Surrogacy Gets a Reckoning

It feels like whiplash at the CBC. Everywhere we turn, someone is talking about surrogacy.

After years of euphemisms and carefully crafted messaging, the realities of commercial surrogacy are finally breaking into the mainstream. A growing number of high-profile cases are exposing what the industry has worked hard to obscure: surrogacy depends upon profound disparities of power and control, with women and children bearing the greatest risks.

Recently, the CBC testified before the Texas Senate Committee on Health & Human Services. Alongside former surrogates, advocates, and like-minded organizations, we had the opportunity to explain the fundamental problem at the heart of surrogacy: the imbalance between the woman whose body, health, and pregnancy are at stake and those who have contracted for the child she is carrying is simply too great to ignore.

Surrogacy proponents at the hearing largely focused on the happiness their own children had brought them. But that framing avoids some of the most difficult questions. What does it mean to intentionally create a child who may be separated from his or her biological mother or father? What happens when an adult’s desire for a child conflicts with a child’s interest in knowing his or her biological origins? And what happens when the woman carrying that child changes her mind about a medical decision affecting her own body—or the life of the child she carries?

The fertility industry—lawyers, concierge services, agencies, brokers, and others who profit from these arrangements—has become remarkably adept at redirecting these questions. By focusing attention on prospective parents and our natural compassion for those who desperately want a child, the industry shifts attention away from the transaction itself.

But we cannot ignore what is being exchanged: human eggs, sperm, pregnancies, parental rights, and ultimately, children.

And right now, we are seeing the consequences.

Kyla

In Florida, the CBC has been following the case of Kyla, who came to us for guidance after almost two years of caring for children born through an international surrogacy arrangement.

The intended parent, a single Chinese national, did not retrieve the children as allegedly contemplated by the surrogacy arrangement and has since made serious claims against Kyla. As the legal battle continues, the court is now faced with an extraordinarily difficult question: what happens to children caught between the terms of a contract and the human relationships that developed afterward?

We have previously highlighted Kyla’s battle, but the case continues. The children have now been removed from the woman who cared for them as a mother during the first years of their lives.

No contract can make that loss insignificant.

The CBC continues to follow the case because Kyla’s experience exposes a problem the legal system is poorly equipped to address: pregnancy, motherhood, attachment, and children cannot be reduced to the terms of a commercial agreement.

McKenna and Baby Rumie

Then there is McKenna.

While carrying a child as a surrogate, McKenna learned that the baby had a serious but treatable heart condition. According to reports about the dispute, the intended parents wanted the pregnancy terminated. McKenna refused.

Baby Rumi was born and has now undergone the first stage of surgery to repair his heart. Meanwhile, McKenna faces a lawsuit seeking $100,000 related to her refusal to abort him.

It is difficult to imagine a case that more clearly brings together the ethical concerns the CBC has raised about surrogacy since our founding in 2000.

A contract negotiated before pregnancy attempts to dictate decisions that may later involve a woman’s body, her health, her conscience, and the life of a child she has come to know through pregnancy. Yet the woman carrying the child often enters that arrangement with far less financial and legal power than the people and businesses on the other side of the contract.

McKenna’s case forces us to confront where that logic leads.

What does “choice” mean when a woman can be sued for refusing to abort the child growing inside her?

That is not an abstract bioethical question. It is happening to a real woman and a real child.

This is Why the CBC is Here

Because these cases have brought surrogacy into the national conversation, media outlets have increasingly turned to the CBC for perspective. We have been able to explain what we have been saying for more than 25 years and, importantly, to help bring attention to the women whose experiences are too often overshadowed by the fertility industry.

This moment is also a reminder of why your support matters.

Without our donors, women like Kyla and McKenna would have far fewer places to turn for guidance, advocacy, and connections to the emotional and legal support they need when confronting a multibillion-dollar fertility industry.

You make it possible for the CBC to show up. We are there for legislative hearings, in the media, in the public debate, and alongside women when the promises of the fertility industry collide with reality.

For years, we have warned about what happens when women, pregnancy, and children become matters of contract and commerce.

Today, the consequences are becoming harder to ignore.

And we intend to make sure the women and children at the center of them are not ignored either.