Yesterday, an ugly abortion controversy was resolved by the birth of “Baby Gabriel.” Here the legal/ethical gray areas involving hired surrogate mothers and the legal/ethical not-quite-so-gray areas regarding legal abortion mated to create a monster.
Upon learning that the baby gestating in their surrogate’s womb was not perfect (the unborn boy had a congenital heart defect), a California couple decided to exercise a provision in the surrogacy contract and force the mother-by-proxy to undergo an abortion. Instead, the surrogate fled to Texas, where abortion is illegal. Thanks in part to the intervention of Texas AG Ken Paxton (who is running for governor), the baby in question was born. Now there is a dispute over who gets custody. The birth mother has decided she wants the child anti-abortion activists have named “Gabriel.” The couple that wanted to have him killed wants him too.
Guess which I would choose, were I the infant.
I’ll examine that mess in Part II, but ahead, from the EA archives, is the last post Ethics Alarms had regarding the generally messy ethics issue of surrogate motherhood, from 2016, Pre-Unethical Conditions: Surrogate Mother Contracts And Making Babies With Jerks…
Ethics Alarms 
I wonder how this is considered a basis for abortion.
When troops suffer heart injuries in combat, the treatment is typically not to kill them…
There’s a more recent complication with surrogacy that has U.S. security issues at stake. Wealthy foreigners, especially Chinese, are using surrogate mothers in this country to produce dual-citizenship babies…at least one having over 100. Surrogacy is illegal in China.
There are all sorts of scenarios, from future espionage to “anchor babies” for family chain immigration, where this could be used against the interests of the country.
When I saw this on the news, I wondered if the California courts would order the child back to California to be killed.