In any other context, the buying and selling of children would be rightly reviled. Yet when it comes to commercial surrogacy, many turn a blind eye.

To be clear, babies are certainly worth celebrating — especially in an increasingly selfish society that depicts parenthood as a form of punishment. But not all methods of conception are created equal.

With gestational surrogacy, babies created in labs are implanted into the wombs of women who are of no relation to them. Nine months later, the child gets ripped from the arms of the person who has become their entire world and sent home with strangers — people with whom they may share DNA but nothing more. (RELATED: Surrogacy Scandal Puts 21 Children and Infants in Danger)

Traditional surrogacy is even more complicated in that the woman carrying the child is also its biological mother. The ethical and legal concerns with these arrangements are manifold. Yet those who dare to point them out often get viciously attacked for their honesty. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M Ep. 109: Another Actress Is Glamorizing Surrogacy)

Take Martina Navratilova, for example. The retired champion professional tennis player recently criticized surrogacy in an X post that caught significant backlash.

“Surrogacy is just wrong. Sometimes you can’t have it all,” Navratilova wrote in a July 13 post, since deleted.

Martina Navratilova with a message regarding surrogacy ???? #RHOM pic.twitter.com/g7LNlGCCHb

— The Real Housewives Polls (@TheRHPolls) July 13, 2025

She made those comments in response to an article she shared concerning the health and exploitation risks faced by young egg donors.

Right on cue, an angry mob flocked to the comments to hurl insults and call the 68-year-old adoptive mother of two a hypocrite.

Navratilova and her wife, Julia Lemigova, adopted two boys last year in a move that, to be fair, begs similar scrutiny. Studies have shown that children fare best when raised by their married mother and father and worst when deprived of a father.

Still, at least with adoption, a child is not created with the explicit intention of depriving it of its birth mother, an act for which the long-term psychological consequences remain largely unknown. Until recently, few people paid any mind to such concerns.

Enter Brandon Keith Riley-Mitchell of Pennsylvania.

A video of Riley-Mitchell and his husband celebrating the first birthday of their surrogate-carried son, Atticus, sparked outrage late last month as social media users discovered Riley-Mitchell’s status as a convicted child sex offender.

His crimes: sexual abuse of a minor and possession of child pornography.

Reduxx reports that Riley-Mitchell pleaded guilty after investigators found he had solicited a 16-year-old boy for nude photographs. The former high school chemistry teacher reportedly sent his student victim around 20 such pictures of himself and had hundreds of sexually explicit videos of the boy on his laptop.

One might wonder how a convicted child abuser managed to gain custody of another child.

As it turns out, Pennsylvania allows it.

Although state law forbids child sex offenders from obtaining children through adoption or foster care, no such law exists concerning surrogacy. Pennsylvania also allows prospective surrogate parents to obtain a pre-birth parentage order establishing them as the child’s legal parents from the moment of birth, sidestepping background checks and other safeguards.

Thanks to those loopholes — which lawmakers are now rushing to close — a child predator has full access to a defenseless infant.

BREAKING – It’s been revealed a gay couple who crowdfunded their surrogacy journey now has custody of a baby boy, despite one partner Brandon Keith Riley Mitchell being a convicted child sex offender, using a Pennsylvania surrogacy loophole that bypasses state adoption… pic.twitter.com/XkSRSNnpTs

— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) July 28, 2025

Meanwhile, a Southern California couple with 21 children, mostly obtained through surrogacy, were arrested in May for suspected felony child endangerment and neglect after a local hospital notified police that their baby was treated for head injuries.

Security footage from the home of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan allegedly showed a nanny violently shaking and hitting the 2-month-old infant, causing loss of consciousness. Other recordings reportedly exist that show instances of physical and emotional abuse by at least six nannies.

Police suspect a surrogacy scam, as the surrogate mothers allegedly “matched” with Zhang and Xuan through an agency registered to the couple’s home address. Some of the women have also claimed the couple tricked them into surrogacy arrangements by misrepresenting how many children they had.

The couple’s intentions remain unclear, but for Kallie Fell, executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, human trafficking comes to mind.

“Everyone’s spidey senses should go up,” Fell told the New York Post. “The danger of the fertility industry is that it is unregulated. Anyone can open an agency. The problem is way bigger than this small story.”

Of course, lawmakers can try to remedy that with legislation. But even if they were to address surrogacy’s most pressing dangers, they would only be scratching the surface of the myriad issues the practice raises.

Contentious custody battles, for instance, can result in complex familial arrangements, as the nation first witnessed in the famous 1986 case of Baby M.

Exploitation is another concern. A woman in financial straits may be vulnerable to an arrangement that treats her as nothing more than a rented womb and the baby she births as a commodity.

When IVF is involved, as is usually the case, there are additional ethical questions to consider. As multiple embryos are created in one cycle, there are often extras that end up being discarded like trash or spending years in a frozen limbo. For those who believe all human life is precious, this presents a dilemma.

Lastly, for Christians, there is the added question of whether creating children outside of God’s prescribed method of procreation is moral. This web of complex concerns raises an important, though admittedly controversial, question: Do the benefits of surrogacy outweigh its many legal and ethical risks?

Maybe it’s time we had that difficult conversation.

Samantha Flom is a senior investigative researcher for Restoration News, specializing in pro-life reporting.