In late July 2025, a viral video swept social media, showing two men proudly introducing their newborn son, conceived through surrogacy and funded by crowdsourcing. Initially, people celebrated the heartwarming footage as another beautiful example of modern family creation.
Within 24 hours, the celebration turned to horror. Brandon Keith Mitchell, one of the “fathers,” was revealed to be a registered sex offender convicted of soliciting nude photographs from a 16-year-old student. Police had found hundreds of sexually explicit videos of the child on Mitchell’s laptop and over 12,000 text messages between predator and victim.
Today, an innocent baby lives in the home of a convicted pedophile, not through tragic circumstance or system failure, but by deliberate design. The surrogacy industry delivered a child directly into the hands of a man legally prohibited from unsupervised contact with minors.
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This case isn’t an isolated tragedy. It’s the inevitable result of a system that prioritizes adult desires over child welfare, treats babies as products, and has abandoned God’s design for how children should enter the world.
Celebrity permission structure: Explained
Celebrity endorsement has dramatically accelerated the cultural acceptance of surrogacy. Kim Kardashian, Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Elton John and countless other celebrities have turned to surrogacy, with each story celebrated as both heartwarming and forward-thinking.
Anderson Cooper called surrogacy “an extraordinary blessing.” When Chrissy Teigen and John Legend welcomed their fourth child via a surrogate, Teigen gushed about “this incredible gift,” naming the child after their surrogate. Each celebrity story focuses on adult joy while ignoring surrogate voices or long-term child implications.
This approach creates a cultural permission structure: If Hollywood’s elites embrace surrogacy, it must be admirable. What begins as a medical option for the wealthy becomes a cultural expectation for everyone. The glamour masks exploitation, the red carpet coverage obscures ethical concerns, and joyful photos hide broken pieces.
Should we let Hollywood or Scripture shape our ethics? The culture that celebrates surrogacy also glorifies divorce, the sexual revolution, and the redefinition of marriage. When celebrities promote fractured relationships and fluid sexual ethics, should we really rely on their judgment regarding children and family?
When Andy Cohen celebrates single fatherhood through surrogacy, or same-sex couples are praised for “building families” through purchased eggs and rented wombs, the culture learns that any adult desire for children justifies any means of obtaining them. The Mitchell case shows where this leads: If only adult desire matters, why would having a criminal history make any difference?
Ethical and biblical arguments against surrogacy
Let me be clear: The Mitchell case industry isn’t surrogacy gone wrong — it’s surrogacy working exactly as designed. Surrogacy itself is the problem, not just the extreme cases.
God designed children to come from the covenantal union of one man and one woman in marriage. Surrogacy abandons this divine order, separating procreation from marital covenant and treating children as manufactured products rather than received gifts.
The issue isn’t about biology or family preferences; it’s about fundamental rebellion against God’s created order. When we fragment childbearing, separating genetic from gestational from legal parenthood, we’re dismantling the protective framework God established for the vulnerable.
Every surrogacy arrangement violates this principle, regardless of whether it is commercial or altruistic, whether it involves celebrities or ordinary people, or whether it is considered happy or tragic. It prioritizes adult desires over God’s design, commodifies women’s bodies, treats children like custom orders, and creates intentional orphanhood while removing natural protections.
God’s blueprint: Protecting faith and values
From the beginning, God established that children come from the marital union between husband and wife. This isn’t mere biology; it’s theological truth reflecting God’s creative order and providing maximum protection for children. As Genesis 1:27-28 states,
“Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”
When a child is conceived through marital embrace, that child enters with optimal protection: two biological parents united in covenant love, both legally and morally responsible, both invested because the child is literally their own flesh.
Surrogacy shatters this blueprint by separating procreation from marriage, often involving third-party gametes, rented wombs, and legal contracts treating children like orders. The Mitchell case shows the result: children delivered to adults based not on parental fitness but on ability to pay and navigate paperwork.
God’s design isn’t arbitrary; it’s protective. When we abandon that design, we abandon its protections.
Manufacturing orphans for the marketplace
Surrogacy creates orphans by design. Unlike adoption, which responds to unexpected tragedy with redemptive love, surrogacy intentionally separates children from their biological mothers from the moment of conception.
The industry lexicon reveals its true nature: “gestational carriers,” “reproductive services,” “genetic material,” and “intended parents.” This is marketplace vocabulary. Children become products manufactured to specifications, delivered per contract terms, and transferred to purchasers upon completion.
Contracts read like business documents because that’s what they are — often including clauses requiring abortion for disabilities, selective reduction for “excess” babies, and strict behavioral limitations on surrogates. Some specify desired physical attributes in donors, allowing parents to customize children like luxury cars.
When children become commodities, predators become customers. Mitchell, a registered sex offender in Pennsylvania, unable to adopt or foster, simply purchased a child through surrogacy, without any inquiries. Pennsylvania’s adoption laws prohibit sex offenders from adopting, but surrogacy sidesteps these protections through pre-birth orders naming commissioning parents regardless of criminal history or fitness.
