We used to object to the buying and selling of human beings. Some of us still do. But some of our fellow citizens think that they should be able to buy and sell children at will — and they want you to pay for it.
A bill in California redefines “infertility” as a status, which is a departure from its previous definition as a diagnosed medical condition. This seems like a small, obscure change on paper, but its implications are enormous. Under the new definition, a person can be considered legally infertile if he or she is unable to “reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention.” By this definition, we’re all infertile now.
The bill specifies that health care contracts cannot deny coverage for surrogacy, gestational carriers, or sperm or embryo donors. And, of course, the bill forbids providers from denying access to any of these medical technologies on a total of 15 counts, including age, marital status, gender (and gender expression and gender identity), national origin, sex, and sexual orientation.
The bill passed the Senate earlier this month and comes before the Assembly soon. If it passes, taxpayers will be forced to fund surrogacy for anyone and everyone who wants it.
LGBT Lobby Pushes for Inclusive Redefinition of Infertility
The push to change the definition of infertility from a medical condition to a status comes from LGBT activists. Since gay couples achieved “marriage equality” through the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the next frontier for gay rights is “fertility equality.”
This line of thought isn’t right-wing hysteria; liberals admit as much. Democrat Sen. Caroline Menjivar, one of the bill’s authors, said that this bill is “critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people.”
The organization Men Having Babies, a nonprofit sponsor of the bill, is an advocacy group that promotes surrogacy access for gay men. In their eyes, the steep out-of-pocket costs that accompany surrogacy are discriminatory and stand in the way of “fertility equality.”
This is exactly what Menjivar wants to change. If the bill passes, it “will ensure that queer couples no longer have to pay more out of pocket to start families than non-queer families,” she said.
Activists can crow about “fertility equality” all they want, but that so-called equality comes with steep human and financial costs. The bill would cost taxpayers an additional $330 million per year. California business and insurance groups have opposed the bill on fiscal grounds, but “they have been careful not to criticize its intent,” the Washington Free Beacon reports.
The intent, to be clear, is thoroughly insane. But setting aside arguments about the importance of two-parent households and the presence of both a mother and father, a glimpse of the grim reality of surrogacy should be cause to oppose the bill on intent alone.
Surrogacy Is Bad for Both Women and Children
In gestational surrogacy, the intended mother and father donate eggs and sperm for embryo creation, à la in vitro fertilization (IVF). A resulting embryo is implanted into the surrogate. But in each case of IVF or surrogacy, dozens of embryos — dozens of children — are created, each with a unique genetic code.
These embryos are just as alive as you or I, and though they are small, they possess equal human dignity. For each embryo that is successfully implanted, dozens are killed or frozen in a lab. More than one million embryos have been created through this process and abandoned in labs across the United States.
Surrogacy doesn’t get much better following implantation. Emma Waters, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, has pulled back the curtain on the surrogacy industry, exposing the true nature of a reproductive technology that relies on people as parts. She writes: “If a man purchases the egg, the womb, and the necessary paperwork, the line between a legitimate commercial surrogacy agreement, driven perhaps by unfortunate health circumstances, and outright baby selling dissolves.”
In an episode of the podcast Moment of Truth, Waters discussed the commercial surrogacy industry and its associated problems.
On a medical level, children experience fetal microchimerism, which is the persistence of the mother’s — or, in the case of surrogacy, the carrier’s — genetic material in the child after birth. Waters explained that surrogacy often involves high-risk pregnancies for the carrier and increased risk of cancer or autism due to the child’s genetic connection to three individuals: the biological mother, the biological father, and the surrogate. (RELATED: A Baby Has Three Genetic Parents)
Additionally, she explained, many surrogacy contracts include a “termination of life” clause, which specifies that the surrogate must have an abortion at the purchasing parents’ request — if triplets are conceived but the parents only wanted one child, for example. If the surrogate refuses abortion, she violates her contract, loses the payment, and the child belongs to the surrogate.
In her research, Waters has found that surrogates are typically lower-income women. Most are professional surrogates, who enter into $60,000–$80,000 contracts every few years as their main source of income.
Speaking specifically to the bill in California, she said, “The bill is outlining what adults have the right to, but nowhere does it address the needs of the child or safety concerns regarding the child either in IVF or in gestational surrogacy.”
Unlike adoption or foster care, which require extensive background checks and inquiries into the suitability of the adopting family’s home environment, commercial surrogacy in California asks no questions. The parents involved are not required to submit a background check or complete screenings for the health and safety of the child’s future home.
“One of the things that we’ve sadly joked about is that, in some instances, you actually have to do more work to adopt a pet from a shelter in California than to purchase a child,” Waters said on Moment of Truth.
Under California’s redefinition of infertility, this process would be available to literally anyone who wants a child — and any suggestion otherwise would be considered “discrimination.” This is the dark extension of the logic of the LGBTQ movement: if there is no legitimate distinction between man and woman, if anyone can marry whoever they want, then why wouldn’t anyone who wants a baby be able to demand one? Reality hasn’t been a limiting factor to the movement’s demands thus far, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see the crusade for “fertility equality” overlook biology.
Though the desire for children and family may be genuine, the commercialization of a child — and the loss of human life that inevitably accompanies the creation of that child — will never be a good thing.
Mary Frances Myler is a postgraduate fellow at the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government.
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