Hijacking the adoption argument

Slate recently ran a piece with the fearmongering headline: “Florida’s Attorney General Is Fighting to Outlaw Surrogacy. Adoption Could Be Next.”

Mark Joseph Stern made the argument, asserting that the Florida AG’s intervention in a surrogacy case, if accepted by the state’s appellate courts, would leave adoptive parents “legal strangers to the children they are already raising.” Equality Florida echoed this concern, saying, “Those inflammatory and deeply offensive arguments could destabilize decades of family law and undermine protections for parents and children alike.” The case at the center of it all is a “routine” surrogacy transaction: Two married men in France purchased eggs, rented a Florida woman’s womb, signed a contract, and expected a baby. There is a lot more to this story.

At first, the adoption vs. surrogacy conflation almost seems to have plausibility. In both adoption and surrogacy, a child is being raised by someone other than the mother and father who created her. But that is where the similarities stop, because the circumstances under which the situation was created matter immensely. Those circumstances are exactly what the surrogacy industry does not want anyone to consider.

The bottom line is this: The child-commodifying surrogacy industry cannot survive a children’s rights argument on its own terms, so it borrows arguments for adoption. It attempts to borrow the tools, the language, the sympathy, and the cultural goodwill adoption built up after decades of placing children in vetted, stable homes. Surrogacy plays the victim and pretends there is no difference between a child whose parents were taken by tragedy and a child whose parents inflicted the tragedy themselves. The line blurring wins sympathetic readers to surrogacy’s defense, so the industry can be left alone to keep victimizing children (and raking in millions).

Except it is getting harder to pretend. In Arcadia, Calif., a Chinese client used surrogacy to bring as many as 21 babies into a California household, where police found them living in a mansion with nannies under documented abuse. No adoption process would have approved any family to bring dozens of children into an abusive home of such questionable origins.

In Pennsylvania, a registered child sex offender brought home a baby through surrogacy without any legal barriers or vetting. No adoption process would have approved a sex offender to take a child home for adoption.

Defending adoption as a child-centric institution means we must oppose surrogacy. Adoption is the response to a child who has lost mother or father—or both—through death, abandonment, or a parent’s inability to raise her safely. The wound exists before the law arrives, and adoption tries to mend a broken situation, with the child’s best interests always paramount. Adoption best practice means placing the child with relatives where possible, preserving her identity, prohibiting payments to her genetic parents, running background checks on the receiving family, and keeping her with her siblings. That vetting carries the moral acknowledgment, in legal form, that the loss is serious and any attempt to redeem it must be careful, protected, and focused on what’s best for the child.

Surrogacy is anti-child. It pries the three roles of motherhood apart and sells the them as separate services. The genetic mother provides the egg. The birth mother gestates the baby. The social mother, if there is one, raises the child. The arrangement always forces a child to grieve maternal loss, always regards that child as property, often separates the child from her cultural and genetic heritage, and typically involves payment to the birth or genetic parents. That is the buying and selling of a child. The contract that produces a child bypasses natural biological processes, and the wound that follows that child into adulthood is not an occasional byproduct; it is built into the architecture of each and every transaction.

As mentioned above, the receiving adults are not vetted. Where adoption requires months to years of home studies, background checks, financial review, and references, surrogacy only requires a contract (and the money to pay the sellers). The intended parents do not have to be studied, interviewed, or asked whether they can safely raise the child.

If you are an adoptive parent reading this, please hear me clearly: You are not the subject of this critique. The industry’s effort to hide behind families like yours is despicable. Your family is the kind that took a child’s loss seriously and tried to heal it, and you passed every test the state required to demonstrate it. You did something wonderful that Scripture clearly honors. The argument here analyzes a separate practice that borrowed adoption’s tools and kidnapped its language, all to create sympathy for an industry adoption is categorically opposed to.

Don’t be fooled by the doublespeak. The surrogacy industry does not want you to see how it is financing the tragedy and does not want you to realize that the wound was something it planned. Adoption answers a child’s loss. Surrogacy manufactures one. We need to see the surrogacy argument and recognize the moral insanity that it is.