First, we apologize for the lack of content last week, as your correspondent was attending the National Conservative conference.

The Dangers of Surrogacy Exposed

Last week, the internet was shaken up by a Wired magazine investigation into venture capitalist Cindy Bi's legal and social media crusade against surrogate Rebecca Smith. It's astonishing reading.

Bi had hired Smith as a surrogate to carry her only male embryo to term. The baby died in utero, a stillbirth from placental abruption. Afterwards, Bi launched a strange campaign of personal destruction against Smith. She spent nearly $1 million on lawyers, hired private investigators, and contacted her surrogate's employers. She sent a photo of her stillborn son to the surrogate's seven-year-old child's iPad. She posted the surrogate's full name, employer information, and home address online.

Smith, who nearly died from placental abruption during an emergency C-section, faced mounting medical bills while Bi accused her of everything from having "rough sex" to deliberately killing the baby. The case exposes how this elite-friendly industry is totally unregulated, and has a dark underbelly which is not normally seen in the media and in public awareness.

The Bi-Smith tragedy illustrates three critical failures in American surrogacy. First, the complete absence of federal oversight creates a Wild West environment where contracts trump human welfare. Second, the vast wealth disparity between intended parents and surrogates creates insurmountable power imbalances—Bi could afford nine different attorneys while Smith relied on pro bono representation. Third, the commodification inherent in commercial surrogacy reduces women to "gestational carriers" and children to products, stripping away the human dignity that should undergird reproduction.

America's surrogacy industry operates in a regulatory vacuum that would be unthinkable in any other medical field. While New York recently became the only state requiring agency licensing, most states have no specific regulations. Unlike adoption, which requires extensive background checks and home studies, anyone with sufficient funds can commission a surrogate pregnancy. The Heritage Foundation reports that in California, you need identification to adopt a pet, but foreign nationals can create children with zero screening.

This lack of oversight enables shocking abuses. In recent years, an FBI sting caught a Chicago man distributing child pornography less than a week before collecting his surrogate-born son. YouTube personality Shane Dawson, who admitted to masturbating to pictures of minors, obtained twins through surrogacy. The intended parents undergo no meaningful screening while surrogate mothers sign away their parental rights before pregnancy even begins.

The health risks to surrogate mothers are systematically concealed. Research by Jennifer Lahl's Center for Bioethics and Culture found that surrogate pregnancies carry four times the risk of severe maternal complications compared to natural conception. Carrying an unrelated fetus triples the risk of potentially deadly conditions—statistics surrogates rarely receive. Chelsea Sanabria, who nearly died after losing 5.4 liters of blood during delivery, was never informed of these elevated risks. The industry that profits from women's bodies has no interest in honestly disclosing what those bodies might endure.

The surrogacy industry's fundamental problem isn't poor execution but its premise: that children are products to be designed, purchased, and delivered to consumers. This commodification manifests in selective reduction clauses requiring surrogates to abort "excess" fetuses, quality control provisions allowing rejection of imperfect babies, and the routine destruction of surplus embryos.

International surrogacy adds another disturbing dimension. Wealthy Chinese nationals increasingly use American surrogates to manufacture U.S. citizens, exploiting birthright citizenship laws while raising these children abroad. The Heritage Foundation warns this creates not just ethical concerns but national security risks, with thousands of U.S. citizens raised with no connection to American society or values.

The psychological toll on children is rarely discussed. Jessica Kern, born through surrogacy, describes "feeling bought, having a price tag." The intended separation from birth mothers inflicts what researchers call a "primal wound" on infants who spent nine months bonding with a woman they'll never know. Unlike adoption, which responds to existing need, surrogacy deliberately creates children to be separated from their mothers.

The surrogacy industry exemplifies how market logic, when completely disconnected from human dignity or the common good, can corrupt human relationships. Agencies, lawyers, and fertility clinics profit enormously: surrogacy can cost $200,000, with birth mothers receiving perhaps $45,000 while middlemen pocket the rest. Poor women's economic desperation becomes leverage for those who can afford to outsource pregnancy's physical burden.

The contracts governing these arrangements would be unconscionable in any other context. Surrogates face breach-of-contract lawsuits for refusing selective reduction—in other words, forced abortion. Surrogates must surrender the child regardless of circumstances, even to parents later revealed as dangerous. When disputes arise, wealthy intended parents can wage legal warfare while surrogates struggle to afford representation.

The politics of this are complicated. Surrogacy in the US is very popular. But social conservatives can use an approach that blunts this problem: health, safety, regulation.

