How the Law Allowed a Convicted Child Sex Offender To Father a Surrogate Baby

A former Pennsylvania high school teacher who pleaded guilty to felony child pornography charges and corruption of a minor is now a legal parent to an infant boy. The man, who sent more than 12,000 sexually explicit messages to a 16-year-old male student, raised money toward the cost on GoFundMe.In Pennsylvania, as in most states, no law stood in his way.The case of Brandon Keith Riley-Mitchell, a Tier 1 registered sex offender in York County, Pennsylvania, sparked a national firestorm last summer after videos of him and his husband, Logan Riley, celebrating their son Atticus’s first birthday circulated on social media and garnered more than 11 million views on X.What began as viral outrage quickly became something harder to dismiss: a window into a structural gap in American family law so wide that a man barred by statute from adopting or fostering a child can still walk out of a reproductive clinic as a legal parent.And as the York County district attorney, Tim Barker, made plain in a public statement, there is nothing prosecutors can do about it.“Pennsylvania law currently does not, in and of itself, prohibit a registered sex offender from becoming a parent through surrogacy,” he said, adding that his office had no legal basis to act. He described the situation as “an issue ripe for review and remedy by our Pennsylvania Legislature.”So how, in a country that mandates criminal background checks for Little League coaches, did a convicted child sex offender become a legal father, and what, if anything, can be done to stop the next one?The convictionMr. Riley-Mitchell was 30 years old and teaching chemistry at Downingtown West High School when Chester County authorities charged him in 2016 with unlawful contact with a minor, sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography, endangering the welfare of children, and corruption of minors. The conduct involved thousands of sexually explicit messages and nude images sent to a 16-year-old male student over more than a year.Mr. Riley-Mitchell pleaded guilty, served roughly three months in jail, was sentenced to probation, was ordered to have no unsupervised contact with minors, and was placed on Pennsylvania’s Megan’s Law registry as a Tier 1 registrant. He completed his probation in 2021.While his conviction barred him from adopting or fostering a child under Pennsylvania law, it did not bar him from becoming a parent through surrogacy because Pennsylvania has no law addressing that.After he married Mr. Riley — a second-grade teacher in Maryland — the couple launched a GoFundMe campaign in 2020, raising over $2,000 toward surrogacy costs, and in 2023 posted an update saying they had found a surrogate. Mr. Riley wrote on the since-deleted page that the couple created four embryos through an anonymous egg donor program and found a surrogate through a family friend.“Our surrogate went through extensive medical and social worker evaluations to be approved for surrogacy,” the post noted. Pennsylvania law required no equivalent scrutiny of the intended parents. Their son was born in 2024.Mr. Riley-Mitchell’s former attorney, Peter Kratsa, maintained that his client “did nothing illegal or unethical in becoming a surrogate parent” and had served his sentence without incident.The loopholeThe mechanics that enabled this are not unique to Pennsylvania. They are endemic to how surrogacy is legally structured across most of the country.Adoption law in the United States is built around one central question: What is in the best interest of the child? That framework mandates criminal background checks, child abuse clearances, home studies, and judicial review before a court transfers parental rights, and it explicitly bars individuals with certain prior offenses from becoming adoptive or foster parents. Surrogacy operates on an entirely different legal premise.It is governed by contract law, not by child welfare statutes. Most states issue pre-birth parentage orders designating the intended parents as the child’s legal parents at the moment of birth, with courts examining the contract for compliance rather than conducting any fitness inquiry.“This gap or difference in laws reflects how surrogacy has been legally framed,” the executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, Kallie Fell, tells The New York Sun.“Adoption law was developed to protect children that had already been born or conceived, vulnerable children in need of state oversight. By contrast, surrogacy has been treated as a form of private reproductive arrangement. It has never been about child welfare, but instead about adult desires.”Ms. Fell argues the result is a two-tier system.