State Lawmakers to Explore Banning Foreign Nationals From Using Texas Surrogates

State lawmakers are exploring prohibiting foreign nationals from using Texas surrogates, elevating a niche fertility issue into a larger battle over immigration and birthright citizenship, surrogacy experts say.

The Texas Senate health committee will hear testimony on Wednesday about potentially banning foreign nationals from contracting with Texas surrogates to have children, after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made examining the issue an interim charge for the chamber ahead of the legislative session that starts in January. Last month, the Texas GOP also approved in its latest platform a ban on commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals, arguing that the practice lets children born under such circumstances obtain U.S. citizenship.

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Surrogacy experts and advocacy groups in Texas say arrangements with foreign nationals account for a small percentage of the thousands of surrogacy births that are estimated to occur in the U.S. every year. The exact number is unknown because surrogacy contracts are private and the government does not collect data.

They worry that targeting that slice of the industry could be the first step toward restricting, if not banning, surrogacy for all Texans. Surrogacy agencies are navigating existential threats on multiple fronts as the state Republican Party also supported banning public funding for IVF, which party officials consider a “destructive practice” for embryos. Without IVF, surrogacy is severely limited.

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Conservative groups believe they will have success regulating surrogacy this legislative session by tackling it as a birthright citizenship issue and one that threatens national security. Florida recently passed a law banning surrogacy and adoption contracts for any cases involving citizens or residents of a designated “foreign country of concern” including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria. Congress is also considering similar legislation — Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy Act (SAFE Kids Act).

The move to cast surrogacy as a foreign threat comes amid multiple reports of Chinese nationals using American surrogates, including a 2025 Wall Street Journal report of a Chinese billionaire who had dozens of children via this procedure. Also last year, Kayla Elliott from Corpus Christi told The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, a California-based organization that supports a global ban on surrogacy, that she was a surrogate to one of many children for a Chinese couple in California that was later arrested on child endangerment charges. The surrogacy agency Elliott worked with was also based in California.

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Seago said banning foreign surrogacy is the first step to ultimately regulating the surrogacy industry. His group does not support commercial surrogacy, which involves paying a surrogate to carry the fetus, and wants the Legislature to consider ethical limits on surrogacy broadly, mirroring larger conversations happening among conservative policy think tanks. Texas Public Policy Foundation, which declined to comment on the story, published a Dallas Morning News op-ed in April about the use of surrogacy in the “commodification of babies” and its alleged use in child trafficking.

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