Golden Ticket Babies
How surrogacy put American citizenship up for sale, and what we told the Texas Senate they should do about it.
We often get asked at Them Before Us where the rubber meets the road. How do we actually create change? This week is a pretty good answer. I (Josh) flew to Austin, Texas, at the invitation of our friends at Protecting Texas Children, to testify before the Texas Senate as it examines the commercial surrogacy industry, and to sit down with state legislators about the children’s side of this industry. This article is a behind-the-scenes look at that trip: why the hearing was called, what we told the committee, and how work like this changes the culture.
For those who may not know, we are an organization that advocates for the rights of the child to their mother and father. Mothers and fathers are facts. Like sex, they can be proved with a blood test. We don’t “assign” sex to a child, and we shouldn’t “assign” parents either; in each case, a reality is recognized, not decided. A child’s bond to their mother and father is written as deep as DNA; a child doesn’t just come from two people, a child is two people, fused.
That bond is the fundamental relationship and foundation upon which all human flourishing is built.
Identity, belonging, and the desire to sacrifice are all wrapped up into one, motivating adults to create a better future they won’t live to see. This attachment is not some leftover evolutionary sentiment, nor is it purely religious or political; it is the sacred bedrock beneath nearly everything good in society. Destroy that bond, and you do more than wound children; you dissolve the foundation, and everything built on it comes down.
But believe it or not, some adults want that bond gone, because biology is the great obstacle to their radical remaking of the family. In their world, parents really are assigned at birth, by contract rather than recognized by blood, and any adult with enough money can acquire a child. A mother and father raising the children they created stands directly in the way of an agenda that wants marriage disposable, children purchasable (designer, on demand), and gestation rentable. In a word, they want children to serve their desires, and they refuse to sacrifice their desires for the best interests of the child.
We say no. We stand in the gap. But the gap is wide.
A child’s right to their mother and father is under threat in the marketplace of third-party reproduction, where surrogacy, donor conception, and the IVF industry create children who are deliberately cut off from one or both of their biological parents and treated like inventory.
It is under threat in statehouses that are rewriting parenthood law so that a contract, rather than a biological relationship, decides who a child’s parents are, and rewriting birth certificates so that a government document can declare a child was created by two women or two men, erasing the factual mother or father from the record. It is under threat in a culture that has normalized homes without fathers, and it is coming over the horizon in the form of artificial wombs and lab-grown eggs and sperm, which would make mothers and fathers optional by engineering. Most people have no idea that there are forces hard at work to destroy that fundamental relationship. That’s what makes our work in Texas so important.
Why Texas Called This Hearing
The nation is waking up to how its immigration system is being abused, and to the uncomfortable fact that children have become the vehicle. Texas saw it coming. Back in March, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick issued the Senate’s interim charges and directed the Health and Human Services Committee to examine “the unethical and foreign interests exploiting the surrogacy and fertility industries in Texas” and to recommend ways to end that exploitation and its harm to patients and children. Then, on June 30, the Supreme Court handed down Trump v. Barbara, upholding automatic birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, and within a day, lawmakers were demanding a special session on birth tourism, with one proposal specifically calling for a ban on surrogacy contracts where any party is a citizen or resident of a country of concern, mirroring what Florida has already enacted. We have been documenting the connection for years: close the front door of birth tourism and the market moves to the higher-tech back door of commercial surrogacy, where citizenship arrives with a birth certificate and nobody asks who is taking the child home.
That is where Protecting Texas Children came in. When they asked us to come make the child’s case to the committee, I booked the flight before I finished reading the message. They are engaged in this work every single day; what they needed from us was the research and the testimony to keep the child at the center of the conversation. Them Before Us is the only organization in the country monitoring these issues across all fifty states, so it is an honor anytime we get to lock arms with a local ally and strengthen the people changing hearts and minds on the front line.
What We Told the Committee
Texas has built one of the most attractive legal frameworks in the world for the global surrogacy market. The state’s only residency requirement can be satisfied by the surrogate alone, so intended parents need no ties to Texas, or to America at all; roughly one in seven surrogacy arrangements in this country is commissioned from a foreign country of concern like China, and where adoption requires a home study, surrogacy requires only a check.
And what does that check buy? The stories coming out of this industry sound like they can’t be real, except that they are. There are documented cases of pedophiles acquiring children through surrogacy, men who would never have survived an adoption screening. The Wall Street Journal has reported on Chinese billionaires commissioning American-born children by the dozen; one videogame billionaire, Xu Bo, has more than 100 children born through American surrogates, some of whom he admits he has never met. And foreign nationals openly treat the rental of a Texan’s womb as a golden ticket to citizenship: the baby is born an American, and at 21, that child can sponsor green cards for the whole family. Beneath it all sits the deeper problem: surrogacy contracts, in advance and on purpose, the separation of a newborn from the only person that baby has ever known.
If you want to read the full testimony or watch the video, click below:
After the hearing, we met with several state legislators to walk through these issues from the child’s perspective. For so many legislators, the unregulated world of assisted reproductive technology (IVF, surrogacy, and soon artificial wombs) is simply not an issue they have experience with, and we are so grateful for how receptive they were. At the end of the day, they need educated advocates sharing what these types of arrangements do to a child.
They Win in the Dark
If you take one thing from this article, take this: the biggest way the anti-child forces win is by living in the dark. Nobody records what happens to the embryos. Nobody follows up on the children created and handed over to strangers. There is no vetting of the buyers, and no questions are asked of agencies making millions off the sale. Every one of those silences is a policy choice, and every one of them protects the industry instead of the child. We want to help pull back the curtain and shine a light on the ways children are being victimized, because none of it survives being seen clearly.
Children in this conversation do not have a voice. They can’t organize, they can’t testify, and they can’t vote. With your help, we give them that voice. That is how the culture changes: through conversations, testimony, statistics, and research, convincing one heart and one mind at a time to stand up and defend kids. And if you give financially to this work, you are a part of all of it; you are helping expose this industry and protect children from being bought, sold, and handed off to unrelated adults. No version of this fight happens without you.
Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. If you believe children deserve a mother and a father, join us by making a monthly gift today.
We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.
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Well done with this excellent testimony on a growing, corrupt, exploitative and soul destroying industry.
This is the sentence that matters: every silence is a policy choice. When no one tracks the embryos, follows up on the children, vets the buyers, or asks who profits, the industry is protected instead of the child. Whatever adults want, children should never be treated as contracts, commodities, or golden tickets.