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In one of the more shocking underreported stories from recent months, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is attempting to strip legal parentage from families who conceive children using a genetic donor, launching an attack on one same-sex couple that has sweeping ramifications for thousands more—including heterosexual and adoptive parents. The Miami Herald reported last week that Uthmeier, a Republican appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, intervened in a routine case to argue that Florida’s surrogacy contract language violates the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery, and, more sweepingly, that the state constitution bars biological parents from transferring parental rights at all. These theories—which one far-right judge has already endorsed—would end both surrogacy and donor conception in Florida, while imperiling parents’ ability to adopt out their birth children. They would render some parents legal strangers to the children they are already raising, potentially leaving those kids without recognized parents at all.
