Ask a kid, any kid: What would you think if I kidnapped you from your mom and dad and gave you to a couple of strangers?
Would it help if I did it before you were old enough to remember? How about if I burned your original birth certificate and made an official government document that falsely certified those strangers as your original parents?
For that matter, ask an adult, any adult: How would you feel about an official state document listing a man as your mother? Would it raise any questions in your mind?
Imagine yourself learning from a DNA test that the people listed on your birth certificate are totally unrelated to you. So, you contact the office of vital statistics to identify your real mother, only to find that she was never recorded in any official document. She’s a cipher in the eyes of the state.
This is Wyoming, you say. That couldn’t happen here! But you are wrong. Wyoming’s legislature passed a law in 2021 that allows all of the above to happen.
Any kid born after Gov. Mark Gordon signed HB 73 - Birth certificates-gestational agreements into law faces the legal possibility that his or her birth certificate is falsified. Even those kids who were never kidnapped and given a false birth certificate will have nothing to distinguish their accurate birth certificate from the fraudulent ones.
By 2039 this crop of kids will be adults. Mark my words, they will not appreciate the chaos that HB 73 caused them.
HB 73 birth certificates-gestational agreements is not about adoption. When a child loses his birth parents, it’s a terrible situation for the child, but Wyoming adoption law had already contemplated those delicate situations where innocence might be protected from too much knowledge.
Under Wyoming adoption law, a new birth certificate can be made that doesn’t expunge the truth. Instead, it leaves a judge to decide who can see the true birth certificate, and when. But HB 73 denies the very existence of the original parents. Then, it uses the power and legitimacy of government to hide that deception.
And that’s not the worst of it.
Gestational agreements bypass the adoption process altogether. There is no home inspection. There is no screening of the prospective parents - not for substance abuse - not for physical abuse - not even whether they are on the sex offender registry!
Gestational agreements require zero due diligence to prevent the state from placing a child in danger. And they go to mendacious lengths to disable that child ever from researching hereditary diseases or making sure he is not marrying his sister.
The only requirement for a gestational agreement in Wyoming is money. That’s it. The birth mother doesn’t even need to be a citizen.
If you’re not outraged yet, here’s the deepest trauma that gestational agreements inflict. Without an ounce of empathy for the child, they contract to separate a newborn from the mother on the very day of birth.
Did any of the legislators who voted for this monstrosity pause to think that through?
Newborn babes can neither understand nor express the pain of being torn from the only mother they have ever known. But they feel it deeper than words. They need adults who are capable of empathy and who are thoughtful enough to put children’s needs before adult desires.
Family Month gives us an opportunity to apply “Them Before Us” to our surrogacy laws. Traumatized newborns don’t have a voice. But adults can get a sense of their pain by listening to the women who experience it from the opposite end.
Broken Bonds: Surrogate Mothers Speak Out, edited by Jennifer Lahl, et. al., gives those women voice. “It’s impossible to carry a baby for 40 weeks and not feel any attachment,” one surrogate laments. “I would never, ever advise a woman to carry a baby for someone else, whether genetically related or not.”
Gestational agreements are always about someone else. Nobody in his right mind could imagine himself as the baby sold like a puppy and still approve the law. And no woman who considered how vulnerable and exposed the birth mother is to exploitation could possibly have gone along with it.
I refuse to believe that our legislators could be so inhumane. I believe, instead, that they simply were not thinking about the child’s needs.
That fatal omission makes HB 73 one of the greatest blunders ever made in Wyoming’s legislative history. It’s a monstrosity that should be expunged from the laws of any decent society.
It is impossible to say how many kids have been deprived of their parents since 2021. Falsifying birth certificates is designed to leave no evidence of the child abuse. But even one child thus abused is intolerable. After five years under this regime, Wyoming has had enough.
Every child has the right to his or her own parents. Full stop.
Adults do not have any right to purchase children - whether the parents are consenting or not.
I know that many legislators regret voting for HB 73. Now is the time to put children’s needs before adult desire and to repeal this monstrous law.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com
