There are a multitude of reasons the rent-a-womb industry should be banned. Surrogacy denies children’s natural rights to life, to a mother and father, and to freedom from commodification; exploits vulnerable women; and creates reproduction loopholes for pedophiles and other bad actors unfit to be parents. The most imminent and possibly important justification for taking swift and legal action to shut down America’s proxy pregnancy market is the increasing exploitation of birthplace citizenship by America’s sworn enemies.
The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause specifies that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” According to Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and the high bench’s Democrat-nominated justices, however, babies of illegal aliens and surrogates paid by wealthy foreigners are just as American as you or I simply because they were born on U.S. dirt.
It doesn’t matter, as Justice Samuel Alito warned in his dissent, if a child is born “to a mother who is here for only a brief time.” If a pregnant mother can board a plane to the U.S. to deliver her baby anywhere in America, that child is considered by Roberts et al. a full U.S. citizen entitled to all of the benefits of the best country in the world.
“The Court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent. “Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens.”
Selling the promise of U.S. citizenship for foreigners’ babies, and eventually foreigners themselves, is incredibly profitable. In fact, there’s an entire subset of the American reproduction market devoted to helping people in other babies get the anchor baby experience of their dreams.
As Federalist Senior Correspondent Chris Bray further explained:
“There are many businesses clustered around this industry, and there have been many more. They die and come back under new names as they get shut down. Suburban cities around Los Angeles have assigned police detectives and code enforcement officers to their birth hotel problem, because people buy houses and cram them full of beds for pregnant foreign visitors. Citizenship is a product, marketed like consumer goods.”
Once overseas parents secure a child with full American citizenship, including key documentation like birth certificate, passport, and Social Security number, their pathway to American citizenship becomes easier as the kid gets older, and it’s cheaper than some visas.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced shortly after SCOTUS’ disastrous decision that it planned to “prioritize the prosecutions of birth tourism schemes across the country.”
“Actors seeking to exploit loopholes to obtain automatic citizenship for their children pose a national security threat and will be brought to justice,” the DOJ declared. The announcement comes mere weeks after the State Department shuttered multiple birth tourism networks in Europe and Africa.
Prosecuting anchor baby businesses is a good start, but it’s simply not enough to keep America’s national sovereignty intact. Even President Donald Trump’s “protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship” executive order, the subject of the high bench’s birthplace decision, fell short of the measures required to secure the nation for the people who are participants in its social compact.
Any policy that permits foreigners to hire American surrogates to carry and deliver their children stateside means the thriving birth tourism market will continue. The most effective way to curb that abuse of American citizenship is a ban on cross-border commercial surrogacy.
The people known for most taking advantage this loophole, starting in the 1990s, are Chinese nationals. One report from 2024 suggested that Chinese nationals made up 41.7 percent of the surrogacy contracts between foreigners and American women between 2014 and 2019. During that same time period, foreigners’ use of the American birthplace citizenship surrogacy scheme increased by 78 percent.
[RELATED: America’s Rent-A-Womb Industry Lures An Alarming Number Of Chinese Nationals]
Take Chinese billionaire Xu Bo for example. Thanks to lax U.S. surrogacy laws, the Chinese billionaire who has never lived in the states reportedly used American surrogacy agencies to father more than 100 children. Most, if not all, of these babies are born on U.S. soil and automatically entitled to American citizenship benefits even though they will be raised in China.
The case of Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, who took advantage of California’s lax rent-a-womb policies to commission the creation of around two dozen children via multiple simultaneous surrogacy before those kids were seized amid allegations of abuse, holds similar implications.
Until the Trump administration and Congress takes the ever-growing international surrogacy industry as a serious threat to our national sovereignty, American citizenship is up for grabs by the highest foreign bidders who can sift through hundreds of surrogacy agencies’ catalogues to find a woman willing to give birth to their child on U.S. soil.
