Surrogacy Reaches the Supreme Court

An egregious surrogacy case has been filed with America’s highest court. Today, the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether or not it will hear the case of M.C. v. C.M.

The importance of this case cannot be overstated. If the Court decides to hear it, this will signal that the country’s highest judicial body recognizes that surrogacy raises serious ethical and constitutional issues. Its decision could be a game changer, with both national and international implications.

Currently, there are no national laws, regulations, or policies regarding surrogacy. Surrogacy is dealt with by the states, and there is no uniformity or consistency among their approaches. Whether by statute or case law, surrogacy has been moving inexorably toward legalization; 92 percent of US states allow surrogacy with varying levels of regulation. Only four states ban commercial surrogacy (Michigan, Indiana, New York and New Jersey). To make things even more complicated, state laws as written often differ dramatically from how they are actually enforced.

The United States’ Role in the Global Surrogacy Market

Most Americans probably do not know that the US is driving the surrogacy industry globally, on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, the US is second worldwide only to India in the supply of surrogates, many of whom are military wives. Among those who study the issue, it is estimated that between 40 and 50 percent of surrogate pregnancies in the US are commissioned by foreign buyers. There is a good reason for this: of the top commercial surrogacy markets in the world, only the US and Ukraine have not passed prohibitory legislation on it.

[…]  Surrogacy is creating a generation of children severed from biological and genetic identity and a breeder class of marginalized women. Both are being transformed into commodities for sale on the global marketplace. This can only be accepted and condoned by a society untethered from any sense of ethics, human rights, dignity, or moral values. When the primal bond—as ancient as humankind itself—between mother and child is destroyed, what will be left?

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