surrogacy

South Dakota Makes Fertility Fraud a Felony

South Dakota legislators passed a bill last week criminalizing fertility fraud.

Fertility fraud, or medical rape, occurs when a fertility doctor secretly replaces the intended father’s sperm with his own or that of another donor’s. South Dakota’s HB 1164 makes fertility fraud a felony and creates a way for victims — including children conceived through fraud and men who involuntarily father children — to sue perpetrators.

The South Dakota House and Senate passed HB 1164 in unanimous votes before Governor Larry Rhoden signed the bill into law on March 10.

Fertility fraud doesn’t just constitute medical rape. It deprives parents of their right to raise their biological children and, conversely, children of their right to be known and loved by their biological parents.

But most American states remain poorly equipped to deal with this and the myriad other ethical problems created by modern fertility technologies. According to the U.S. Donor Conceived Council, more than two-thirds of states still have no legislation explicitly criminalizing fertility fraud.

Indiana became the first state to make fertility fraud illegal in 2019, following the trial of former Indiana fertility doctor Donald Cline.

Cline fathered more than 90 children through medical rape during the 1970’s and 80’s. One of Cline’s sons began unraveling the mystery after an at home DNA test showed he was not related to the man he believed to be his biological father.

Netflix documented Cline’s children’s search for justice in the 2022 documentary Our Father.

When Cline went to trial in 2017, Indiana had no law classifying his conduct as a crime. He pled guilty to felony obstruction of justice and paid a $500 fine.

“The charge silenced [Cline’s victims] when it came to their ability to describe the underlying harm to the court,” Jody Madeira, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and one of the experts who testified against Cline, told Netflix’s Tudum.

“The entire narrative got changed,” Madeira expanded. “It became about Cline lying to the state of Indiana and not about these illicit inseminations, not about the medical rape, not about the harm [and] not about the identity issues.”

Identity issues lie at the heart of all ethical problems arising from the rapid, unregulated expansion of fertility technologies.

The biological ties between parents and children are practically and spiritually crucial to a child’s development and identity formation. That’s why Focus on the Family believes children have the right to be raised by their biological mother and father.

While adoption redeems broken relationships between parents and children, surrogacy intentionally separates children from one or more of their biological parents. Babies conceived through in vitro fertilization frequently suffer the same foundational trauma.

“By making fertility fraud a felony, South Dakota affirms a simple truth: a child’s biological identity isn’t anecdotal or interchangeable,” child advocacy organization Them Before Us noted on X.

“Parentage is critical to a child’s humanity and rights; thus, their genetic origins deserve legal protections.”

The Daily Citizen thanks South Dakota legislators for protecting women’s, parents’ and children’s rights by criminalizing fertility fraud. But children and families still need comprehensive, nation-wide protections from unregulated fertility technologies.

Until all states prioritize children’s rights over adults’ desire for children, crimes and abuses like fertility fraud will continue to occur.

Additional Articles and Resources

Florida to Regulate Surrogacy After Pennsylvania Sex Offender Purchases Baby

Male ‘Throuple’ Buys Toddler from Quebec Government

President Trump Acts to Expand Access to IVF

Why Adoption is Beautiful and Surrogacy Isn’t

Florida to Regulate Surrogacy After Pennsylvania Sex Offender Purchases Baby

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier pledged last week to introduce a state-level bill regulating surrogacy.

The Protecting Kids from Predators Pursuing Parenthood Act would prevent registered sex offenders and people convicted of animal abuse from obtaining a child via surrogacy, the Attorney General explained in a short video posted to X.

He plans to introduce the bill in Florida’s 2026 legislative session.

Uthmeier’s announcement comes amid America’s reckoning with the laughable permissibility of surrogacy laws.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the nation learned a Pennsylvania sex offender purchased a child through gestational surrogacy — a surrogacy contract in which at least one of the parties is biologically related to the child being purchased.

Brandon Keith Mitchell was convicted of felony child porn possession and corruption of a minor in 2016 after he sexually abused a 16-year-old; the boy was a student at the high school where Mitchell taught chemistry.

Mitchell served only two months of his two-year prison sentence. His parole conditions required he register as a sex offender, surrender his teaching license and refrain from unsupervised contact with minor children.

But Mitchell and his partner, a man named Logan Riley, had no problem gaining full parental rights over a newborn in 2023 via a gestational surrogacy contract.

Tim Barker, the District Attorney of York County, Pennsylvania, where Mitchell and Riley live, told Newsweek the pair took advantage of a massive loophole in state laws governing surrogacy contracts.

“Pennsylvania law currently does not, in and of itself, prohibit a registered sex offender from becoming a parent through surrogacy,” he explained.

This means the baby cannot be removed from Mitchell’s care based on his prior convictions. What’s more, Pennsylvania recognizes Mitchell as the child’s parent, making it considerably harder for state actors to intervene.

This loophole is not unique to Pennsylvania. In Florida, the only pre-requisite to entering a gestational surrogacy contract — an agreement to grow and purchase a child — is that all parties be at least 18 years old.

Meanwhile, state governments from sea to shining sea are denying Christians’ adoption applications because they do not believe in affirming a child’s sexual identity confusion.

Lack of surrogacy regulation in states like Florida and Pennsylvania reflect our culture’s mistaken conception of surrogacy: That it’s a pro-family technology helping couples struggling with infertility to have biological children.

