could decide they no longer want to carry the pregnancy to term and decide to terminate the unborn child’s life in an abortion.But the...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has once again vetoed a bill that would set up a legal framework for surrogacy births in the state, saying the legislation "still raises concerns for many in the pro-life community." "Despite the good intentions and hard efforts of the author, this legislation still raises concerns for many in the pro-life community," Jindal wrote in his veto message Saturday. "Thus, I cannot in good conscience, sign this bill." Contracts governing surrogacy are not enforceable in the state's courts, but the legislation would allow couples and a woman to enter into a contractual surrogacy birth relationship. The...

On April 1, the Louisiana House passed HB 187, a bill creating a judicial framework that makes gestational surrogacy enforceable. The debate over the bill in Louisiana is only one example of the legislative battles taking place across the United States over the issue of surrogacy. Since the controversial Baby M surrogacy case that gripped the nation in 1988, there has been a patchwork of state laws, which criminalize the practice in Michigan and Washington, D.C., for example, while leaving it unregulated in states including California, which has a booming reproductive-tourism enterprise. This wide-ranging and often confusing mix of surrogacy...

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,...

Recently I watched the documentary Breeders, which I recommend to everyone – gay and straight, liberal and conservative.  The documentary, produced by Jennifer Lahl at the Center for Bioethics and Culture, exposes the ethical dangers posed by the practice known as “surrogacy.” Surrogacy is the use of a contract, by which a woman agrees to carry a gestating child in her womb for another party (usually an infertile heterosexual couple or a gay male couple), and also agrees to abandon the child to the couple who has engaged her services.Compensated surrogacy means that the carrier is paid to rent out...

Catholic teaching on surrogacy is receiving reinforcement from current research. Mothers have long believed, cultures have long taught, and research has repeatedly confirmed that an emotional network links pregnant moms to their babies. If mom is happy, the preborn baby is content. When mom is anxious, the prenate shows signs of stress. What’s more, post-birth, this bio-emotional nexus—the gestational link—continues to yoke mothers to their offspring throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It’s important, then, to investigate what happens when an enterprise like surrogacy sunders the gestational link. For the first time, a 2013 study suggests surrogate children experience greater adjustment...

The dominant secular culture portrays the world of In vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogate pregnancies as a great advance for mankind, even as it generates a stream of horror stories beyond the imagination of Greek tragedians.Not a week passes, it seems, without a new disturbing permutation to this culture. “Surrogate offered $10,000 to abort baby,” reported CNN this week.So now surrogates are offered money not just to carry children but to abort them. A more complete headline on CNN’s story would have been: “Surrogate offered $10,000 to abort baby diagnosed as disabled.” Untroubled by eugenic abortion, CNN doesn’t even bother...

Biological colonialism is on the rise. Rich couples from western nations hiring poor Indian women to be surrogates. It seems like a win-win. The infertile couple gets the child they so desperately want on the cheap and the surrogates make more money than they can hope to make in such a short time. But look closer and you find a disturbing western attitude that the poor, dark, and different women are not people, but vessels in which to grow the next generation; natural resources to be exploited to continue on the western blood line.

[1]Meet Cathleen: a twenty-year-old from New Brunswick, Canada, who served as a surrogate mother of twins for an infertile British couple. Twenty-seven weeks into the pregnancy, Cathleen was informed–via text message–that the couple was divorcing and would no longer need the children she had been carrying for them. Then there’s Carrie: a mom of four from Colorado who agreed to carry a child for an Austrian couple who had spent twenty years unsuccessfully trying to conceive. After the child was born and they returned home, Carrie was hit with medical fees of $217,000. The Austrian couple paid none of it,...

August 2, 2012 (Mercatornet.com) - A TV show called The New Normal will have its premiere on NBC in the US soon. It’s about a gay couple and the single mother they engage to have their baby. “She’s just like an easy-bake oven except with no legal rights to the cupcake,” the surrogate-mother broker tells Bryan and David. This is a hard-nosed description of the woman’s role in gay marriage and child-rearing, but it sums it up accurately. In heterosexual relationships, the birth rate rises when couples are married. One would expect similar dynamics to apply to same-sex couples. For...

The 14-week-old twins a pregnant Laurie Thompson is carrying don’t belong to her. Conceived with donor eggs, they are the children of a same-sex couple from Spain who turned to Thompson because paid surrogacy is illegal in their country. In the past five years, would-be parents from as far as Istanbul and Uruguay have turned to healthy, young American mothers to serve as surrogates. The babies are born U.S. citizens, but surrogacy agency officials say that's not a primary motivation for the parents, who typically come from European and Latin American countries where surrogacy is illegal or socially unacceptable. The...