We should stop selling American babies.
Regardless of the flaws in the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on birthplace citizenship, it highlights that the surrogacy industry is selling American babies and shipping them overseas. Literally. Just last year, The Wall Street Journal published a story headlined “The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate.” The leading example was Xu Bo, a video game mogul whose “company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.” The vast majority of these are boys, whom he prefers.
Legally, these children are, as the Supreme Court has affirmed, American citizens by virtue of being born in the USA. So why are we allowing them to be sold by the dozens to a weirdo in China?
Well, he’s weird, but he’s also really rich. And he and others of his ilk are, as the Journal reported, enabled by a “thriving mini-industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services — even to pick up the newborns from hospitals.” The Chinese nationals ordering these American babies do not even need to set foot in the US to procure their American-citizen children. The surrogacy industry infrastructure allows Chinese customers to “ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.” Mail-order American babies for a vial of semen and a lot of cash.
This goes far beyond the one weirdo. The report cited the CEO of an IVF company that serves the Chinese market, who claimed that there has been a notable increase in clients who are “commissioning dozens, or even hundreds, of U.S.-born babies with the goal of ‘forging an unstoppable family dynasty.’” He once even turned down a client who “wanted more than 200 children at once.” The reporter added that “other surrogacy professionals described similarly head-spinning numbers.” And not everyone will say no. “The owner of one agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.”
The surrogacy industry promotes itself as generous and heartwarming, a way of helping infertile couples have the babies they long for. The reality is that it is more than willing to factory-farm babies for anyone with enough cash. As the Journal’s reporting shows — though some in the IVF industry will decline the most outrageous orders — there are no industry standards to keep others with even fewer scruples from fulfilling them. If Chinese billionaires want to buy American babies by the dozen, someone will try to fill the order. And this is all legal.
Of course, it is not just the Chinese taking advantage of the lax standards surrounding American surrogacy, though sending large numbers of American babies to our geopolitical rivals is especially concerning. The United States is well known for its unregulated IVF and surrogacy industries, which, for the right price, will provide anyone with an American baby — or a hundred. And the people (mostly on the left) most eager to affirm the Americanness of every baby born on American soil are also the most eager to enable the sale of these American babies via surrogacy — including for overseas buyers in hostile nations.
Furthermore, as Emma Waters noted at the time, President Trump’s executive order restricting birthplace citizenship did not plug the surrogacy loophole that gave citizenship to babies born to American citizens — even if those babies were immediately shipped to China. And now the Supreme Court’s decision ensures that the surrogacy loophole will remain, and that it will include babies born to immigrants (legal or illegal) who work as surrogates.
But this does not mean that we have to allow an endless supply of American babies to be shipped overseas, especially to hostile, authoritarian nations. Republican states can start by following Florida’s lead; the Sunshine State recently banned “surrogacy contracts in which any party is a citizen or resident of a ‘foreign country of concern,’ including nations such as China, Russia, and Iran.” Every other GOP-controlled state should do the same.
Federally, though President Trump’s efforts to curtail birthplace citizenship have been stymied, the sale of American babies to foreigners is a distinct problem that the administration could still address. What the Supreme Court’s decision has done is highlight the absurdity and evil of a surrogacy industry that allows babies to be ordered from overseas, given American citizenship, and then shipped off to be raised by citizens of hostile powers.
But the government does not have to treat contracts for American babies as if they were ordinary commercial transactions. Rather, the Trump administration should treat this as the human trafficking and national security threat that it is, and shut it down. We put export controls on all sorts of things; we should add American infants to the list. Making America Great Again means not selling American babies.