“The law is privileging adult intent and contractual rights over the consistent application of child protection,” she says.A University of Minnesota Law School professor, June Carbone, tells the Sun that the gap stems from how parentage is legally defined. Because a biological father is recognized as a parent purely based on genetic connection, with no screening required, that same logic, by extension, has applied to intended parents in surrogacy arrangements.“A person who is recognized as a parent by virtue of his genetic connection to a child does not go through any child welfare screenings to become a parent, and thus neither do those who arrange to have a child by use of surrogacy,” Ms. Carbone explains.The Pennsylvania Family Council, which has been tracking the legislative response to the case, points to a foundational design problem: Surrogacy law in most states developed not around child welfare but around adult intent, often modeled on the Uniform Parentage Act, which contains no language requiring background checks, home studies, or fitness review.“Adoption views the child as the client,” a person affiliated with the organization, speaking to the Sun on background, explains. “Surrogacy views the commissioning parents as the client.”Louisiana is the only state whose surrogacy statute restricts who may become an intended parent, limiting enforceable agreements to married heterosexual couples who provided both the egg and the sperm for the child, though even that falls short of a direct prohibition on sex offenders.No state requires, by law, intended parents to undergo background checks, home studies, or fitness checks. Surrogacy agencies sometimes conduct their own voluntary screenings, but those can be easily circumvented through private arrangements — exactly the route Mr. Riley-Mitchell and his partner took.The surrogate’s partner, Theodore Martinovich, told Newsweek that Mr. Riley-Mitchell had mentioned “something in my past” before the arrangement was finalized, but offered no details.“I didn’t know the story, and I didn’t care to dig into it,” Mr. Martinovich said.Under Pennsylvania law, he had no right to a full criminal disclosure.A legislative race to close the gapThe political response has been swift and, unusually, bipartisan. In Pennsylvania, State Representative Aaron Bernstine announced legislation requiring background checks and child abuse clearances for all intended parents before a pre-birth parentage order can be issued, and explicitly prohibiting registered sex offenders from obtaining legal parentage through surrogacy.A state senator, Doug Mastriano, separately circulated a co-sponsorship memo for broader legislation that would extend those requirements to out-of-state gestational carriers and adult household members.At the federal level, Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida introduced the No Surrogacy for Sex Offenders Act in November 2025, which would impose penalties of up to 18 years in prison for registered sex offenders who use interstate or foreign commerce to enter surrogacy arrangements as intended parents.In February 2026, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced the companion Protecting Children in Surrogacy Act, which carries criminal penalties of up to 10 years and explicitly bars federal courts from enforcing any surrogacy contract where an intended parent is a registered sex offender. Both bills are before the House Judiciary Committee.In Florida, the legislature passed House Bill 905 in March 2026, primarily aimed at restricting foreign nationals’ involvement in surrogacy, while Senate Bill 1680, which would mandate level 2 background investigations for surrogacy participants, was introduced in January 2026 but did not receive a committee hearing.Ms. Carbone stresses that the constitutional terrain on a federal ban is complicated.“The constitutional issue is the right to procreate,” she says. “A sex offender who is not incarcerated should ordinarily have the same right as any other person to have a child.”She argues that a more targeted approach would be more durable.“I would propose that surrogacy agencies be required to do a background check on intended parents that, at the very least, determines whether they have a record of convictions for offenses such as sexual abuse of minors,” Ms. Carbone says.Ms. Fell, however, argues that surrogacy should be outlawed altogether.“There is no way to close this loophole while continuing to permit surrogacy fully. Surrogacy still leaves children in a separate legal category with fewer protections than those in adoption or foster care,” she says.“The choice for lawmakers is not simply how to ‘patch’ the system, but whether to continue maintaining a system that, by design, treats children differently depending on how they were brought into the world and treats those at the center of contract law as products to purchase.”

How the Law Allowed a Convicted Child Sex Offender To Father a Surrogate Baby

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