What Rights Are Owed to Children?

As Minnesota celebrated the sanctity of human life this week, Minnesota Family Council was honored to cohost the leaders of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, to educate Minnesota lawmakers on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy. Jennifer Lahl founded the CBC and continues to lead on bioethical issues with her experience both as a pediatric critical care nurse and her background in bioethics. Kallie Fell serves as the Executive Director of the CBC along with her work as a perinatal nurse. Their free documentaries provide insight on a variety of issues related to bioethics.

We also were honored to host Minnesota’s Dr. Amy Fisher from Allina who helps women and families restore reproductive health by addressing underlying diseases which manifest in the symptom of infertility. Even as Minnesota Family Council seeks to address the concerning practices of the fertility industry, we recognize the painful trial couples face as they walk through infertility. Restorative reproductive medicine (RRM) seeks to help families restore health by working with the body to achieve health rather than causing more harm to the body through the common practices of the fertility industry.

In IVF, sperm and eggs are collected from “donors” by fertility clinics, and fertility doctors seek to successfully create multiple embryos by fertilization in a petri dish. When the individuals providing the genetic material are not going to parent the child, those individuals are selling their own eggs and sperm.

After successful fertilization, the doctor tests the embryos to determine which embryos appear to have the healthiest genetic material or the desired characteristics by the individual(s) who will parent the child, once born.

Women who undergo egg extraction, whether for the purpose of having their own child or for a child whom another person will parent (through a surrogacy arrangement), are often not told the risks this process will pose to their own health. Risks include hyperstimulation to the ovaries due to superovulation, loss of fertility, and stroke. Since these women are not considered patients by the industry, there are no long-term studies associated with the impacts to women’s health which comes from subjecting women to high-dose fertility drugs.

For the embryos, the nascent lives undergoing IVF, it’s estimated based on limited reporting from the CDC that just over 2% of embryos created result in a live birth, and that between 7 and 8% of embryos created will even be transferred to a womb. For the vast majority of fertility clinics, life in its earliest form faces three paths: discarding as “unfit;” indefinite freezing; freezing for future implantation or research (and subsequent death); or eugenic testing to determine whether to implant.

In the context of surrogacy, IVF begins the process of the surrogacy transaction. Often surrogacy involves at least one party selling genetic material for fertilization, before fertilized embryo(s) are transferred to an unrelated woman to gestate the child. She is called the gestational surrogate. The gestational surrogate faces health risks of which she is often not fully informed. Although research is limited, pregnancies with an unrelated embryo face significantly higher rates of pre-eclampsia and hypertension, among other risks.

Once the child of surrogacy is born, he or she is taken from the only home and person ever known (the gestational surrogate) and given to “intended parent(s),” who may or may not be biologically related. Minnesota’s House of Representatives passed a bill to legalize commercial surrogacy during the 2024 legislative session [1]. If this bill had become state law, people from around the world could have paid Minnesota women to carry children for purchase, earning U.S. citizenship upon birth, before taking those children back to the child’s new home country.

This is happening in America already. In January 2024, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine shared a report disclosing the demographics of the foreign nationals seeking to pay for children born from surrogacy in the United States. The largest demographic group in the report were Chinese men over the age of 42. Legalizing the for-profit trade of children comes with severe consequences, bypassing the adoption review process which was developed with the best interests of the child as the central focal point.

The one question avoided by the fertility industry at large is the one question which must be answered: What rights are owed to children?

Minnesota Family Council stands with many other family organizations in drawing a bright line at children’s right to life and the right of children and women’s bodies to not be bought and sold.

[1] Note: the bill was not voted upon by the Minnesota Senate and therefore failed to become state law.

Minnesota Family Council's 2025 Legislative Strategy

After the November 2024 election, the Minnesota House of Representatives had split control—67 DFLers and 67 Republicans. In the Minnesota Senate, the DFL had a one-seat majority. Since the election, much has changed in the legislature. Senator Kari Dziedzic from Senate District 60, Minneapolis, passed away from cancer in December, leaving the Senate with split control between the parties until the special election on January 28. In the House, House District 40B winner DFLer Curtis Johnson is not a resident of the district. The special election for that district will also take place on January 28. Finally, House District 54A winner DFLer Brad Tabke won the election by 14 votes, but information has surfaced that 20 ballots were thrown away in the 54A election. A ruling on how to proceed with that election is forthcoming.

