Surrogacy under siege in Italy

 Opposition to surrogacy in Italy has taken aim at the babies of same sex couples.

The NYT has the story:

Surrogacy Emerges as the Wedge Issue for Italy’s Hard Right. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has ordered municipalities to stop certifying foreign birth certificates for same-sex couples who used surrogacy, leaving some babies in a legal limbo.  By Jason Horowitz

"the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni ordered municipalities to obey a court ruling made in December and stop certifying foreign birth certificates of children born to Italian same-sex couples through surrogacy, which is illegal in Italy.

"The decision has left Martino Libero and several other children suspended in a legal limbo, depriving them of automatic Italian citizenship and residency rights like access to the country’s free health care system and nursery school.

...

"Milan, a city that has long served as a cosmopolitan haven for same-sex couples in Italy, has for now complied with the Meloni government order and suspended issuing Italian birth certificates.

"Without official recognition, Libero Martino, 2 months old this month, will have to leave and re-enter the country every few months to remain legal. A court could eventually recognize one of the men as the biological father — they decline to say which one is the sperm donor — and then they could start a separate adoption process for the other.

...

"Ms. Meloni’s government has sought to shift the issue away from the status of the children to the practice of surrogacy, which, while legal in the United States and Canada, is illegal or restricted in much of Europe outside of Greece, Ukraine and a few other countries. In Italy, home of the Vatican, it is not only illegal, but it is also widely opposed, including among Catholic corners of the center-left opposition.

...

"Prominent members of Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party have called surrogacy a crime “even worse than pedophilia,” in which gay couples, one of whom is usually the biological father, seek to “pass off” children as their own and mistake “children for Smurfs,” saying gay couples can uniquely afford surrogacy, even though it is overwhelmingly used more by heterosexual couples.

"The party is floating a proposal, made by Ms. Meloni when she was a member of Parliament, to make Italians’ seeking of surrogate births abroad — what she had called “procreative tourism” — illegal and “punishable with three months to two years of prison and a fine of 600,000 to a million euros.”

...

"In an interview shortly before her election, as her young daughter ran around her in a Sardinia courtyard, Ms. Meloni said she opposed gay marriage, not because she was homophobic — “I’ve got many, many homosexual friends” — but because she saw it as a step to same-sex adoption, which she opposed, and which the Roman Catholic Church successfully lobbied to exclude from a civil unions law passed in 2016.

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Earlier:

Monday, February 20, 2023

Will Italy criminalize foreign surrogacy?

This Supreme Court term has many cases on repugnant transactions and controversial markets

 The newly conservative-dominated Supreme Court is ready for its second term, and has a docket full of what readers of this blog know I think of as controversial markets and repugnant transactions.  While previous court decisions have expanded individual rights on these subjects, such as abortion, the present court seems to view them not as individual rights but as States' rights.  But that may be too simple a characterization of this brand of conservative jurisprudence. We're going to learn more about that as the term plays out. (I'm personally most worried about what decisions will be made about election law, because of the effect those decisions may have on future decisions.)

Here's the NYT on the coming caseload:

As New Term Starts, Supreme Court Is Poised to Resume Rightward Push. The justices return to the bench on Monday to start a term that will include major cases on affirmative action, voting and discrimination against gay couples. Several will take on questions about race.  By Adam Liptak

"The last Supreme Court term ended with a series of judicial bombshells in June that eliminated the right to abortion, established a right to carry guns outside the home and limited efforts to address climate change. As the justices return to the bench on Monday, there are few signs that the court’s race to the right is slowing.

"The new term will feature major disputes on affirmative action, voting, religion, free speech and gay rights. And the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority seems poised to dominate the new term as it did the earlier one.

...

"Several of the biggest cases concern race, in settings as varied as education, voting and adoptions.

"They include challenges to the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. As in last term’s abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, longstanding precedents are at risk.

"The court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs meant to ensure educational diversity at colleges and universities, most recently in 2016. In an interview that year, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the issue had been permanently settled.

...

"Mr. Trump went on to name three members of the Supreme Court, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who succeeded Justice Ginsburg after her death in 2020.

"Those changes put more than 40 years of affirmative action precedents at risk, including Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court endorsed holistic admissions programs, saying it was permissible to consider race as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said she expected that “25 years from now,” the “use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

"The court seems poised to say that the time for change has arrived several years early in the two new cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, No. 20-1199, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, No. 21-707. They are set to be argued on Oct. 31.

...

"A challenge to the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which makes it hard for non-Native Americans to adopt Native children, may also turn on whether the court views those safeguards as based on race, making them vulnerable to constitutional review. The law at issue in the case, Haaland v. Brackeen, No. 21-376, was a response to a history of children being removed from their tribes and heritage; arguments will be heard on Nov. 9.

