It exploits women. It uses children. Ban it.

Human surrogacy exploits human life.

It destroys human life.

It’s wrong.

I recently defended Martina Navratilova for saying what should be obviously correct: Surrogacy is wrong.

Navratilova was bullied into deleting her tweeted opinion, and her wife, a former Miss USSR who stars on The Real Housewives of Miami with the retired tennis pro, just this week made clear she disagrees:

Well, you know, Martina and I share a bed, but we don’t share a brain. And we not always agree on different views, but I believe in surrogacy.

Whatever does it mean to “believe in surrogacy”? Your belief system insists an adult is entitled to a child by any means necessary? The well-being of the child is not of supreme importance?

Single motherhood, Heather Has Two Mommies . . . no situation that is not a loving mother and father is ideal. It’s reality. And if Heather is a twelve-year-old from foster care, well, God bless them all. But to design a baby to live in an arrangement that is not as close to a natural family as possible? And simply because adults want what we want? Including our DNA and hair color and all kinds of preferences? This isn’t a culture of life and civilization of love. This isn’t being pro-family or even pro-natalist, as is all the craze. It’s selfishness. And it can mean ethical and other kinds of chaos.

A few items from recent days that emphasize the point that this all needs to be prohibited:

From TMZ (no pro-life rag): Child Sex Offender Uses Loophole to Become Father to Infant Through Surrogacy

A man revealed to be a convicted child sex offender is causing outrage because he’s got a baby boy at home . . . and we’ve learned there was nothing to block him from bringing the child into his family under Pennsylvania law — but now prosecutors say the best solution is changing the law through the legislature.

Here’s the deal . . . a Pennsylvania man named Brandon Keith Mitchell went viral this month over videos he shared on social media showing him and his husband kissing a baby boy and blowing out a candle every month through the child’s first birthday.

The couple got ripped by some right-wing activists — and then folks discovered Mitchell is a registered sex offender who was convicted of child sex abuse and possession of child pornography back in 2016.

Mitchell and his husband crowdsourced money a couple years ago to help them pay for a surrogacy . . . and they found a surrogate who they say gave birth to their baby boy, and they’ve since been documenting their “surrogacy journey.”

Folks on the internet are voicing outrage and concern, but we’ve learned there is nothing expressly prohibiting a registered sex offender from becoming a parent through surrogacy under Pennsylvania law.

Them Before Us: “Straight, Gay, or Single: Surrogacy Has a Victim. Surrogacy isn’t wrong because of who chooses it, it’s wrong because of what it does to children.”

Surrogacy is often marketed as a beautiful, selfless act, especially when it involves a straight couple struggling with infertility. A woman agrees to carry a child for them, and after nine months, hands the baby over in love. What could be more generous?

But behind the marketing lies an unregulated global industry where children are commodified, mothers are exploited, and the rights of the most vulnerable are routinely violated.

In Ukraine, even as bombs fell, surrogacy clinics continued operating — not to protect children, but to fulfill contracts. Newborns were stored in bunkers awaiting pickup by foreign clients, and investigations into Ukraine’s largest surrogacy agency raised serious concerns about child trafficking, as babies were sometimes handed to people with no biological relation to the at all.

In Cambodia, the practice was outlawed midstream. Dozens of pregnant surrogates were suddenly faced with an impossible choice: keep and raise the child they had been paid to surrender, or go to prison for 20 years. Many were forced to assume full responsibility for babies they had been contracted to give away — children now stranded without legal parents and at risk of becoming stateless.

And in the U.S., one high-end surrogacy arrangement ended in tragedy because of how it treated the child as conditional. Marty and Melinda Ranger hired a surrogate under contract in California, which included payment to forgo alcohol or drugs. When the surrogate posted a photo of what appeared to be a shot of tequila, the couple lost trust and — despite the baby being 20 weeks along — asked her to abort. She complied. “It was a very tough decision,” Marty later said, “but the trust had been broken.” The baby was discarded. They moved on to a new surrogate.

These aren’t rare mistakes. They reveal what surrogacy really is: a system that treats children as custom-ordered products and their first maternal relationship as disposable. Even in so-called “best-case” arrangements, a child is always separated from the woman who carried them. That loss is not accidental — it’s designed into the business model.

And it doesn’t matter whether the intended parents are gay or straight, infertile or busy professionals, rich or middle-class. Surrogacy violates the rights of children 100% of the time.

Los Angeles Times: The Mystery of the L.A. Mansion Filled With Surrogate Children

In early May, after a baby was hospitalized with possible signs of child abuse, police showed up at a nine-bedroom mansion in this Los Angeles suburb known for lavish homes and residents with roots in China. Inside, they found 15 more children, none older than 3, living under the care of nannies.

The investigative trail led them to six more children at other homes in the Los Angeles area. A Chinese-born man and woman living in the mansion said they were the parents of all 22 children. Birth certificates list them as such. What mystified police was that the children appeared to have been born all over the U.S., and in rapid succession.

Local authorities removed the children from the homes, placed them in foster care, and called in the FBI.

The mansion, it turned out, was listed as the headquarters of Mark Surrogacy, which had arranged many of the children’s births and was managed by Silvia Zhang, the woman living there. Zhang said she was the mother of all the children.

The surrogates who carried some of the children said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that Zhang deceived them about the family she was trying to have, and that they had spoken with federal agents in recent weeks. The investigation is focusing, they were told, on whether the couple was selling babies whose births the agency had arranged.

Zhang denied that in an interview with the Journal, saying that she and a man she described as her husband just wanted to have as many children as they could. “We never sell our babies,” she said. “We take care of them very well.”

Vanity McGoveran, who gave birth to a baby girl for Mark Surrogacy in March, said she was shocked to learn that Zhang had so many children. Now, she said, she is wondering whether Zhang “has something that she doesn’t want people to know.”

The website of the company, Mark Surrogacy, said it is in the business of connecting surrogates with American and international couples who need them. The surrogates, who live across the U.S. and were paid tens of thousands of dollars each, said Zhang and people working with the agency recruited them on Facebook, telling them they would be carrying children for a Chinese couple in Los Angeles struggling with infertility.

The probe is raising alarm in the commercial surrogacy industry, a fast-growing and multibillion-dollar market that connects aspiring parents with women willing to bear children for them. Surrogacy professionals worry that the couple’s ties to China and the large number of children they had through surrogacy could prompt heightened scrutiny on what is now a lightly regulated industry. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

The industry has been fueled in recent years by money from China, where surrogacy is illegal. In the U.S., one-third of intended parents were from other countries between 2014 and 2020, and 41% of those were Chinese nationals, according to researchers at Emory University. Some U.S. surrogacy agencies marketing their services to Chinese parents explicitly tout American citizenship for the newborns as a benefit.

It’s unclear whether the Arcadia mansion had any direct ties to China. Among the many mysteries surrounding the couple are how many children they had in total, why a surrogacy business was operating out of their home and whether that business had any outside clients. Over the course of numerous conversations in English and Mandarin, Zhang either declined to respond or gave conflicting answers to those and other questions.

Also, for the record:

Jennifer Lahl and others have long been doing important work over the years debunking the image of surrogacy as happy hopefulness that is of no harm to anyone. It exploits women. It uses children.

Ban it.