Bioethics – Family Council

WSJ Highlights Financial Fraud Allegations in Commercial Surrogacy Cases

Oct 28, 2025Jerry CoxBioethics, SurrogacyBioethics, Commercial Surrogacy, Surrogacy

The Wall Street Journal recently published a column highlighting allegations of financial fraud among commercial surrogacy businesses.

Commercial surrogacy is a practice where companies and wealthy couples pay women thousands of dollars to carry children for them.

Social commentators and policymakers worldwide have raised concerns about how commercial surrogacy financially pressures women into providing children for paying customers.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports that some commercial surrogacy companies have allegedly mishandled customers’ money.

Calling the industry “almost entirely unregulated,” The Wall Street Journal writes,

Escrow companies, used in the majority of surrogacies, can handle millions of client dollars with almost no oversight, according to a Wall Street Journal review of court filings and interviews with parents and surrogates. . . .

In one case earlier this year, a surrogacy company owner pleaded guilty to wire fraud after prosecutors said she used client escrow money to fund a yoga and flotation chamber business and other personal expenses. An employee at another company stole $2.7 million to feed an online gambling habit. Yet another used parents’ funds to buy bitcoin.

As we have said before, it’s bad when commercial surrogacy goes wrong — but it’s important to remember that surrogacy never “goes right” either.

Commercial surrogacy treats women like commodities, and it treats children like products that can be made to order and sold for profit.

It denies children the opportunity to be raised by their biological mom and a dad.

In California, surrogate Brittney Pearson’s story shows some of the problems associated with surrogacy.

After Pearson was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, doctors recommended inducing labor early and caring for the baby in the NICU while she started chemo. However, that isn’t what the same-sex couple paying Brittney Pearson as their commercial surrogate wanted.

Even though she was 24 weeks pregnant and the baby might have been able to survive outside the womb, the men wanted Brittney to have an abortion. If the baby were born alive, the men asked that no life-saving measures be taken for the baby.

With her cancer having spread to her liver, Pearson found a hospital to induce birth. The child died shortly after being born on Father’s Day, June 18, 2023.

All of this was made possible by state laws that facilitate commercial surrogacy and treat the intended parents in surrogacy arrangements as the legal parents of the child.

Stories like this one underscore why Family Council has opposed commercial surrogacy in Arkansas. Unfortunately, Arkansas’ commercial surrogacy laws are very lax.

Since 2017, Family Council has supported legislation to prohibit commercial surrogacy in Arkansas. So far, those restrictions have not passed.

Human beings are not products that can be bought or sold. That’s why Family Council opposes commercial surrogacy — and will continue to oppose it.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Shattered Dreams: The High Cost of Reproductive Technology

May 19, 2025Jerry CoxBioethicsArtificial Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Human Egg Harvesting, Invitro

A column published in The Wall Street Journal last Friday highlights the heartbreak and empty promises that assisted reproduction technology often brings.

Ruthie Ackerman writes,

I spent close to $15,000 to freeze my eggs when I was 35. I paid top dollar out of pocket at a well-respected clinic that had, as far as I knew, glowing statistics. The process allowed me to bank 14 eggs, a number my doctor enthusiastically told me could produce two children.

Yet when I returned to use my eggs six years later, none was viable. Only eight survived the thaw, and only three became embryos after being fertilized. I then waited to see if any would reach the blastocyst stage necessary for pregnancy.

None of them did.

Ackerman goes on to note how egg freezing simply isn’t the “slam dunk” or parenthood “insurance policy” that many people make it out to be. Egg freezing and in vitro fertilization can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and there is no guarantee that the eggs — or the unborn children created from them — will survive.

We have written before about the ethical problems with human egg harvesting, in vitro fertilization, commercial surrogacy, and other assisted reproductive technologies. Fertility clinics often fail to give women all the information about the risks, consequences, and alternatives associated with these processes.

Two bills filed earlier this year would have helped address this problem.

H.B. 1554 and H.B. 1795 by Rep. Alyssa Brown (R — Heber Springs) would have required fertility clinics to be licensed by the State of Arkansas and report key data related to assisted reproductive technology. Unfortunately, neither of these bills passed.

Family Council has worked for years to bring better accountability and oversight to assisted reproduction technology. We remain committed to doing exactly that.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

We’ve Seen the Dire Wolf Movie and it Doesn’t End Well: Guest Column

May 13, 2025John StonestreetEthicsBioethics, Ethics, Medical Ethics

Recently, TIME magazine announced that the biotechnology company Colossal has resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct thousands of years ago. “This is Remus,” read the caption over a photo of a robust-looking white wolf. “He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years.” According to Colossal, this is a first step to resurrecting other long-extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth.

As it turns out, the headline is an exaggeration. Remus, his brother Romulus, and their sister Khaleesi contain no DNA from the dire wolf. Rather, they are modern gray wolves with genes tweaked by the company to mirror the DNA of the dire wolf. And they were more than likely engineered to look like the fictional giant wolves from HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

The most common comment on the TIME story was some variation of the sentiment, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well.” Most people likely had in mind Jurassic Park, in which a company uses genetic technology to bring back dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well. In fact, the seventh installment of the franchise will release this summer, each containing the same message as the 1993 original: Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

Dozens of movies reflect the dangers of genetic tinkering, human reengineering, and other forms of scientific hubris. From The Island of Dr. Moreau to Gattaca to Planet of the Apes to The Island, not to mention about half of all zombie movies ever made, we’ve been thoroughly warned about the illusion of human control over nature.

Maybe this is just the story of directors sprucing up a plot, or perhaps a surprising amount of wisdom in the arts has been overlooked or ignored by scientists and tech pioneers. A popular meme from Twitter quotes an imaginary science fiction author saying, “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale,” immediately followed by a tech company exec announcing: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” Even more, there is a strange disconnect between pop culture’s ability to anticipate the negative consequences of our scientific advances and our overall willingness to volunteer as guinea pigs.

This is as true for Artificial Intelligence as for medical technology. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to A.I. to Terminator to I, Robot, to Avengers: Age of Ultron, we’ve been warned about AI. Wall-E warned how we’d lose our humanity if we relied on technology to solve all our problems. Ready Player One warned against getting lost in virtual reality. Children of Men depicted what would happen if society stopped having enough babies. Minority Report questioned the justice of a surveillance state.

What all these movies have in common is that their warning has been ignored in the real world. People will jokingly say, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well,” but we continue to adopt every new technology that promises comfort, convenience, and control without a serious discussion about purpose or boundaries.

Even when the warnings aren’t exactly accurate or even realistic, these films often raise questions worth asking. And yet, our curiosity wanes once the credits roll. As in the Terminator movies, artificial intelligence continues to gobble up vast areas of life and human creativity without much protest. And despite all the Jurassic Park references, Colossal’s wolves will likely be the first of many bioengineering projects that prioritize profit and publicity over the welfare of animals or humans.

You won’t hear me say this often, but it’s time to pay closer attention to Hollywood. Despite the garbage that comes from the entertainment industry, there’s a willingness to question “progress” that is lacking at MIT, medical labs, and Silicon Valley.

C.S. Lewis wrote that reason is the organ of understanding, and imagination is the organ of meaning. We need both, which is why we should listen when someone asks, even in film, “What could go wrong?” Asking whether we should do something is a skill that should not be extinct.