Two California men hired a surrogate to create their “dream family,” but when the surrogate found out she had cancer and needed to deliver the baby at 25 weeks in order to receive treatment, the “parents” demanded the child be “immediately terminated.”
Brittney Pearson, the surrogate mother, was distraught that she could do nothing to save the child growing inside her, but California laws give no rights to surrogates or the infants they carry. After she delivered a premature but viable baby at 25 weeks, the two men responsible for her pregnancy “ordered that life-saving care be withheld” because they “didn’t want to pay Brittney for a baby born before 38 weeks due to the potential health problems of a premature baby.” The baby boy died soon after he was born.
In an email seeking legal counsel, Brittney’s uncle explained that the couple could not force his niece to abort the baby, but once the baby was born he was then “property” of the parents and they could control his medical treatment – including the decision to withhold life-saving care. “They’d rather watch (or rather they won’t be around) their baby die than allow it to be saved as best as possible and given to a family,” her uncle wrote, even offering to adopt the child himself.
“While it appears Brittney tried to protect this child in the womb, her participation in surrogacy played a partial role in the ultimate death of this little boy,” Live Action President Lila Rose tweeted. “From his moment of conception, he was stripped of his fundamental rights & treated as a product that could be discarded at the first sign of defect.”
Surrogacy turns women into nothing more than a rented womb, and turns babies into a commodity to be bought and sold. This use of surrogacy is morally wrong and overlooks God’s perfect design for marriage and procreation.
“Surrogacy is fundamentally wrong,” Rose tweeted. “It enables people to act as if they are entitled to other people’s reproductive abilities – the body of the woman whose womb they are renting. It also treats children like property to be bought, sold, and killed.”
While many see surrogacy as a solution to infertility struggles or a way to bypass a difficult pregnancy or postpartum experience, it is heading down a dangerous path where women are stripped of their rights and creating a human life becomes transactional. This was never God’s plan for procreation.