There are a few common sense policies conservatives can support:

Ban international commercial surrogacy. If foreign nationals want American babies, they should pursue adoption through proper channels with appropriate screening.

Require the same screening for intended parents that adoptive parents undergo—background checks, home studies, and psychological evaluation. Children deserve protection regardless of how they're conceived.

Mandate comprehensive data collection. The CDC should track surrogate pregnancies, complications, and outcomes. Women deserve informed consent based on actual risks, not industry propaganda.

Establish minimum standards for surrogate protection, including mandatory independent legal representation, comprehensive health insurance, and cooling-off periods after contract signing.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Climate — Good marker to lay down: in a new Journal op-ed, physicist and former Obama administration official Steven E. Koonin discusses a recent Energy Department report he co-authored that challenges prevailing narratives about climate change impacts on the United States. Koonin, a senior fellow at Hoover, argues that the controversial assessment, conducted by five senior scientists, provides a more measured perspective on climate science than previous government reports. The report's key findings include: that elevated CO2 levels enhance plant growth and agricultural productivity; that climate models have often exaggerated future warming projections; that U.S. data shows no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events; that sea level rise has not shown the acceleration expected from warming; and that terms like "existential crisis" lack scientific support when describing climate impacts on the U.S. economy. Time for sanity on this issue, and good that non-conservatives are acknowledging the real science.

#Finreg — This seems like very good news. As Carrie Sheffield of IWF notes, the Trump administration issued an EO in August 2025 titled "Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k)s" that allows private-sector workers to invest their 401(k) retirement funds in private equity, which was previously restricted to wealthy accredited investors and public pension funds. This is very good news as these alternative assets were previously only available to the wealthy.

#AI #Energy — In 2023, artificial intelligence data centers consumed 4.4% of electricity in the United States, which could triple by 2028, according to a new study.

#AI — Speaking of, R Street's Kevin Frazier and Adam Thierer have a new op-ed out on a new proposal to prevent state AI regulation from sinking the boat, and important issue in the wake of the failure of the AI moratorium in the OBBBA. They note that California, in particular, seems determined to regulate AI to death. "One promising approach, currently being explored by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, would be the creation of regulatory sandboxes and safe harbor provisions for developers who commit to transparent reporting and auditing. By giving innovators room to experiment within clear guardrails, Congress can avoid freezing AI development in outdated compliance regimes while still safeguarding the public interest."

#AI — Speaking of: interesting article from Shane Tews at AEI, arguing that bureaucracy is the biggest obstacle to AI adoption. She singles out risk-averse legal departments, compliance teams, and middle managers protecting their positions. She argues this is a problem because it prevents companies from achieving the efficiency gains, cost reductions, and innovation that AI enables, as demonstrated by successful implementations in healthcare and fast food industries where AI has improved diagnostics, accessibility, and operational efficiency. To overcome this resistance, she recommends that senior leadership provide clear governance frameworks and guidance on AI implementation, invest in retraining programs that show how AI augments rather than replaces human work, create new roles that combine human creativity with AI efficiency, and frame AI adoption as a critical change management challenge rather than merely a technical implementation, warning that organizations failing to evolve will be "eliminated by those who will." Good advice to heed.

#Medicare — The Bipartisan Policy Center, whose work we always pay close attention to, has a new brief out on Medicare reform. The report notes that reforms tried to shift physician payments from volume-based fee-for-service to value-based care through Alternative Payment Models (APMs), but that they have basically failed. Fee-for-service remains dominant, participation bonuses are expiring, and Medicare Part B spending is projected to more than double by 2034. The fundamental problem is that current financial incentives still favor high-volume service delivery over accountability for care quality and costs, while clinicians face excessive administrative burdens and inadequate resources to transition to models that require upfront investments. Successful reform will require realigning incentives to make population-based payment models more attractive than fee-for-service, providing sufficient transition support, and focusing on models like Accountable Care Organizations that have demonstrated ability to improve care coordination while reducing costs, particularly for the growing population of beneficiaries with complex chronic conditions.

#Immigration — A welcome loophole closure: starting September 6, 2025, nonimmigrant visa applicants must attend their interview in their country of residence or nationality. Applicants used to game the system by applying in "friendly" countries. Work visa applicants will face tougher scrutiny, and fraud officers will review them where it matters most, at home, where local trends and false documents are easier to spot.

#Immigration — Speaking of: good item from Simon Hankinson at Heritage on student visas, arguing for limits on how they are awarded. There are 1.1 million foreign exchange students in the US. Are such numbers really in the national interest?