Emma Waters: Consider the children

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday April 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: the ethical dangers of surrogacy.

A quick warning to parents: this commentary deals candidly with child exploitation. It runs about three minutes.

Here now is WORLD Opinions commentator Emma Waters on a new front in the battle to protect children from adults who intend to harm them.

EMMA WATERS: In a recent sting operation, the FBI arrested Adam Stafford King, a Chicago man, for distributing child sexual assault material and boasting about sexually abusing his nieces and nephews. The arrest came less than a week before he and the man identified as his husband were set to collect their newborn son from a commercial surrogate in California. King had also openly discussed how he preferred boys in the “single digits,” and that he planned to sexually abuse his surrogate-born son.

Commercial surrogacy is a contractual agreement where someone pays a woman to gestate and birth a child for a fee. In the United States, it’s an under-regulated and unaccountable practice. Unlike adoption, the intended parents are not required to undergo a background check or home visit. Male same-sex couples or single men make up a large percentage of this industry’s clients.

Proponents tend to frame surrogacy as a beautiful experience in which a woman helps someone complete their chosen family. This overlooks serious concerns. Critics have pointed out that surrogacy is effectively a form of baby-selling that exploits women who need financial assistance. Moreover, the practice flourishes when loose laws allow bad actors to create children.

Sadly, the recent FBI arrest shows these are not hypothetical concerns. In addition to Adam Stafford King, author Katy Faust describes a growing list of men who have a history of child sexual abuse or intend to abuse their own children gained through surrogacy. And these are just the ones we know about.

Stories like this leave us with one final haunting question: What about the children? At no step in this legal or reproductive process did anyone stop to ask what is best for the child. This newborn son will almost certainly never know his biological mother—she is likely an anonymous egg donor selected from a catalog.

Even in dog breeding, the puppies remain with their mother for six to eight weeks. But not so with surrogacy. The child is typically taken from the only mother he has ever known the moment he is born. And even if the child never meets Adam Stafford King, he will likely be raised by King’s husband and other male partners. This alone makes the child at least eleven times more likely to suffer sexual or physical abuse.

This newborn son will one day realize that he was not conceived in a loving union. Instead, he was purchased through a highly lucrative contract involving in vitro fertilization, or the fertilization of an egg by sperm in a petri dish. In surrogacy, a man buys the egg, rents the womb, and completes the necessary paperwork to create a child. It’s hard to see how that is morally different from buying a child after his birth.

On April 1, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a law that reversed the state’s ban on commercial surrogacy. Notably, both California and Michigan have yet to pass basic safeguards to protect children. Our laws should encourage, whenever possible, married mothers and fathers to raise their children. We should not legalize the buying and selling of children, especially when such contracts reinforce disordered sexual fantasies.

I’m Emma Waters.

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