*******

I think the two university affirmative action cases are no longer as closely linked as they were before the appointment by President Biden of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has two degrees from Harvard, and may have to recuse herself. See this cryptic note from the Supreme Court's website: 20-1199 STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS V. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

*********

Earlier:

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

What might the assisted reproduction gray market look like, post Roe?

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Adoption is complex even when it doesn't include State and Tribal rights...

Spain's stolen babies (from the NY Times)

The sale of babies is widely regarded as repugnant, but it has been used for political purposes in the dark days of Spain, and Argentina.  Here's a story from the Sunday NY Times recounting some of the history, focusing on one woman's search for her birth mother.

 Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s ‘Stolen Babies’ Are Learning the Truth. Thousands of Spanish children were taken from hospitals and sold to wealthy Catholic families. By Nicholas Casey, Sept. 27, 2022

"Up to the early 1930s, Spain had been among Europe’s most progressive countries, allowing for married couples to divorce and women to seek abortions. Under Franco, those rights were swiftly rescinded. Contraception was outlawed, adultery was criminalized and women lost the right to vote. Newspapers were censored, and many books were banned altogether, including those of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most renowned poet and playwright. (Lorca had already been murdered by Nationalists during the civil war.) 

...

"But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. ... Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun.

...

"Some nuns — aided by doctors, nurses and midwives — began to abduct babies to meet demand. In certain cases, the nuns still managed to persuade mothers to give up their children willingly, though many say they were coerced into surrendering their newborns. Others say they were sedated in the delivery room and then told, when they woke up, that their babies had died. In reality, the children had been sold to other families.

"Franco’s regime was not the only one to use the theft of children as a political weapon. In Argentina, as many as 30,000 people were “disappeared” by a military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and gave their orphaned children to right-wing families, prompting decades of protests and demands that the government investigate. In Spain, people often refer to the Argentine cases as offering a precedent. But unlike Argentina, Spain never established a truth-and-reconciliation commission. In fact, the country did the opposite, passing a broad amnesty law in the years following Franco’s death that absolved members of the regime of most of their past crimes. While those responsible for the abductions were not explicitly granted amnesty, the policy did reflect a consensus that had emerged in post-Franco Spain — to avoid confronting the dark legacy of the dictatorship. The agreement even had a name: the Pact of Forgetting. Spain’s leaders, on both the right and left, espoused the need for peaceful democracy, even if it meant sacrificing popular calls for justice. “Let’s not disturb the graves and hurl bones at one another — let the historians do their job,” said José María Aznar, a former prime minister, in a speech years later.

...

"In 2004, the conservative government was defeated by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a Socialist who came into office with plans to address the taboos of the past.... at Zapatero’s urging, Spain passed its historical memory law in 2007, which condemned the crimes of the Franco era and recognized its victims for the first time.

"A new generation of victims began to emerge — this time led not by the mothers who had lost their babies but by their children, now grown, who were seeking their biological parents. They formed grass-roots organizations like the National Association for Irregular Adoption Victims, which estimated that as many as 15 percent of the adoptions in Spain from 1965 to 1990 were performed without consent of the birth parents."

Foster care in the U.S.

 In the U.S., foster care isn't regarded as a profession (it's repugnant to pay foster parents, so they just get a stipend for childcare expenses). So we don't have a high quality foster care system.  But we're learning more about it from careful studies, and there's some interstate variation that might yield further evidence about best practices.  Here's a recent survey.

Economics of Foster Care by Anthony Bald, Joseph J. Doyle Jr., Max Gross & Brian Jacob NBER WORKING PAPER 29906 DOI 10.3386/w29906, April 2022

Abstract: Foster care provides substitute living arrangements to protect maltreated children. The practice is remarkably common: it is estimated that 5 percent of children in the United States are placed in foster care at some point during childhood. These children exhibit poor outcomes as children and adults, and economists have begun to estimate the causal relationship between foster care and life outcomes. This paper describes tradeoffs in child welfare policy and provides background on the latest trends in foster care practice to highlight areas most in need of rigorous evidence. These trends include efforts to prevent foster care on the demand side and to improve foster home recruitment on the supply side. With increasing data availability and a growing interest in evidence-based practices, there are opportunities for economic research to inform policies that protect vulnerable children.

Same sex marriage now legal in Switzerland, by popular referendum

 The BBC has the story (it happened last month, but I wasn't paying attention):

Switzerland same-sex marriage: Two-thirds of voters back yes

"Some 64% supported the measure, making it one of the last countries in western Europe to legalise same-sex marriage.

...

"In the build up to the vote, church groups and conservative political parties opposed the idea, saying it would undermine the traditional family.

"Switzerland has allowed same-sex couples to register partnerships since 2007, but some rights are restricted.

"The measure will make it possible for same-sex couples to adopt unrelated children and for married lesbian couples to have children through sperm donation.

"It makes Switzerland the 30th country in the world to adopt same-sex marriage.

...

"Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter said the first same-sex marriages would take place in July next year.

