Rising Opposition to Surrogacy Industry Creates Odd Coalition of Left, Right and Everyone in Between

An Alaska nurse who carried another couple’s baby to term against their wishes was sued for more than $100,000 for refusing an abortion, and was then barred by a Dallas judge from seeing the child she delivered. It might sound like a case built for cable news; it is also, according to the lawyers who write surrogacy contracts for a living, entirely ordinary.The suit against McKenna West “is not an outlier. Surrogacy contracts routinely include clauses like this giving intending parents the right to seek an abortion. But they are unenforceable,” a professor of law at Florida International University College of Law, Cyra Choudhury, tells The New York Sun. “We’ve seen other cases like this across the world.”Congress, a state attorney general, and a senior German politician facing the collapse of his career have all been pulled into the same fight this year.Surrogacy has historically made news through celebrity birth announcements and glossy ads from fertility clinics — a multibillion-dollar corner of American medicine that had mostly stayed out of the headlines. That changed in 2026. Lawmakers introduced a wave of bills targeting the industry. Florida’s attorney general mounted a constitutional challenge to it. Feminist writers and Catholic bishops, who rarely agree on anything, found themselves making the same argument.What could turn a fertility contract into the rare cause that unites Rome, radical feminists, and Texas Republicans?The West case is far from the only fault line in America’s fertility industry this year. Legal loopholes have allowed the industry to be exploited by predators, including a former Pennsylvania teacher who crowdfunded his way to fatherhood through a surrogate even after being convicted on charges of child pornography and corrupting a minor.Reports of Chinese nationals fathering hundreds of American-born children through surrogates have raised birthright-citizenship questions of their own. At the same time, a California couple’s surrogacy operation collapsed into a criminal investigation after a nanny was caught on camera abusing one of the 21 children born to the couple through multiple surrogates at once. It is all part of what commentators have taken to calling an increasingly weird corner of reproductive law.Ms. Choudhury says the clause the parents invoked in the McKenna West case cannot compel a medical procedure, but that doesn’t make it toothless.“These clauses can’t force a medical procedure, but refusal can be grounds for breach, which is what’s happening here. It makes the surrogate monetarily liable for not complying with the intending parents’ invocation of the clause,” she explains.Other legal scholars see less of a void and more of a genuinely hard case, especially once a baby is born.“Decisions about what happens to a surrogate’s body will always belong to the surrogate, but decisions about what happens to the fetus that is someone else’s child may not be so clear-cut, as we see in this tragic case,” a professor of law at Rutgers Law School, Kimberly Mutcherson, tells the Sun.A Florida-based surrogacy and reproductive law attorney takes a different view of the case altogether.“I view the McKenna West case primarily as an outlier rather than evidence of a systemic failure in surrogacy law or contracting. Modern surrogacy agreements are generally sophisticated documents that expressly address potential disagreements regarding prenatal testing, selective reduction, abortion, fetal anomalies, and medical decision-making,” Marla Neufeld tells the Sun, noting that “no court will compel a surrogate to undergo an abortion or any other medical procedure against her will.”Two competing readings of one Texas case, however, foreshadow a much broader battle.Florida’s “Modern Day Slavery” ArgumentFlorida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, uses a custody dispute between a French couple and their Florida surrogate to make a far more sweeping claim: that commercial surrogacy violates the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on slavery.“This modern-day slavery is morally wrong, endangers children, and threatens national security. It must be stopped,” Mr. Uthmeier wrote in a social-media post, underscoring that “registered sex offenders and foreigners — including Chinese nationals — buy thousands of babies from U.S. surrogacy companies.”That national-security argument is not confined to Florida. Congressional Republicans have introduced bills this year targeting what they describe as loopholes exploited by foreign nationals and registered sex offenders, including a measure from Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania making it a federal crime to facilitate or enter into a surrogacy agreement when one of the parties is a registered sex offender. Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rick Scott of Florida, meanwhile, have asked the Justice Department to investigate Chinese-owned surrogacy agencies operating in Southern California.An organization devoted to opposing the practice on trafficking grounds says the West and Uthmeier cases are symptoms of the same problem.“[Our] position is that surrogacy contracts are inherently wrong and constitute a form of human trafficking, both in the use of women’s bodies and in the children who are created and transferred pursuant to these agreements,” the development director for the Center for Bioethics and Culture, Kirstin Wallace, tells the Sun. “If we genuinely believe in bodily autonomy, no contractual clause should override a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.”But not every hard case in surrogacy fits a trafficking or national-security framework.A Wired investigation tells the story of a female Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose son died in utero while being carried by a surrogate. What followed was a bitter fight over who was to blame for the stillbirth. It ended in a restraining order and years of recrimination between two women who had once agreed on everything. Even the most carefully drafted contract, the case shows, cannot anticipate grief.Such a reckoning is no longer confined to American courtrooms.A German Resignation and a Widening Global BacklashMs. Wallace’s organization has an unusual pedigree here. It was the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network that helped circulate Gloria Steinem’s 2019 letter urging New York not to legalize paid surrogacy, arguing that women in economic need would “become commercialized vessels for rent.”Ms. Steinem, who died September 2 at 92, spent years warning that surrogacy exploited economically vulnerable women, an argument now echoed from an entirely different flank: Catholic bishops and conservative lawmakers who object on grounds of human dignity. The late Pope Francis called the practice “deplorable” before his death.The alliance perhaps found its clearest institutional voice last October, when Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, told the General Assembly that surrogacy “as a practice as an industry must be abolished.”LGBTQ+ family groups and surrogacy advocates pushed back. Regulated programs in the United States and Canada, they say, bear little resemblance to the arrangements Ms. Alsalem describes in parts of Latin America and Eastern Europe.Not every case cited by critics is a policy dispute. Some are of a criminal nature.A Dutch national’s recent trial in the Netherlands on charges of sexually abusing a toddler conceived through surrogacy has laid bare such vulnerabilities in an industry operating with limited oversight. The case gripping the Netherlands involves a 40-year-old man who, prosecutors allege, “engaged in sexual acts” with a toddler he had acquired via surrogacy during a previous relationship.The man is also accused of taking hundreds of nude photographs of the young girl and her friends while bathing or on the toilet, none of which, the plaintiff argues, were taken with ill intent. Prosecutors called for a four-year prison sentence; however, the case raises questions that extend far beyond one predator’s crimes: What gaps in the surrogacy industry need to be closed?The politics of the issue claimed its most prominent European casualty in July, when Jens Spahn, the parliamentary leader of Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats, resigned days after revealing that he and his husband had become fathers through a surrogate in the United States.Surrogacy is banned under German law, a position his own party had voted to reaffirm in February.“My personal happiness — starting a family with my husband and becoming a father — is incompatible with my political office,” Mr. Spahn wrote in his resignation letter.Italy has gone further still. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government now prosecutes its citizens for pursuing surrogacy abroad.The Casablanca Declaration, a coalition of more than 100 experts campaigning for a global ban on surrogacy, puts the industry’s worth at $14 billion in 2022, on track to hit $129 billion by 2032. Its spokeswoman, Olivia Maurel, who was herself born through surrogacy, says that growth is the point: The “beautiful stories” told about the practice, she argues, don’t make it any more ethical.Advocates for regulated surrogacy insist the backlash conflates isolated abuses with an entire field. They point to established American programs that require independent legal counsel for both surrogate and intended parents; mandatory mental-health screening; and independent escrow arrangements to safeguard payment throughout the pregnancy. These safeguards are absent from the cases critics tend to cite, including the Dutch trial and the abuses that Mr. Uthmeier’s office has invoked.Nobody has settled who referees the next dispute before it arrives in courtrooms in three states at once. Advocates for federal oversight say the state-by-state system itself is the problem; it invites the kind of forum-shopping that unfolded in the West case, which involved Ms. West’s home state of Alaska, the parents’ home state of California, and Texas, where the baby was born.“Federal regulation would avoid ‘reproductive tourism,’ where clients may seek out regions where they have fewer costs or obligations, leading to competitive processes that might disadvantage surrogates,” the bioethicist and public health scientist Evie Kendal tells the Sun.Ms. Choudhury, however, sees it as an issue for states to resolve. “States that allow surrogacy have to think about stronger regulation of the intermediaries, whether everyone understands the rights and obligations and the risks of entering into such a contract,” she underscores.Others contend that state law was not built for cases like Ms. West’s. A pregnancy can cross state lines, an abortion clause can mean one thing in California and something entirely different in Texas, and a newborn’s care can come down to which court gets there first. Almost no one disputes that.Feminists, bishops, attorneys general, and a United Nations human-rights office often don’t agree on much; they do, though, on that.Whoever writes the next law — Congress, a state legislature, or an international treaty body — will decide more than one baby’s custody. They will decide whether America’s surrogacy industry keeps operating largely unregulated, or whether this year’s outrage has reached a tipping point that finally forces a rewrite.

