Aggregated News
In late January, Kansas State Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook introduced a bill that would have criminalized the use of surrogate contracts in pregnancy and imposed a $10,000 fine and up to a year in jail for anyone participating in such a transaction. The effort was quickly abandoned amid a storm that included pro-lifers battling pro-lifers, invocations of God having hired the Virgin Mary as a surrogate, sonograms performed live in a senate committee and a host of other risible posturings.
If the bill hadn’t been body-slammed into the dust by some of the sillier statements of its chief proponent (Pilcher-Cook asserted, for example, that surrogacy creates children who are “not going to have either a biological mother, biological father or both”), the discussion might have garnered more attention. The laws regarding surrogacy are a jumble of inconsistent public policies, free-market contracts, civil interventions and criminal sanctions. However incoherent the Kansas attempt, there’s a serious question as to whether individually drafted private contracts are sufficient to settle questions of intended parenthood, or if the “best interests of the child” standards governing custody...
If the bill hadn’t been body-slammed into the dust by some of the sillier statements of its chief proponent (Pilcher-Cook asserted, for example, that surrogacy creates children who are “not going to have either a biological mother, biological father or both”), the discussion might have garnered more attention. The laws regarding surrogacy are a jumble of inconsistent public policies, free-market contracts, civil interventions and criminal sanctions. However incoherent the Kansas attempt, there’s a serious question as to whether individually drafted private contracts are sufficient to settle questions of intended parenthood, or if the “best interests of the child” standards governing custody...