surrogacy

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.