"Whoever loves each other and wants to get married will be able to do so, regardless of whether it is two men, two women, or a man and a woman," she said.

...

"Over the last 20 years, most countries in western Europe have recognised same-sex marriage. However, in Switzerland many big decisions go to a nationwide ballot, and this can slow down major changes to social legislation.

"The new law, which had the backing of the Swiss government and all major political parties except the People's Party, was passed by parliament in December."

Can same sex couples adopt and foster children in need? It's complicated...

 When religion and non-discrimination contest with each other in court, the decisions sometimes rely on the details of the case:

The WSJ has the story:

Supreme Court Exempts Catholic Foster-Care Agency From Nondiscrimination Law. Catholic Social Services is entitled to city contract despite Philadelphia ordinance requiring contractors to treat same-sex couples equally, court rules  By Jess Bravin

"The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that a Catholic social-service agency was entitled to a Philadelphia contract even if its religious views prevented it from compliance with local policies forbidding discrimination against same-sex couples.

"The court’s decision, by Chief Justice John Roberts, was a narrow one, stopping short of fundamentally extending the accommodations for religious exercise that Catholic Social Services—and several conservative justices in concurring opinions—argued the Constitution required.

"The city of Philadelphia contracts with private agencies to screen foster parents for children in need. While a broad nondiscrimination policy is written into its contracts, Chief Justice Roberts observed that the agreements also authorize the city’s human-services department to grant exceptions.

"Catholic Social Services, which for decades has received city contracts, was entitled to such an exception, the chief justice wrote, because the city can grant them for secular reasons. The city’s interest in equal treatment for same-sex couples—and in caring for children in need—wasn’t impaired, the court found, because some 20 other agencies with foster-service contracts are available to work with married LGBT foster parents."

International adoptions temporarily halted in the Netherlands

 The decision by the Netherlands to indefinitely ban international adoptions has generated some controversy.  

The NY Times has the story:

Netherlands Halts Adoptions From Abroad After Exposing Past Abuses.  An inquiry found systemic abuses like child trafficking, lack of record-keeping and government complicity until 1998. Practices have since improved, the government said, but not enough.   by  Claire Moses

"The Netherlands has temporarily halted all adoptions from abroad after an investigation found that the government had failed to act on known abuses, including child theft and trafficking, between 1967 and 1998.

“Adoptees deserve recognition for mistakes that were made in the past,” Sander Dekker, the minister for legal protection, said on Monday, as the results of the investigative report were made public

...

"The government formed an independent commission in 2018 to look into international abuses after a lawsuit showed that the Dutch government had been involved in an illegal adoption from Brazil in 1980, and pointed to the possibility of more such cases. Experts said they knew of no other Western country that had stopped international adoptions.

"In its report, the commission said it had found systematic wrongdoing, including pressuring poor women to give up their babies, falsifying documents, engaging in fraud and corruption, and, in effect, buying and selling children. In some cases, the Dutch government was aware of misdeeds in adoptions from Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, but did nothing about them and allowed them to continue, the report said.

"“The intercountry adoption system itself served as a kind of ‘child-laundering’ mechanism, as children who were put up for adoption under suspect circumstances could be transformed into legitimately adopted children,” the commission reported. It described the creation of an adoption market and the conversion of children into “tradable goods,” a system that could be “categorized as an abuse.”

"The government froze new applications for international adoptions, though pending adoptions can be completed, Mr. Dekker said.

...

“We need a permanent stop,” to adoptions from abroad, Mr. Westra said.

"Many others disagreed.

"Sander Vlek, the chairman of the National Organization for Adoptive Parents and the father of two adopted children from South Africa, said the decision to suspend international adoptions was made hastily, without input from Parliament or scientific research about contemporary adoptions.

“This severely disadvantages children for whom parents will no longer be available,” he said.

...

"Another group, the Dutch Adoption Foundation, said in a statement that the years of misdeeds were “painful and sad,” but warned that a ban could push adoptions into a black market. The foundation urged Parliament not to agree to the suspension in international adoptions.

"The foundation said it was “unpleasantly surprised” about the “draconian” decision. “This affects the children who gain most from adoption,” it said."

HT: Stephanie Wang

Adoption is complex even when it doesn't include State and Tribal rights...

Foster care and adoption are always complex, and never more so when not only families and children are involved, but also States and Native American tribes.  Here's a NY Times story on a complex case, involving a little boy and his sister, the family who adopted the boy and would like to adopt his sister, the biological mother who would like to see the adoption go through, the tribe that opposes it, and the courts.

Who Can Adopt a Native American Child? A Texas Couple vs. 573 Tribes

A bitter custody battle threatens affirmative action laws, tribal rights, and the future of one little girl.

