Ogles, who represents Tennessee's Fifth District, told reporters the measure grew out of a pattern of cases in which women carrying children under surrogacy arrangements have been pressured to abort over the baby's sex, a suspected birth defect, a sudden illness in the pregnancy, or simply because an intended parent changed their mind. Advocates who track these contracts say women who refuse have in some cases been threatened with lawsuits, loss of payment, or custody fights.
"No woman should ever be forced to murder a child because of threats, financial pressure, or a provision buried in a contract," Ogles said in announcing the bill.
The legislation has been referred to committee and has not yet received a vote. It follows a broader run of pro-life measures Ogles has pushed this year, including a June bill addressing legal protections tied to abortion clinics. Surrogacy contracts currently fall under a patchwork of state law, and family law attorneys have noted that so-called "reduction" or termination clauses are common boilerplate in agreements drawn up by fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies.
A Child Is Not a Line Item
Now here is where the story stops being about Washington and starts being about you, and about the God who made every soul that has ever been carried in a woman's body. A contract is words on paper. It can specify money, and timelines, and what happens if things do not go as planned. But there are some things no contract, no clause, no signature can ever rightly touch, and the life of an unborn child is one of them. The moment a document tries to make a baby into a condition of the deal, something has gone very wrong with the way we have come to think about life itself.
Scripture never once speaks of a child as property to be adjusted by agreement. A child is a gift, plain and simple, given by the hand of God to be received, not renegotiated.
"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)
Think on that a moment. The same God who set the stars in their courses knit that child together in secret, in the dark of the womb, long before any lawyer drew up a clause. He was not consulted by the contract. He does not need to be. The child was His idea before he was anybody else's arrangement.
My friend, this is bigger than one bill in Congress, though that bill is a good and worthy thing, and men and women of conscience ought to be glad to see it move. The deeper trouble is a culture that has learned to speak of a baby the way it speaks of a warranty — something that can be voided if it does not meet expectations. That kind of thinking does not stay contained to fertility clinics and surrogacy paperwork. It seeps into how a nation treats its old, its sick, its inconvenient, anyone whose life becomes a burden to somebody else's plans.
The gospel answers that thinking at the root, not just at the edges. It says a life is not measured by what it costs someone else, or whether it arrived on schedule, or whether it matches what was ordered. It says every life, wanted or unwanted, planned or surprising, healthy or hurting, was made in the image of God and is precious to Him before it is precious to anybody's ledger. A surrogate mother pressured to end a pregnancy she never wanted to end is not facing a business dispute. She is facing a test of conscience in a world that has forgotten whose the child truly is.
If you are reading this and you know that pressure, from a contract or from a person standing over you demanding you undo what God has already begun, hear this plainly: no signature can obligate you to sin, and no threat can change whose child that is. He who formed the child in secret has not forgotten either one of you, mother or babe. Bring it to Him. He has never once turned away a soul that came to Him honestly, in fear, carrying more than it could bear alone.