Utah lawmakers in Congress want to stop foreign nationals from using US surrogacy. Here’s why

WASHINGTON — Utah Rep. Blake Moore is co-leading a push to crack down on foreign nationals abusing U.S. surrogacy services in an effort to close federal loopholes that have been used to exploit birthright citizenship.

Moore introduced the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy, or SAFE KIDS Act, on Wednesday, intended to ban commercial surrogacy arrangements that involve citizens of adversarial countries, such as China, Russia, Iran or North Korea. The bill would automatically invalidate those contracts and create a misdemeanor for surrogacy brokers who knowingly facilitate those arrangements.

“Allowing foreign adversaries unrestrained access to the U.S. surrogacy industry is a national security and humanitarian crisis waiting to happen,” Moore said in a statement. “Most of the developed world already bans international commercial surrogacy due to trafficking risks, and this bill is a strong step in the right direction to prevent bad-faith actors from taking advantage of U.S. surrogate mothers and the children they bear.”

The restrictions would only deal with paid surrogacy contracts as opposed to altruistic surrogacy, which occurs when a friend or family member decides to carry the child at no cost except for medical bills, in most cases.

The bill comes in direct response to reporting last year from The Wall Street Journal uncovering a Chinese billionaire who had been raising more than 100 babies birthed by U.S. surrogates, with several of those mothers alleging they were deceived into the arrangements without knowledge they were foreign nationals. Those types of surrogacy contracts, lawmakers argue, put the babies at risk of being taken to foreign adversarial countries as U.S. citizens.

“The national security and espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm and grounds for immediate action,” Moore said.

The United States currently lacks comprehensive federal regulations for commercial surrogacy, instead leaving it up to individual states and private companies to impose ethical guidelines. However, many states don’t have strict enforcement mechanisms.

For example, the U.S., unlike several other developed countries, does not have limits on how many children a donor can conceive or how many families can use the same single surrogate. Multiple countries have banned commercial surrogacy altogether.

That lack of regulation, lawmakers argue, makes the U.S. susceptible to abuse and espionage risks from foreign nationals.

Without a fix, lawmakers warn that wealthy foreign nationals could use U.S. surrogacy services to have children inside the country, granting them birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. That poses a national security and human trafficking risk, they say, as the children could be raised in adversarial countries while holding U.S. citizenship.

The bill has already garnered the support of more than a dozen House Republicans, including Utah Reps. Mike Kennedy and Burgess Owens.

“Allowing foreign adversaries to exploit Americans, traffic infants, and manipulate our citizenship laws are evil practices we must stop, yet federal law has failed to keep pace,” Kennedy said in a statement. “The SAFE KIDS Act draws a clear line stating that America will not tolerate these abuses. This is exactly the kind of fight Congress must take on, and I welcome the opportunity to stand with my colleagues to see it through.”

The bill has also been pushed in the Senate by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who first introduced the SAFE KIDS Act in November.

“America’s surrogacy system is meant to help individuals build families — it should never be the avenue to allow abuse, neglect or deceit of innocent women and babies,” Scott said in a statement at the time. “And it’s terrifying that this might be at the hands of foreign adversaries with the sole intent of having a child that is a U.S. citizen. We’ve already seen troubling cases of human trafficking and abuse linked to international surrogacy schemes, as our foreign adversaries prove willing to exploit every loophole they can to destroy us.”