"Zachary, or A.L.M. as he is called in legal papers, has a Navajo birth mother, a Cherokee birth father and adoptive parents, Jennifer and Chad Brackeen, neither of whom is Native American. The Brackeens are challenging a federal law governing Native American children in state foster care: It requires that priority to adopt them be given to Native families, to reinforce the children’s tribal identity.

"Last fall, a federal judge ruled in the Brackeens’ favor, declaring that the law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, was unconstitutional — in part, he said, because it was based on race.

"The case is now before a federal appeals court. Whoever loses is almost certain to ask the Supreme Court to hear it."

Adoption, interracial adoption, and repugnance

The Washington Post looks back on the history of adoption. (Even adoption can arouse repugnance...):

A white couple, a mixed-race baby and a forbidden adoption
In 1966 in the nation’s capital, what Kara and Frank Speltz wanted to do simply wasn’t allowed.

"Longing for a child, the white couple, who were involved in the city’s civil rights struggles, began to research how they could adopt an African American child instead. A year after their wedding, they contacted D.C.’s Department of Public Welfare and Junior Village, the city’s overcrowded home for orphaned and destitute children. Both organizations turned them down, saying it was against their policies to allow adoptions between whites and blacks.
...
"In segregated, post-World War II America, children of color and mixed-race children were considered “hard to place” in adoption agency parlance. Most agencies at the time used a policy of “matching,” which required that children be placed with families who looked like them or came from the same racial, religious or ethnic backgrounds, according to Matine T. Spence, professor of history at the University of Iowa.

"Some white couples adopted Asian or Native American children, but whites officially adopting African American children were much rarer, Spence said. The first recorded case occurred in 1948 in Minnesota.

“Originally, the main impulse behind race matching in adoption was a white-supremacist, segregationist impulse,” Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy said in a 2003 Harvard Magazine interview.

"At the time, many states had miscegenation laws barring interracial marriage. Maryland even had a law until 1957 that said it was illegal for “a white woman to bear a child fathered by a negro.”

"Still, formal statewide bans on interracial adoption were rare, Kennedy told the magazine: “It was thought to be beyond discussion — it was so obviously wrong that there was no need for a law.”

"The District did not have an official law on the books. either. But because interracial adoption was considered so taboo, private and public agencies and judges, which had the authority to approve or reject adoptions, enforced an unwritten policy to bar it, Spence said.
...
"n 1969, there were 4,336 black children placed for adoption in the United States, with 1,447 of them placed with white families. In 1971, 7,420 African American children were adopted, with 2,574 placed with white families.

Interracial adoption was — and remains — controversial in the United States.
In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers asserted that such arrangements constituted a form of “cultural genocide.”

“With that condemnation, the number of white-black adoptions quickly plummeted, according to Kennedy’s 2003 book, “Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.”
***********

Tax credit for adopting a child

Philip Held draws my attention to this oped from the WSJ, by By Jedd Medefind (who is president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, and formerly led the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives (2008-09)).

The Adoption Tax Credit Saves Money
The foster system costs over $25,000 a year for each child.

"The adoption tax credit, which provides up to $13,570 to aid families in adopting a child, has teetered on a razor’s edge in tax-reform negotiations. But the bills passed by the House and Senate both ultimately preserved it, and now the conference committee should follow suit. Eliminating the credit would harm children who need families, while hitting America in the pocketbook.

"There are more than 115,000 children in foster care today. About half of them will be adopted, but without the tax credit that number would drop significantly. The rest “age out” of foster care, likely without family for life.
...
"Families don’t adopt to get a tax credit. But the costs of going through the process—and then meeting the needs of a child coming from a hard place—can be a major barrier. After the adoption tax credit first became widely available in 1997, adoptions from foster care nearly doubled in three years.

"A drop in adoptions would mean fewer [children] finding families. It would also push government spending higher in many areas. Government’s replacement for parents—the foster system—costs taxpayers well over $25,000 a year for each child, according to a 2011 report by the National Council for Adoption. That doesn’t count spending on a huge number of other programs that chip in, including food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families."
***********


Here's the 2011 report.
"Comparing the per-child cost ofsubsidized adoption from fostercare with the cost of maintaininga child in foster care, one concludes that the child adoptedfrom foster care costs the publiconly 40 percent as much as thechild who remains in fostercare. The difference in cost perchild per year amounts to$15,480."
**************

I can't help seeing a strong analogy between

• adoption saving kids from foster care;
• kidney transplants saving patients from dialysis; and
• adoptive parents being analogous to kidney donors...

Who can be parents in Italy? (Adoption by same sex couples...)

In Italy, Confusion and Division Over Same-Sex Parenting
Court ruling highlights conflicting views over the rights of homosexual couples as parents

"An Italian court’s decision to recognize two homosexual men as the fathers of twin children has exposed confusion and a deep divide in the country over parenting rights of same-sex couples.

It was disclosed earlier this week that a court in the northern Italian city of Trento granted the men full rights as parents to their six-year-old twins, who were born in Canada through surrogacy.

