Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 2, 2024 / 17:05 pm
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, signed a bill that legalizes and regulates paid surrogacy in the state.
Michigan will join the large majority of states in the country that permit paid surrogacy. The only remaining states to not permit paid surrogacy are Nebraska and Louisiana.
The law reverses a 36-year-old prohibition on paid surrogacy in Michigan. The Legislature initially banned the market through the Michigan Surrogate Parenting Act in 1988, which made all compensatory surrogacy contracts unenforceable and the creation of such contracts punishable by fines and up to a year in prison.
To procreate through surrogacy, doctors typically create several embryos through IVF by fertilizing a woman’s egg with a man’s sperm in a lab and then implant one of the embryos in another woman, called the surrogate mother, who has no biological ties to the preborn child. In the IVF process, doctors routinely create numerous excess embryos, most of whom are discarded, which ends human lives.