In the House of Representatives, Republicans are claiming a one-seat majority and plan to move forward with that majority until the January 28 election results. House Democrats are threatening not to participate in government next week if Republicans do not hold to the power sharing agreement, which was developed before information on 40B surfaced. Regardless of that procedure, the House of Representatives needs 68 votes to pass a bill from the chamber floor.

At this point, there are many questions on how the legislature will proceed next week.

Given the nature of the split government, we expect to see much of the legislative focus to be on the creation of the state budget. Budget negotiations will likely be the focal point of the session.

Regardless of session dynamics, Minnesota Family Council will remain focused on advancing good family policy and watchful to expose and thwart policy which negatively impacts families.

Some policies we expect are the following:

Supporting

Age Verification of Users of Commercial Pornography Websites

• Commercial pornography companies’ websites should be accessed by adults only, but most states in the union do not require the companies to check users’ age before granting access.

• A bipartisan movement is sweeping the nation to require that these companies verify potential users as adults before granting access to the sites.

• Minnesota Family Council is working to ensure that these companies are required by law to ensure that children do not gain access to their sites.

Opposing

Equal Rights Amendment

• The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed state constitutional amendment which grants constitutional protection to abortion and “gender identity.” The version which passed the Minnesota House in May 2024 did not include any constitutional protections for religious freedom. If passed by both chambers, proposed Minnesota constitutional amendments are voted upon by voters.

• Although different kinds of ERAs have passed the Minnesota House and Minnesota Senate, identical text must pass both chambers in a biennium; since this has not happened, the ERA has yet to fully pass both chambers and be presented to voters.

• If passed by the legislature and by voters in a subsequent election, the ERA would privilege males who “identify” as women at the expense of the safety and dignity of women and girls.

• Males would have a constitutional right in Minnesota to women and girls’ private facilities, grants, prisons, and athletics.

• In addition, the passage of the ERA would give constitutional protection to abortion until birth in Minnesota. Since the 2023 session, abortion until birth has been legal according to state statute, which does not provide as significant protection as the state constitution.

Physician-Assisted Suicide

• A perennial policy issue in Minnesota which has not yet passed into law, the assisted suicide language debated in 2024 would permit doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to an adult who has received a terminal diagnosis with 6 months or less to live.

• The language does not require a mental illness evaluation by a licensed mental health professional, a family notification, or a witness to the event.

• We are concerned that legalization of physician-assisted suicide would result in elder abuse, abuse of patients with disabilities, or abuse of other patient populations who are more expensive on the healthcare system. Because healthcare is expensive, and death is inexpensive, at what time does ‘right to die’ become ‘duty to die’?

Mobile Sports Gambling

• Another perennial policy issue, the passage of mobile sports betting would legalize a casino in the pocket of every Minnesotan.

• Large and profitable online gambling companies track users’ activity, prompting betting on not only the outcome of the game but also on details such as every coin toss and play of the game. The companies target the most addicted to their platforms, who are often young men or economically struggling individuals, drawing most of the company revenue from these customers.

• When mobile sports gambling has become legal, a direct links between this kind of gambling and depletion of family savings and domestic abuse have been measured, amongst other devastating societal effects.

Commercial Surrogacy

• A bill to legalize commercial surrogacy in Minnesota passed the House in 2024 but did not come up for a vote in the Minnesota Senate. This bill would legalize the for-profit trade of children to unrelated adult(s) in Minnesota.

• Through commercial surrogacy, sperm and eggs are purchased by the social parent(s) or donated before fertilization is achieved in fertility lab. The embryonic baby is then implanted into an unrelated woman who carries and births the child. The woman is paid for her services of gestating the child and the child is traded to unrelated adult(s) who become his or her social parent(s.)

• The bill which passed the Minnesota House did not place any restrictions on international trade of these children created through this process, opening the door for international human trafficking.

Minnesota Family Council works to defend our shared values of life, family, and religious freedom at the Minnesota legislature. Will you please pray that we would be successful in our efforts this legislative session? Please subscribe to our emails to get weekly session updates, including our Family Beacon podcast which is available on all podcast platforms and YouTube.