The gay community hailed the decision—the first to accord full parental rights to a non-biological father—as historic in a country that last year became one of the last in Europe to approve civil unions for gay couples. But the ruling kicked up controversy right away, with the head of the main group opposing the civil-unions bill saying it marked a “sad day for Italy.”
...
"The 2016 legislation approving civil unions stopped short of addressing broader questions of parental rights and other family law issues for same-sex couples. Political opposition was so fierce that lawmakers scotched any reference to adoption or parental rights to get the bill passed. As a result, Italian law today recognizes only the biological parent, and joint adoption by gay couples isn’t allowed.

Italian courts have been left to fill that gap in a haphazard way, with some judges approving adoption requests by gay partners of a biological parent and others turning them down. The result: up to 1,000 children of gay couples are caught in a legal limbo.
...
"Riccardo and Lorenzo, the Trento couple who released only their first names, sought to break new ground. The pair, an entrepreneur and a civil servant in their 50s who have been together for more than 20 years, were married in Canada. Their twins were born in Canada via surrogacy, a practice that is illegal in Italy. Canadian law allowed both men to be listed as the twins’ fathers on the birth certificate.

Once back in Italy, the couple sought to have the Italian state recognize the Canadian birth certificate, seeking a parental status that affords more rights than adoption in Italy. An adoptive parent’s relatives have no legal relation with the adopted children, who therefore have no legal status when it comes, for instance, to inheritance from grandparents. The court granted the couple’s request, effectively recognizing both men as fathers.

“[We] sought no more than to see our children’s legal family rights protected, just as with other families,” they said in a statement.

Nichi Vendola, a gay Italian politician and leader in the fight for same-sex rights, hailed the decision. “When you raise, care for and love a child, you’re a father, mother, parent,” he said.

In Italy, however, court decisions don’t set legal precedent, so the legislative gap remains for parliament to fill. With Italy headed to elections this year or next, there is little political appetite to take up the bruising battle over parenting rights again."

Two California surrogacy stories from Europe, and a (pretty sad) one from Italy via Russia

Here's a late breaking story about an Italian couple that enlisted a surrogate in Russia, had the child taken from them by Italian authorities, and has just lost their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

ECHR rules in surrogate case--Court overrules its previous verdict
 "(ANSA) - Strasbourg, January 24 - The European Court of Human Rights said in a ruling Tuesday that Italy had not breached the rights of a couple after taking away a child born to a surrogate mother in Russia with whom they had no biological ties. The child was taken away from the couple after they returned from Russia following DNA testing showed that neither the man or the woman were its biological parent, even though a Russian birth certificate put them as parents.
    Tuesday's ruling overrides a previous decision made by the Strasbourg court in January 2015. "The Court considered that the contested measures had pursued the legitimate aims of preventing disorder and protecting the rights and freedoms of others," the ECHR said. "On this last point, it regarded as legitimate the Italian authorities' wish to reaffirm the State's exclusive competence to recognise a legal parent-child relationship - and this solely in the case of a biological tie or lawful adoption - with a view to protecting children".
    The child has been adopted by another family."

"PARADISO-CAMPANELLI VERSUS ITALY"
Surrogate motherhood: stopped by the European Court for Human Rights. The Chambre supports the Italian Court
"(Strasbourg) “The Court rules that the relationship between the applicants and the child is not part of family life”: this has been ruled by the Grande Chambre of the European Court of Human Rights, issued today about “Paradiso-Campanelli versus Italy”. The case is about an Italian couple living in the province of Campobasso, who went to Russia in 2011: through a private organisation, the married couple had had a child from a “surrogate mother” who has no biological relationship with the couple. Under Russian law, the couple could record the child as their own child, but, once back in Italy, the Court refused to record the child as the couple’s child and, after finding there was no biological relationship, it ruled that the child should be taken away from the applicants (the child was about eight months old back then) and then adopted by a different family. Today’s ruling overturns a ruling issued by the Court in January 2015: it claimed that taking the child away from the first couple breached article no. 8 of the Convention on Human Rights (right to private and family life), regardless of the child’s interest. The new ruling states, instead, that the Italian Court had actually ruled in the child’s interest and also stopped surrogate motherhood."

HT: Dorothea Kuebler
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Here are two earlier stories, set in England and Italy, from the blog Above the Law. about surrogacy as a repugnant transaction (at home) and the resulting fertility tourism (to California):

1."British aristocrats, the Viscountess and Viscount Weymouth... welcomed their second son on December 30, 2016. In what is likely a first for the British aristocracy, the child was born via surrogate.

The baby boy is the second grandson of the 7^th Marquess of Bath. I’ll just assume this is kind of a big deal in England. Lady Weymouth suffers from medical complications that made a second pregnancy too dangerous. So the couple turned to a California surrogate. To their credit, they are reportedly* sharing their story to help remove some of the stigma associated with surrogacy. Welcome and all hail the Right Honourable Henry Thynn. No typo. Honorable is spelled that way on purpose."

