The New York State Senate passed a bill to legalize paid gestational surrogacy for couples who are unable to have their own children. But it faces an uncertain future in the Assembly, and opponents range from feminist icon Gloria Steinem to the Catholic Church.
The measure is part of a package of bills that supporters say advance LGBTQ rights, including a measure to prohibit anyone from using the so-called gay or trans panic defense, where someone claims that a person’s sexual identity led them to commit violence against that person.
Senate sponsor of the gestational surrogacy bill, Brad Hoylman had to go to California to arrange for a surrogate in order for him and his husband to have a child.
“New Yorkers can now stay in New York rather than have to travel 3000 miles like my husband and I did,” Hoylman said.
Senators at the news conference were joined by Bravo channel star Andy Cohen, who lives in Hoylman’s Manhattan district and who has been lobbying for the bill. Cohen also appeared at two events with Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Cohen , a gay man, says when it came time for him to start a family, he was shocked to learn that gestational surrogacy is illegal in New York.
“How Draconian is that?,” Cohen said, during an event on Monday at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Manhattan. “ So if a woman went ahead and carried a baby for a gay couple in New York, she would be committing a felony in 2019? It doesn't seem possible to me.”
Cohen also traveled to California and now has a four month old son.
Cuomo has promised to sign the bill, if the legislature approves it, and he says his Department of Health will ensure that the rights of women who choose gestational surrogacy will be protected, and that they will have access to attorneys.
The bill faces an uncertain future in the state Assembly, and several leading Democratic women who consider themselves to be feminists oppose it.
Cuomo, during a press conference in Albany, singled out the women, who include Deborah Glick, the first openly lesbian state lawmaker, Helene Weinstein, the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee and Assemblywoman Didi Barrett, past chair of the women’s Caucus.
“We have differences of opinion all the time, but I do not understand the assembly members who oppose this,” Cuomo said, “I have respect for Assembly Members Glick, and Weinstein and Didi Barrett, but I just don't see the possible rational.”
Assemblywoman Glick took offense at the governor’s remarks. Glick, who was the long time sponsor of the Reproductive Health Act, which codified the abortion rights in the US Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade into law, says she “finds it interesting” that she was singled out, along with Weinstein, the first woman chair of the Ways and Means Committee in the Assembly’s history, and Barrett, the former Women’s Caucus chair.
“It’s an unfortunate lack of respect,” Glick said.
Glick says she does not believe the bill offers enough protections for women, and she says there are already thousands of children who languish in foster care who could be adopted.
Other opponents include longtime women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem, and some religious organizations, including the Catholic Church.
Dennis Poust is a spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, the lobby group for the church.
“We see this as fundamentally something that will exploit women’s bodies largely for the benefit of men,” Poust said.
Poust says the practice turns babies into “commodities”, and could lead to trafficking of the women and the children. He says it has an uncomfortable connection to the country’s legacy of slavery. He says the women, like slaves, will be treated a as a form of “chattel”.
“We’ll be literally mining their bodies for eggs,” said Poust. “We’ll be creating a market for rent- a –wombs.”
He says he’s not surprised, that, on this issue, the church and some feminist groups find “common ground.”
“It’s about the fundamental dignity of women,” he said.
He says the Catholic Church does not condone non paid, or altruistic surrogacy, which is not illegal in New York. He says at least in that arrangement, there is less chance for exploitation.
Supporters say 47 other states allow paid gestational surrogacy, and that New York State is now an outlier.
Poust says that’s not completely accurate. 10 states have passed laws to regulate and allow the practice, but in many other states the transactions exist in a gray area of the law, where they are neither explicitly prohibited or permitted.
The bills approved by the Senate also create a transgender youth suicide prevention task force.
