Bill to Make Babies Legal Property Passes House, Goes to Senate!
As I told you earlier this week, HB 1979 (D-Sullivan) is one of the most Anti-Family bills we've seen that actually has a shot at passing.
With your emails and calls, and The Family Foundation team's lobbying efforts, HB 1979 has taken some major hits, but unfortunately it still passed the House of Delegates this week on a vote of 61-36. (Watch the video clip of the House floor debate where Delegate Dave LaRock masterfully critiques this bill, joined by Delegates Brenda Pogge and Nick Freitas.) Now it has been assigned to the Senate Courts of Justice Committee, and will most likely be voted on next week!
This bill will open up Pandora's Box on critical matters involving Life, Parental Rights, and the most basic notions of what it means to be a family. It must be stopped.
Some are naively calling this bill "pro-life" because it will make it easier for single people and same-sex couples to enter into surrogacy contracts to implant one of the one million "snowflake babies" which have been created in labs and are currently frozen. But even setting aside the terrible public policy decision of encouraging children to be born into the world without both a mom and a dad, nothing in this bill would limit the continued proliferation of more and more lab-created human beings, most of which will be forever frozen or destroyed.
Here are some of the terrible consequences of this bill:
1) Recognizes in VA law (for the first time since the 1860s) human beings as property to be “owned” by others.
The bill language inserts “owns”, “owned”, or “ownership” 8 times to refer to human embryos. (A new concept and legal term of art.)
2) Multiplies and expands the commodification of human beings to potentially be exchanged, traded, bought, and sold.
Children are not commodities to be sold or bartered!
3) Creates a new legal presumption for parenthood that is not tied to biology, undermining the parental rights of ALL parents.
This will cause serious long-term damage to our society. Imagine the immeasurable damage to a child when they will now grow up to be told that they never had a father, or that they never had a mother.
4) Encourages the creation of babies without both a mom and a dad because it would now allow any single individual to contract with a surrogate to obtain a baby.
Unmarried homes create more unstable environments for children.
5) Greatly diminishes the nuclear family with a dad, a mom, and their resulting biological (or adopted) children.
The breakdown of the family and familial bonds is the single greatest cause of ALL of the other social ills we face since the nuclear family is the bedrock societal institution.
6) Leads to the commercialization of “lab-babies” with no parents, which will lead to selection based on certain desired traits.
This will lead to countless human lives being created and destroyed in labs.
7) Erases terms like “husband” and “wife”, “his” and “her”, to replace them with gender-neutral language.
This further blurs important distinctions between male and female and removes child-rearing from the sexual/procreational/conjugal union of a man and woman, leading to the commodification of children, and ultimately to government assumption of parental rights.
