Josh Wood is the executive director of Them Before Us and a contributing author of “Pro-Child Politics: Why Every Cultural, Economic, and National Issue Is a Matter of Justice for Children.” Nandi Gamble is the director of public policy for the Delaware Family Policy Council.
In 2012, a Delaware woman named Bridget Wismer pleaded guilty to attempting to sell her newborn to a man named John Gavaghan for $15,000, a transaction she agreed to while still pregnant. Both were charged with “dealing in children.” Delaware’s courts treated it as what it was: baby selling.
Senate Bill 250, introduced March 5, would make a nearly identical transaction perfectly legal, provided the contract is signed before conception rather than after. Delaware already permits commercial gestational surrogacy, in which the woman carrying the child has no genetic connection to the baby. SB 250 goes further. It adopts the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act and expands Delaware’s surrogacy framework to include paid genetic surrogacy — meaning a woman could be compensated to conceive, carry and relinquish her own biological child to adults who have no genetic connection to the baby at all. The only thing separating this arrangement from the one Delaware prosecuted is paperwork and timing. The child cannot tell the difference.
A better path already exists: SB 236
If Delaware legislators want to address a real gap in family law, they already have a bill for that. Senate Bill 236 — filed with bipartisan support by Sen. Dave Lawson, R-Marydel, and Rep. Tim Dukes, R-Laurel — would secure donor-conceived individuals’ right to access identifying information about their biological parents at age 18. That bill brings accountability to an industry that has operated without it and delivers justice to children who want to know where they come from.
It also represents a step in the right direction — closing the growing distance between a child and his or her biological origins, rather than expanding it. In a space where children are increasingly being commodified and treated like products of a system, SB 236 reinforces their personhood in a way that magnifies the importance of identity and biological connection.
SB 250 does something else entirely: It builds a commercial marketplace for acquiring children, with fewer protections than adoption has required for decades.
What SB 250 changes
Under this legislation, a biological mother can accept money in exchange for her child, with no home study or background check required of the recipient parents and no agency oversight. A court can approve a surrogacy agreement after a woman is already pregnant. And a separate provision allows a paid genetic surrogacy arrangement to proceed even if the child was conceived through intercourse, rather than a medical procedure.
While the bill does not necessarily envision all these scenarios happening at once, each one, on its own, strips away protections that adoption law has maintained for decades. Adoption law has long recognized that, when a child is placed into a new home, the state has the responsibility to ensure that the placement is safe, stable and within the best interest of the child. SB 250 weakens that current standard by shifting the focus from child protection to contract enforcement.
Last year, Pennsylvania legislators considered the exact same language, only to drop the bill when a surrogacy scandal came to light and highlighted how the bill created even more opportunity for exploitation. Delaware legislators should learn from Pennsylvania and refuse to adopt this language.
Real-world consequences
The consequences of surrogacy without meaningful vetting are already on record.
In May 2025, authorities in Arcadia, California, found 21 surrogate-born children (17 of whom were 3 or younger) in a single mansion, commissioned by a couple who ran a fraudulent surrogacy agency and who told each surrogate that she was helping a small family with infertility. Surveillance footage showed nannies slapping and shaking infants.
In Pennsylvania last summer, a convicted child sex offender used surrogacy to gain custody of a child for him and his partner because his criminal record barred him from adoption. The county district attorney said his office lacked any legal basis to intervene.
In San Francisco, police freed 6-year-old surrogate-born twins from a cagelike structure in a hoarding apartment belonging to a 74-year-old single man, who had commissioned them at age 67 without any assessment of his fitness to parent.
Every one of these children would have been protected by the screening that adoption requires. None were protected by surrogacy law.
A long-standing legal concern
The legal consensus on paid genetic surrogacy has been remarkably consistent for nearly four decades. The New Jersey Supreme Court called it “illegal, perhaps criminal, and potentially degrading to women” when it voided the Baby M contract in 1988. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared such agreements unenforceable in 1998, citing the risk of exploitation of economically vulnerable women. Two U.N. special rapporteurs have concluded that commercial surrogacy, as currently practiced, amounts to the sale of children under international law. SB 250 asks Delaware to overturn that consensus in favor of an untested commercial experiment.
The bigger picture: What is being defined?
Delaware’s children need legislators who will read beyond the title of this bill. The word “equality” is doing enormous (and erroneous) work in SB 250, but the provisions it shelters have nothing to do with equal treatment under the law and everything to do with building a deregulated market in which the adults who want children face fewer safeguards than the ones who adopt them do.
The best interest of the child is ignored for the sake of an adult-centered framework, where the desires of the adults are fulfilled through enforceable contracts. This raises the question: Should the law treat children as gifts given from God to be protected or as outcomes to be arranged?
Wismer went to prison for selling a baby. Under SB 250, the same exchange becomes a protected legal right, provided the right paperwork is filed at the right time. The children on the other end of these contracts will not care about the timing.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
