Earlier this month, the Florida Attorney General intervened in a case involving Kyla Simpson, of St. Augustine, who served as a commercial surrogate for a single man residing in China. In November 2024, Simpson gave birth to three children. For over 20 months, the intended father failed to pick up the infants, stating difficulties obtaining a visa and attempted to hire a different man to retrieve the infants and transport them back to China.
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When the intended father still had not picked up the children by May 2026, Simpson and her husband initiated the process to terminate his parental rights with the intention to continue caring for the children. The intended father responded by filing an emergency child-pickup order to remove the children from the Simpson home. The children were placed in temporary care, and moved to California pending court hearings.
This case highlights the complexities of international surrogacy arrangements, the fallout of minimizing interests of children, and national security risks involving surrogacy arrangements with countries of concern.
Commercial surrogacy is a massive and profitable international market, valued at nearly $25 billion. The U.S. is an outlier, compared to most western countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy that prohibit or criminalize commercial surrogacy based on human rights principles of harm, exploitation, and commodification.
The U.S. has become a commercial surrogacy destination point, with an estimated 40-50% of clients at U.S. agencies hailing from other countries. The Wall Street Journal described how intended parents may ship genetic material, purchase surrogacy services, arrange for around-the-clock nanny care and even facilitate the infants’ transportation into another country without ever leaving home.
In the U.S., surrogacy is regulated by a patchwork of laws that vary across each state. Multiple states have enacted laws that are favorable to supporting commercial surrogacy transactions, and designate the intended parents as the infant’s legal parents by a prebirth order. Unlike other countries or some U.S. states that recognize the surrogate’s involvement by listing her as the mother on the birth certificate, a prebirth order directs the hospital to list the intended parents on the infant’s birth certificate. This effectively erases the record of the surrogate and genetic donors involved. While Florida does not permit commercial surrogacy, in the U.S. people can travel to states with different laws.
In this case, the children were brokered by a single father who has never met them, removed from the Simpson family who stepped up to care for them since birth, and have no connection to their genetic lineage while they wait in limbo. Commercial surrogacy contravenes multiple considerations that further children’s interests, such as the importance of knowing and being raised by their parents, having information about their genetic lineage, and forming secure family relationships.
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While commercial surrogacy may fulfill deep parental longing for a child, some critics have asked: at what cost?
The cases on the margins reflect what happens when we begin to treat human reproduction as an “order to fill.” Children have been abandoned due to a disability, rejected because the intended mother changed her mind, released to a 22-time convicted sex offender, and created by the dozen for male foreign nationals.
Recent cases involving Chinese nationals suggest that children are not only treated as a commodity to purchase, but an asset to cultivate. Children born in the U.S. are classified as U.S. citizens, even if their intended parents are foreign nationals or even have never stepped foot in the U.S. This means the child could have access to a U.S. birth certificate, government identification, and passport while being raised with allegiance to a hostile nation. In 2010, FBI Operation Ghost Stories uncovered Russian nationals committing espionage with stolen U.S. identities, who were engaging in information gathering, sabotage, and undermining U.S. interests.
Surrogacy laws highlight false documentation is not necessary, as long as foreign nationals have enough money to enter the surrogacy market. Congress has called on the Department of Justice to investigate, and a federal bill has been introduced to address national security concerns.
Children — and our national security — should not be up for sale.
Katherine Drabiak is the chair of the Health Policy and Systems Management school in the USF College of Public Health.
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