Day: May 22, 2013

Not much new this week, since the Assembly is out of session for the next two weeks as the Joint Finance Committee finishes the budget. Still there was some action on the bills we are following, and there have been two new bills that I have added to the Trackers as they seem interesting. The first is Rep. Rebecca Walker's House Bill 131, or the Gestational Carrier Agreement Bill. At first, I thought the term "Gestational Carrier" was an overly technical and political correct replacement for Surrogate Mother. But it turns out that I was wrong. There are two kinds of Surrogacy. One is where the surrogate mother is genetically related to the child she is carrying, or in other words, the surrogate mother used her own egg and had it artificially inseminated by the intended father. This is called traditional surrogacy. If the surrogate mother carries an fertilized egg to term and she is not genetically related to it, that is gestational surrogacy, and Representaive Walker's legislation establishes the legal rights of all involved in a gestational surrogacy. Titles and labels aside, the bill is a good idea, as it establishes into law the notion that these agreements between a couple and a surrogate mother are binding legal contracts. According to the legislation, after the child is born, the intended parent becomes the legal parent of the child and the gestational carrier would have no parental rights. In New Jersey, Governor Christie vetoed a similar law, and his official reason is that it could radically change the traditional notion of the family. Please. This bill allows more families to be created, which I thought was a good thing. The other bill (Senator Hocker's Senate Bill 74) features an unholy alliance of Progressive and Arch Conserative sponsors, all agreeing on transparency and open government. See Democratic Leadership, the GOP is really going after you on transparency. It is a potent issue, and you ignore it at your peril.