Need proof that the wild, wild west of assisted reproductive technology should be tamed? Look no further than the New York Times’ profile of a 68-year-old woman whose use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), gamete purchasing, and the rent-a-womb industry landed her in an unprecedented legal fight with a long list of pending felony charges.
The 30 charges against MaryBeth Lewis, contrary to what you may think, have little to do with her liberal use of reproductive technology and her relationship with the fertility industry. Yes, Lewis is out hundreds of thousands of dollars and could face prison time that takes her away from her husband and her brimming brood of 13 children.
Yet, she is not the victim. The now-two-year-old twins Lewis was emboldened to commission the creation of thanks to a lack of reproductive technology regulation will undoubtedly suffer the greatest consequences of her actions.
Mum’s The Word
The children in question had no genetic relation to Lewis, her husband, or the woman whose womb she rented for the duration of the pregnancy. In fact, the only full-blooded relatives of the test tube babies are the 11th, 12th, and 13th Lewis children, who hailed from the same batch of embryos the couple commissioned using purchased eggs and sperm in 2016. Lewis was 62 when she gave birth to the 13th child, one of the lucky embryos that made it to implantation, in 2019.
Some years, increased delusion about her capability to juggle more than a dozen children and be an involved grandma for her adult kids’ kids, and some deception later, Lewis found herself eagerly awaiting the birth of yet another set of twins. Except this time, her husband had no clue about the babies his wife repeatedly forged his signature to give legal permission to create, nor did he have any idea she was paying a surrogate to gestate and birth them.
Lewis told NYT “she had no choice” but to deceive her better half, because he had wanted the extra embryos destroyed and that “goes against my religious beliefs.” Lewis claims to be a practicing Catholic and maintains that she “saved these embryos from being destroyed,” a quote the NYT used as its clencher.
It was Lewis’ decision to create the babies via IVF, a procedure the Catholic church deems “immoral,” however, that led to such a dilemma about implanting, donating, or destroying the little lives in the first place.
It took most of the surrogate’s pregnancy, but eventually, Lewis’ legal counsel and the local judge, who was supposed to grant the parentage order the Lewises would need to take the twins home after birth, sniffed out the scheme.
Suddenly, the babies who already were never going to know their genetic parents and were not going to spend much more than nine months with the woman who gestated them wouldn’t even know the woman who paid to make them. They were officially wards of the state. The NYT author, though bluntly, put it best when he declared, “they had no mother at all.”
Guaranteed Orphanhood From The Get-Go
Even after Lewis’ husband claimed to have a change of heart and pledged to welcome the children with his wife, it was too late. Lewis would be charged with more than two dozen criminal counts ranging from forgery to falsifying business records to perjury, and the babies would go home with yet another set of strangers.
The twins are not simply orphans because they did not go home with Lewis. Even before their conception, the babies were guaranteed to be permanently separated from their parents because of reproductive tech. They were sold, bought, pieced together in a lab, frozen, born of a woman they had no relation to, and then tossed to the foster care system for the last two years — some of the most formative years of their lives.
Lewis may have racked up several felony charges, but the real crime is that babies can be torn away from their genetic parents and the women who gestate them, a provably damaging decision, without any consequences.
In fact, our culture and politics increasingly encourage the expansion of assisted reproductive technology and prioritizing adults’ desires over children’s rights and needs without batting an eye. The result? Familial dysfunction, physical and emotional harm, legal battles, eugenics, and the loss of countless little lives.
Proponents of reproductive tech desperately want Americans to believe that cases like Lewis’, the California couple with 21 kids — many born of surrogates who were hired under false pretenses, and other rent-a-womb racketeering rings are one-offs. The truth is, however, that there are little to no policies in effect or even in the works to prevent those situations from happening again and again and again and again.
Anyone with a willing egg/sperm bank, fertility specialist, OBGYN, and/or surrogate could replicate Lewis’ scheme. As long as they don’t fake a signature, as Lewis herself admitted to NYT, their quest to create children using ART would go largely unnoticed and certainly unpunished.
Even the little surrogacy-linked safety net that New York has could do nothing for the twins beyond shipping them off to foster care after birth, much less honor their rights at conception and in pregnancy. In fact, Lewis and her husband, after years of navigating the ins and outs of New York’s parentage laws, could still become the legal parents of the babies Lewis commissioned within the month or so. How long two people over retirement age will be around to parent those children is unknown.
Lewis very well may see victory in her parenting and felony charges cases. The children she could soon have authority over, however, will no doubt feel the losses of their genetic parents, of their surrogate mother, and of the foster parents who raised them from birth to their second birthday for years to come.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