Even in the best circumstances — when a married couple create an embryo and use another woman to carry that baby to term — surrogacy is not pro-family. It breaks the bond between a baby and the mother who grew them for nine months.

Focus on the Family’s position statement on surrogacy asks whether “we fully understand the implications of turning conception and childbearing into services for hire,” continuing:

What about the child? Who does she belong to, really? (We’re not talking about legality, here–but spiritually, morally and emotionally.) Does surrogacy make the child a commodity.

Child advocate Katy Faust expands on the consequences of surrogacy for children in World :

Surrogacy is, in 100 percent of cases, the violation of children’s rights — namely, every child’s right to his or her mother.

Maternal separation is a major physiological stressor for the infant, and studies have found that even brief maternal deprivation can permanently alter the structure of the infant brain.

But that aside, the ethical nature of a scientific technology cannot be determined by its best use-case alone. Surrogacy is rife with potential for abuse. Offenders like Mitchell are already taking advantage.

Focus on the Family and the Daily Citizen believe all surrogacy — contractual and altruistic — is morally wrong. In the absence of a total prohibition, we support laws tightening restrictions on surrogacy and protecting children born into these ethically compromised situations.

Additional Articles and Resources

Focus on the Family’s Position Statement on Surrogacy

Baby Should Be Immediately Removed from Convicted Child Predator

Court Frees Christian mom to Adopt, Stop Oregon’s Gender Ideology Adoption Mandate

Massachusetts DCF Denied a Catholic Couple’s Foster Care License — Now, They’re Being Sued For Religious Discrimination

When Government is Hostile to Christian Foster Parents

Maternal Health is Declining Because We Are Ignoring Mothering

Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage Harms Children and Society

Chip and Joanna Gaines Platform Couple to ‘Normalize Same-Sex Families’

IVF’s Own ‘House of Horrors’

Fifteen years ago, authorities raided a West Philadelphia abortion clinic owned and operated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell. What was found led investigators to dub the facility a “house of horrors.” In addition to blood-stained furniture, urine-soaked walls, and cat feces, investigators also discovered the remains of 47 children, born and unborn, in containers, boxes, and jars. Gosnell’s clinic targeted primarily poor, minority women. Staff testified that hundreds of infants born alive were killed, often through a method Gosnell called “snipping.” Now described as a “serial killer,” Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, 21 felonies, and 200 other legal violations.

The grand jury report blamed a “complete regulatory collapse,” adding that at the time of Gosnell’s arrest, Philadelphia nail salons faced more regulations and oversights than abortion clinics. In a recent essay in First Things, Erika Anderson documented a different list of ethical horrors that are also birthed from under-regulation and lack of oversight. To be clear, the stories of the “wild west” of “big fertility” are far more sanitized than Gosnell. Nor are they as shocking as what was found in Gosnell’s home and clinic, but that’s only because nothing is that shocking.

For example, a fifty-one-year-old California man who lives with his elderly parents hired a surrogate to carry embryos he “adopted.” He now has custody, with no background check or home study required, of three babies with whom he has no biological relationship. During pregnancy, he asked the surrogate to abort one of the babies, but she “refused and offered to raise the third child herself.” He refused and took all three children, and the woman who carried them “never saw them again.”

Bloomberg recently reported on the dramatic case of businessman Greg Lindberg, whose ex-wife got custody of their three children. Lindberg wanted children who could never be taken away from him so he “conned” young women into donating their eggs and signing over their parental rights in exchange for millions of dollars. He now has sole custody of at least twelve children.

In 2024, a Nashville fertility clinic was shut down after the Tennessee attorney general launched an investigation into Dr. Jaime Vasquez, who allegedly neglected protocols, safety measures, and record-keeping. Court records obtained by the Daily Mail establish that embryo storage tanks at Vasquez’s clinic were not monitored for temperature, and there was no alarm system to alert workers if the temperature reached an unsafe level. According to Anderson, “Patients … lost access to their ‘reserved’ embryos and weren’t told whether they would ever get them back.”

In 2023, a Virginia judge ruled that frozen embryos in dispute because of divorce proceedings “are property.” His decision relied, in part, “on a 19th century law governing the treatment of slaves.” In 2021, the New York Times reported on a couple “shocked to receive a storage fee invoice for frozen embryos they had been told didn’t exist for more than twenty years.” The couple had been told that the embryos they created through IVF had not survived.

Each of these accounts, and the dozens of others that, as one attorney put it, “the public doesn’t even know about,” reveal how irresponsible and inhumane it would be to expand and subsidize this industry that is so under-regulated. Even worse, the regulations that do exist, at least the ones on the books in 49 states, treat frozen embryos as property. Even in otherwise pro-life states, embryos created through IVF have no right to life. Ethicist Charles ­Carmosy described the current legal view of embryos this way: “Imagine a human being who is a captive, an orphan, and a (quite) little child that the surrounding culture deems a non-person all in one.”

If, as Christians believe and science confirms, human life begins at conception, then every single human life deserves respect and protection. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, persons are persons and never should be property. IVF, as currently practiced, treats these persons as property, and justifies doing so by centering adult desire over the rights and wellbeing of children. Like the abortion industry fifteen years ago, the fertility industry is in need of far more regulation and oversight, not less. Even more, it is in need of a better legal framework, one built on the dignity and value of all human beings, not some. If not, then the list of ethical horrors from this industry will continue to grow.