*They explain the differences between surrogacy in California and Britain as follows:

"Ceawlin explains that the US state has the most advanced legal system for the procedure. 
For example, it allows money to be exchanged, while Britain insists no more than expenses can be paid to the woman who will carry the child.
‘Obviously, we would have preferred to do it closer to home, but the legal system in Britain has not evolved with medical technology, so any contract with a surrogate is not binding,’ he says. 
‘Even if the baby is 100 per cent yours (ie the sperm and egg) the surrogate still has the right to keep the baby. California has the most evolved legal system in the world [for surrogacy].’ 

2. "Italy Is Not A Great Place To Be Gay. The parents of the twins are a gay Italian couple. While the U.S. made the move to permit gay marriage in 2015, Italy still denies same-sex couples the right to marry. Italy also denies gay couples the right to adopt children. Italian same-sex couples can’t even adopt their own family members through kinship adoptions. And, unsurprisingly, there is no same-sex step-parent adoption since gays can’t marry in the first place.

Having limited family-building options, the couple turned to an egg donor and California surrogate to conceive their children, and complete the family they dreamed of. Two embryos were transferred to the same surrogate. One was a donor egg fertilized with sperm from dad 1; the second was a donor egg, but this time fertilized with sperm from dad 2. The twins are biologically half-siblings with the same birthday. The conditions for an Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito situation probably couldn’t have been set any higher.

This Is What Partial A Victory Looks Like. The fathers returned from the United States to Italy with their twins in tow. But the Italian government initially refused to recognize the children as (1) sons of the fathers, and 2) eligible for Italian citizenship. The fathers’ appealed, and were able to obtain what many consider a victory.

The court determined that despite the children being born to a gay couple (strike 1), using donor eggs (strike 2 – donating eggs and/or sperm is illegal in Italy) and to a surrogate (strike 3 – surrogacy is also illegal in Italy), it would be in the children’s best interest for Italy to recognize the parent-child relationship. The court awarded parental rights of each individual twin to the genetically related father."  

(NB: the two twins aren't legally related in Italy...)

"It Could Have Been Much Worse. While this was not a complete victory, it was a step forward for Italy. In prior cases, an Italian court has denied parentage to both parents — or even taken away a surrogate-born child from the parents and made the child a ward of the state! In an infamous case from 2014, an infertile couple in their 50s — who had been turned down for adoption three times — turned to surrogacy. They paid a Ukrainian surrogate €25,000 to carry a child conceived with donated genetic material. When they brought the child back to Italy, the government refused to register the child as theirs and charged them with fraud. Sadly, the court went further, ruling that the child, whose genetic and surrogate parents were unknown, was a “child of no one.” Despite even an Italian prosecutor advising that the child be allowed to stay with the intended parents, the court ruled that the child must become a ward of the state and put up for adoption. Heartbreaking.

Europe’s Anti-Surrogate Tendencies. Italy is not an anomaly. Most of Western Europe (including France, Spain, and Germany, among others) bans surrogacy. This has led to a number of troubling cases when Europeans go elsewhere for surrogacy and then try to bring their children home. In France, for instance, several surrogacy cases have involved French courts denying parental rights. But couples have had success appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. There, a child’s right to his or her parents has prevailed over French domestic law."

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2016 Baby Markets 10th Anniversary International Congress in April

Here's the call for papers:

2016 Baby Markets 10th Anniversary International Congress

April 1-3, 2016 • University of California, Irvine School of Law

The Baby Markets International Congress celebrates the 10th Anniversary of the Baby Markets Roundtable series founded by the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy's Director, Chancellor’s Professor Michele Goodwin.

The Center welcomes abstracts engaging adoption, assisted reproduction, surrogacy trafficking, custodial parenting, care-giving, foster care, legal implications, and more through historical and contemporary lenses. View the full list of Congress themes »

Congress attendees will have the opportunity to submit papers to the Organizing Committee for publication in UC Irvine Law Review. The Organizing Committee will choose a select number of proceedings from the Congress for publication. Papers may also be accepted for the Second Edition of Professor Michele Goodwin’s Baby Markets volume.

All abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2016. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words.

Black market for babies in Malaysia

Al Jazeera files this report: BABIES FOR SALE:  Malaysia's underground baby trade

"The babies offered for sale come from a variety of women. Some are poor migrant workers who, by law, are not allowed to have children in the country. Others come from Malaysian women, including some who are forced to give up their babies to avoid the stigma associated with having a child out of wedlock.

"The buyers are often childless couples desperate to start a family and frustrated with the country's convoluted adoption procedures. But activists say some babies are bought for more sinister purposes, sometimes by syndicates who groom children for paedophiles.
...
"During our investigation into Malaysia's baby trade, it was easy to find a woman who wanted to sell her unborn child.