As Helen Gibson, a representative of the advocacy group Surrogacy Concern, noted, “Vetting of commissioning parents in surrogacy is virtually nonexistent and is not comparable with checks we see in adoption.”
The voices of regret
While the industry showcases happy intended parents, surrogate mothers tell different stories. Many describe feeling “used,” “exploited,” and “like someone who sold my child.”
Tanya Prashad, a former surrogate, testified, “I feel like all surrogate mothers are being used. I believe I have underestimated myself … I’d rather work a hundred hours of overtime than subject myself to that again.”
An Australian surrogate shared, “I feel betrayed and hurt, and I am still suffering mentally and physically. I regret handing over [the baby] … Not a day goes by where I … wonder if he is safe.”
These voices expose the lie that surrogacy is always beautiful and altruistic. The truth is messier and more painful than the industry admits. Behind every celebrated success may be a woman wrestling with regret, grief, and knowledge that she carried and delivered a child she’ll never see again.
The industry profits from silencing these voices because they complicate narratives, challenge ethics, and raise uncomfortable questions about consent, exploitation, and commodification — concerns that threaten a business projected to grow from $27.21 billion in 2025 to nearly $196 billion by 2034, according to Precedence Research.
The idolatry of entitlement
Surrogacy represents a shift from receiving children as gifts to demanding them as rights, transforming biblical desire for children into sinful entitlement.
Consider Hannah versus our culture’s approach. Hannah wept, prayed, and waited for the Lord to open her womb (1 Samuel 1:10-11). She understood children come from God’s hand, not human ingenuity. Today’s couples increasingly bypass prayer for procedures, trading dependence on divine providence for marketplace transactions.
As Proverbs 14:12 warns, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”
Surrogacy may seem like love but often springs from idolatrous entitlement — demanding God provide us what we want, when we want it, and how we want it, regardless of His design or the cost to others.
The failure of compromise
Some Christians seek middle ground, supporting “altruistic” arrangements while opposing commercial ones, or backing better regulation rather than prohibition. The Mitchell case exposes this futility.
Mitchell’s arrangement wasn’t obvious commercial exploitation. They raised only $2,000, far short of their $50,000 goal. Their surrogate underwent “extensive evaluations.” By the standards of reform advocates, this arrangement was perfectly acceptable.
Yet it still delivered a child to a predator.
There is no safe or ethical form of surrogacy. The problem isn’t inadequate regulation — it’s the practice itself. When we separate children from biological mothers, commodify reproduction, and prioritize adult desires over child welfare, we create systems that inevitably fail the vulnerable.
A more excellent way
Christians need to reclaim a biblical perspective that views children as God’s gifts, not as rights to assert. This means trusting God’s sovereignty even in infertility pain, following Hannah, Sarah, and Elizabeth, who received children by God’s hand in His timing.
We must embrace adoption as the Gospel alternative. Adoption responds to existing brokenness with redemption, providing homes for children who need them. Crucially, adoption includes rigorous screening — a protection that surrogacy bypasses.
The contrast is stark. While adoption asks, “How can we serve children who need homes?”, surrogacy asks, “How can we create children to meet our needs?”
We must provide pastoral care for couples struggling with infertility that doesn’t simply point toward technological solutions but helps process grief, examines hearts for idolatrous desires, and finds contentment in God’s will.
The call to courage
Christian men, this moment demands courage. The culture will call you hateful for opposing surrogacy, but God calls you to faithfulness over cultural acceptance.
The Mitchell case presents clear answers when people ask why surrogacy should be rejected: It creates children for predators, bypasses every child welfare protection, prioritizes adult desires over child safety, and treats society’s most vulnerable as marketplace products.
Stand firm. Protect the vulnerable. Defend the voiceless. Speak truth in love, even when costly.
Children first
As Jeremiah 1:5 beautifully says of God’s sovereignty over and care for each one of us,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.”
Every child is known by God before conception, loved before birth, destined for purposes beyond our understanding. Children deserve to enter into life through covenant, not through contracts. They deserve protection, not commodification. They deserve safeguards from God’s design for family, not vulnerabilities from human schemes.
The baby now living with Brandon Keith Mitchell deserves better. If we do not act, countless other children created through surrogacy will also suffer. So will women whose wombs are rented, bodies used, and hearts broken by this industry.
The time for compromise is over. May God give us courage to defend His design for life, marriage, and family, no matter the cost.
Originally published at the Standing for Freedom Center.
Virgil L. Walker is the Executive Director of Operations for G3 Ministries, an author, and a conference speaker. He is the co-host of the Just Thinking Podcast. Virgil is passionate about teaching, disciple-making, and sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Virgil and his wife Tomeka have been married for 26 years and have three children. Listen to his podcast here.
