The Massachusetts House has unanimously passed a bill that would allow women to sell their babies to the highest bidder.
The bill passed under the guise of LGBTQ rights.
Under the state’s current laws, paid and traditional surrogacy is permitted — but for traditional surrogacy, the would-be “parents” must adopt the baby and, therefore, pass a background check. Additionally, at least one of the parents must be related to the infant.
Live Action explains:
However, adoption protects children from abuse due to the regulations that are involved in the process. There is research on the negative outcomes for children who live with non-biologically related parental figures. One study found, “In studies across a wide range of cultures… [t]he single best predictor of child abuse is the presence of a stepparent in the home. In fact, the risk of even unintentional deaths, such as drowning, is greater in stepfamilies than in intact or single-parent families.”
Background checks exist in the adoption process to protect children from being placed in dangerous homes.
In a recent case, Adam Stafford King was arrested this year for allegedly planning to sexually abuse the baby boy he and his partner were expecting via surrogate. Background checks that are not required in surrogacy could have stopped Mark Newton and Peter Truong from sexually abusing a boy they paid a Russian woman to carry in 2005. Police believe they wanted to have a child “for the sole purpose of exploitation.” The boy’s abuse began just days after he was born and video shows Newton abusing him less than two weeks after his birth. The men traveled the world for more than six years, selling the boy for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse, and uploading the footage to the “Boy Lovers Network.”
The bill would also change the description of “parenthood,” under the law from being based on biology or adoption to a “person’s intent to be a parent of a child.”
The change will remove all mentions of mothers and fathers from parentage law and replace them with gender-neutral terms.
The Federalist reports:
Surrogacy is an inherently exploitative practice. It commodifies women and treats children as products. This specific bill enables particularly extreme arrangements. Most commercial surrogacy laws and surrogacy agencies restrict contracts to cases where the woman carrying the child is not genetically related to the child. Under genetic surrogacy arrangements, sanctioned by this bill, a woman would be allowed to accept money in exchange for her biological child.
In any other circumstance, if a woman accepts money in exchange for handing over her parental claim on her child, she has engaged in baby-selling. Under this bill, she can do exactly that if she has secured a valid surrogacy contract, even if she makes the arrangement with the purchasing parents after she has become pregnant, providing the contract is validated before the child is born.
Under H. 4672, the following would be perfectly legal: a woman undergoes the physical and mental health screenings required to become a surrogate, becomes pregnant via sperm from a sperm bank, and then posts to a surrogacy forum or social media group that she is not only available as a surrogate but already pregnant.
She could then choose to “match” with the couple willing to pay the highest “payment of consideration,” essentially auctioning off her child. As long as the surrogacy agreement meets the requirements outlined in the bill, it could be validated by a court and viewed as not only permissible but legally binding. However, if that same woman became pregnant and decided to make an agreement with a couple to adopt her child, while insisting that she be paid for placing her child with them, she would be prosecuted for baby selling.
The bill is now heading to the state senate for consideration.