Rising Opposition to Surrogacy Industry Creates Odd Coalition of Left, Right and Everyone in Between

Rising Opposition to Surrogacy Industry Creates Odd Coalition of Left, Right and Everyone in Between

More from the New York Sun

Ectopic Pregnancies Spike as Hospitals Hesitate To Offer Abortion-Adjacent Treatment

Countdown Has Begun as America Braces To Lose Its Measles-Free Status in November

Pro-Life Movement Faces Potential Setback in Deep-Red Idaho Where Voters May Overturn Abortion Ban

Jack Smith Faces New Accusation He ‘Privately’ Admitted Trump Probe’s Methods Could Violate Constitution

Drive To End Child Marriage Faces Long Road, Multiple Obstacles

Trump Promised To Crack Open the Secret Saudi 9/11 Files. Grieving Families Are Waiting.

Trump, Despite Scoffing of Democrats and Transatlantic Elites, Deploys the ‘Art of the Deal’ in Greenland Pact

Trump’s Threat To ‘Annihilate’ Iran’s Regime Could Be Undermined by Waiting for the Midterm Elections

More from the New York Sun

Ectopic Pregnancies Spike as Hospitals Hesitate To Offer Abortion-Adjacent Treatment

Countdown Has Begun as America Braces To Lose Its Measles-Free Status in November

Pro-Life Movement Faces Potential Setback in Deep-Red Idaho Where Voters May Overturn Abortion Ban

Jack Smith Faces New Accusation He ‘Privately’ Admitted Trump Probe’s Methods Could Violate Constitution

Drive To End Child Marriage Faces Long Road, Multiple Obstacles

Trump Promised To Crack Open the Secret Saudi 9/11 Files. Grieving Families Are Waiting.

Trump, Despite Scoffing of Democrats and Transatlantic Elites, Deploys the ‘Art of the Deal’ in Greenland Pact

Trump’s Threat To ‘Annihilate’ Iran’s Regime Could Be Undermined by Waiting for the Midterm Elections