One Filipino who was six months pregnant offered her baby boy for $2,000, plus the cost of her monthly check-ups and the baby's delivery fee.

"The baby is healthy and actually the baby is starting to move now," the expectant mother told our undercover reporters who were posing as a couple who were unable to have children.

The woman said she had been working in Kuala Lumpur, but her work visa had expired. Migrant workers are not allowed to bear children in Malaysia, and her child would be stateless if born in the country."

Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange

Here's a new paper on matching for adoption:

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange Improves Its Matching Process
Vincent W. Slaugh, Mustafa Akan, Onur Kesten
Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
vslaugh@cmu.edu, akan@cmu.edu, okesten@andrew.cmu.edu
M. Utku Unver 
Department of Economics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467 unver@bc.edu

Abstract: We utilize operations research and market design frameworks to improve the e ectiveness of a recommender system for children in state custody and prospective adoptive families, and describe the implementation of changes to the Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE). The purpose of PAE is to nd permanent families for hard-to-place children in state custody, and it provides match recommendations to over 200 children each year. After describing PAE's operation, we use data provided by PAE to analyze the relationship between child attributes and adoption outcomes. With the primary objective of improving adoption outcomes, our recommendations cover the information that PAE collects to make recommendations, the decision rules that produce child-family match suggestions, and the interactions between PAE and system participants. We demonstrate the value of improved information about families and children using a discrete-event simulation of PAE. As a result of our collaboration, PAE has begun to collect new information from families and children to better predict match success, to use a spreadsheet tool that provides a more nuanced comparison of family preferences and child attributes, and to change the match recommendation process to reduce strategic manipulation by families. A survey of child case workers in Pennsylvania and interviews with PAE managers guided these changes. Insights from this project are relevant to other adoption exchanges, as well as the placement of children in foster care.
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A related paper, which I blogged about earlier, is here:
Child-Adoption Matching: Preferences for Gender and Race, 2013, by  Mariagiovanna Baccara, Allan Collard-Wexler, and Leonardo Felli, and Leeat Yariv, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming. 

A Spanish market in stolen babies?

In a chilling story, the NY Times reports Spain Confronts Decades of Pain Over Lost Babies

"Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen.Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks.

"The cases, which could eventually run into the thousands, are jolting a country still shaken by the spoken and unspoken terrors of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s rule.
...
"Spain’s judiciary was forced into action after Anadir, an association formed to represent people searching for missing children or parents, filed its first complaints in late January. Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido announced on June 18 that 849 cases were being examined, adding that 162 already could be classified as criminal proceedings because of evidence pointing to abductions.
...
"The cases of disappeared infants stretch from 1950 to 1990, continuing well after Franco’s death in 1975. It is not known whether government officials played any role.
...
"Antonio Barroso, the president of Anadir, said he believed that over time Spain became a hub for gangs operating an international trade, with many newborns sold into adoption overseas.
...
"Mr. Barroso, 42, founded Anadir last year, after being told by a friend that they were both adopted. He took DNA samples from the woman he had always known as his mother and confronted her after tests showed that his sample and hers were not a match. She admitted paying a nun for a baby and misleading her son about his birth for decades.
...
"As in Mr. Barroso’s case, a few nuns have confessed to selling children, but without suggesting that they were part of a criminal network.
...
"During the Franco regime and in its immediate aftermath, “you simply didn’t challenge what an official told you,” said María Luisa Puro Rodríguez, a former tobacco factory worker who claims that her newborn was abducted in 1976 from a Malaga hospital. “We now thankfully live in a society where it is normal to question what we hear,” she said. “I’ve learned this bitter lesson and am now ready to fight all the way to find out what actually happened.”

Adoptions by same sex couples

Adoptions Rise by Same-Sex Couples, Despite Legal Barriers

"Same-sex couples are explicitly prohibited from adopting in only two states — Utah and Mississippi — but they face significant legal hurdles in about half of all other states, particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states.

"Despite this legal patchwork, the percentage of same-sex parents with adopted children has risen sharply. About 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child in the house in 2009, up from just 8 percent in 2000"

Adoption as a (less) repugnant transaction

You wouldn't think that adoption would sometimes be regarded as a repugnant transaction, i.e. as something that some people didn't want other people to do, but in fact there have in many times and places been laws and customs that prevent certain sorts of people from adopting certain other sorts of people, e.g. inter-racial or inter-ethnic or inter-religious adoptions of various sorts. (And of course there have also been restrictions barring certain kinds of couples, e.g. same sex couples, from any kind of adoption.)

The Telegraph reports that things are changing in England in this regard:

Adoption shake-up: new guidelines will stop 'social-engineering': "New adoption guidelines have been announced by the Government to break down the barriers faced by potential parents and children."

"Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said some of the limitations put on adopters in the past - based on ethnicity, sexual orientation and faith - was ''social engineering of the worst kind''.
Outlining the adoption guidance being introduced, the minister said: ''At the moment, the system simply doesn't allow many of those people who are desperate to help the chance to give young people and children a loving home.
''It has always been the case unfortunately that far too many children are growing up in circumstances where sadly they won't have the architecture or stability that means they can achieve everything of which they are capable.''
The Government said progress in adoption has stalled in recent years, with the number of children placed for adoption falling by 15 per cent between March 2009 and 2010, and more children waiting longer to be adopted.
Black children took over 50 per cent longer on average to be placed for adoption than children from other ethnic groups, and children over five were four times less likely to be adopted compared to children under five in the last year.

Mr Gove said: ''What I do find difficult to accept is that we've created over time a web of rules that mean that we are not always putting the interests of children first.
''We all know that the length time which children spend in institutional care once they be been taken into care is far too long, when those children could be adopted by loving parents.''
He said the average amount of time children spend in care before being adopted is 21 months.
''One of the reasons that they sound so long is that for far too long, we have made an idea of the perfect the enemy of the good,'' he said.
Speaking about the barriers faced by adopters previously, he said: ''We said that this particular couple can't adopt because, in the past, they might have the wrong sexuality, they might even have the wrong ethnic background.
''It could be that they're too young, it could be that their social background doesn't make for perfect match. That sort of thinking is social engineering of the worst kind.''

Elton John and husband have a son by a surrogate mom

Lots of formerly repugnant transactions get mentioned in this brief, happy story: Elton John, Husband Welcome New Son

"Elton John must have been really nice this past year. The legendary singer and songwriter and his husband welcomed a new child into their lives on Christmas Day.

"The "Benny and the Jets" singer and filmmaker David Furnish are the parents to a 7-pound, 15-ounce boy named Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John. The baby was delivered through an unidentified surrogate mother.

"The child is the first for John, 63. Us Weekly confirmed the adoption on Monday.

"...In the past, the British native attempted to adopt an HIV-positive child from the Ukraine with Furnish, but was forbidden to by government officials due to both John's age and marital status."

Baby Markets

I've just ordered this new book (only in part to find out why the ratio of female to male authors is drawn from such a different distribution than most discussions of market design and repugnance...):

Baby Markets
Money and the New Politics of Creating Families
Edited by Michele Bratcher Goodwin
University of Minnesota
Published February 2010
View Table of Contents as PDF (94KB) Baby Markets
Cambridge University Press
9780521513739

Contents
PART ONE. WHAT MAKES A MARKET? EFFICIENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND RELIABILITY OR GETTING THE BABIES WE WANT

1 Baby Markets
Michele Bratcher Goodwin

2 The Upside of Baby Markets
Martha Ertman

3 Price and Pretense in the Baby Market
Kimberly D. Krawiec

4 Bringing Feminist Fundamentalism to U.S. Baby Markets
Mary Anne Case

5 Producing Kinship through the Marketplaces of Transnational Adoption
Sara Dorow

PART TWO. SPACE AND PLACE: REPRODUCING AND REFRAMING SOCIAL NORMS OF RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND OTHERNESS

6 Adoption Laws and Practices: Serving Whose Interests?
Ruth-Arlene W. Howe

7 International Adoption: The Human Rights Issues
Elizabeth Bartholet

8 Heterosexuality as a Prenatal Social Problem: Why Parents and Courts Have a Taste for Heterosexuality
José Gabilondo

9 Transracial Adoption of Black Children: An Economic Analysis
Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Daniel Pollack

PART THREE.SPECTRUMS AND DISCOURSES: RIGHTS, REGULATIONS, AND CHOICE

10 Reproducing Dreams
Naomi Cahn

11 Why Do Parents Have Rights?: The Problem of Kinship in Liberal Thought
Maggie Gallagher


12 Free Markets, Free Choice?: A Market Approach to Reproductive Rights
Debora L. Spar

13 Commerce and Regulation in the Assisted Reproduction Industry
John A. Robertson

14 Ethics within Markets or a Market for Ethics?: Can Disclosure of Sperm Donor Identity Be Effectively Mandated?
June Carbone and Paige Gottheim

PART FOUR.THE ETHICS OF BABY AND EMBRYO MARKETS

15 Egg Donation for Research and Reproduction: The Compensation Conundrum
Nanette R. Elster

16 Eggs, Nests, and Stem Cells
Lisa C. Ikemoto

17 Where Stem Cell Research Meets Abortion Politics: Limits on Buying and Selling Human Oocytes
Michelle Oberman, Leslie Wolf, and Patti Zettler

PART FIVE.TENUOUS GROUNDS AND BABY TABOOS

18 Risky Exchanges
Viviana A. Zelizer

19 Giving In to Baby Markets
Sonia Suter

Concluding Thoughts
Michele Bratcher Goodwin


HT: Kim Krawiec