On Sept. 3, 2011, in the parking lot of the Delaware Park Racetrack, a woman named Bridget Wismer handed her newborn son to a man named John Gavaghan in exchange for $15,000 in cash and a money order. Gavaghan had never met Wismer before the pregnancy and had no genetic connection to the child, but he listed himself as the biological father on the birth certificate anyway. Wismer’s grandmother tipped off police. Both were arrested and indicted by a grand jury on charges of dealing in children. Wismer eventually pleaded to a lesser charge and was sentenced to five years in prison.  What Wismer did in that parking lot is now being legalized across the country, and Delaware is one of the states leading the charge.   Delaware’s Senate Bill 250, introduced on March 5, is the latest in a growing wave of state legislation built on the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act, which expands surrogacy frameworks to include paid “genetic surrogacy.”  The practice works like this: A woman agrees to conceive a child using her own egg, carry the pregnancy to term, and then relinquish her biological child to the intended parents in exchange for payment. She is the baby’s mother in every genetic and gestational sense of the word.   This is different from “gestational surrogacy,” in which a woman carries a child created with someone else’s egg and has no genetic connection to the baby. Most Americans, if they’ve heard of surrogacy at all, are thinking of the gestational kind. Genetic surrogacy is a biological mother being paid to hand over her own baby.  Gestational surrogacy (carrying a genetically unrelated child) is already legal in most U.S. jurisdictions, and not a single state maintains a criminal ban after Michigan repealed the last one in 2024. The question these Uniform Parentage Act bills pose is not whether to allow surrogacy. Most states already do. The question is whether to go further and allow a woman to be paid to conceive and surrender her own biological child.   Nine states have adopted some version of the 2017 act so far. Pennsylvania had a version pending until legislators dropped the bill last year after a surrogacy scandal exposed how the language created new opportunities for exploitation. Delaware’s bill adopts the same framework Pennsylvania abandoned.  Under the Uniform Parentage Act framework, a biological mother can accept payment to surrender her child with no home study, no background check of the intended parents, and no agency oversight. Courts can retroactively validate a surrogacy agreement after the woman is already pregnant. And while the model language requires that conception occur through assisted reproduction for a valid contract, it includes a carveout: If natural conception is later proven and the intended father is the genetic parent, the court may, at its discretion, allow the surrogacy agreement to proceed anyway. Translation: normal intercourse, payment, take the child, all legal.   Every one of these provisions represents a massive departure from adoption law, which has spent decades building safeguards precisely because children are not products to be transferred by contract.  These safeguard failures are not hypothetical, and they are not limited to genetic surrogacy. The existing gestational surrogacy framework already lacks the vetting that adoption requires, and the results are on record.   In March 2024, the FBI arrested Adam Stafford King, a Chicago veterinarian, days before he was scheduled to collect his son from a California surrogate. King had been distributing child sexual abuse material on Telegram, had admitted to drugging and sexually abusing his nieces and nephews, and had explicitly discussed his plans to abuse the newborn after taking custody. No background check had ever been conducted.   In May 2025, authorities in Arcadia, California, found 21 surrogate-born children (17 of them 3 years old or younger) in a single mansion, commissioned by a couple running a fraudulent surrogacy agency who told each surrogate she was helping a small family with infertility; surveillance footage showed nannies slapping and shaking infants. Each one of these children would have been protected by the screening that adoption requires. None were protected by surrogacy law.   In Oct. 2025, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on violence against women concluded that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and recommended a global abolitionist framework. The rest of the developed world is acting on that conclusion.   Italy now sentences its own citizens to up to two years in prison for pursuing surrogacy abroad, even in countries where it is legal. The European Union classified surrogacy exploitation as a form of human trafficking in April 2024. Argentina’s Supreme Court declared surrogacy contrary to the law in November 2024, and Greece barred foreign intended parents in 2025. The international consensus is moving decisively toward restriction and abolition. The United States is moving toward reckless permissiveness.  The 2017 Uniform Parentage Act is spreading through American state legislatures under the banner of equality, but the provisions it carries have nothing to do with equal treatment under the law. They build a deregulated market in which the adults who want to purchase children face fewer safeguards than the ones who adopt them, in which a biological mother can be paid to surrender her child without anyone asking whether the people receiving that child are fit to raise one.   Bridget Wismer was sentenced to prison for accepting $15,000 in exchange for her baby. If these Uniform Parentage Act bills had been law in 2011, she would not have gone to prison. She would have gone to a notary. The act would be identical: a woman accepting payment for her biological child. The only difference is a signed contract and a judge willing to call it surrogacy instead of baby-selling.   That is what these bills ask every state legislature in America to accept: that it was never the selling of the baby that was wrong, just the accompanying paperwork.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post She Was Imprisoned for Selling Her Baby. Now Delaware Wants to Make It Legal.  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Never before have more Americans attended college. Today, roughly 57% of Gen Z enroll in some form of postsecondary education after high school. Yet at the very moment participation has peaked, confidence in higher education is eroding. The traditional four-year degree, once a hallmark of intellectual formation and social mobility, is increasingly questioned, both for its cost and its purpose. Part of this decline stems from a shift away from classical liberal arts education, which once emphasized the pursuit of truth through disciplines such as philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric. This model aimed not merely at job preparation, but at forming well-rounded, critical-thinking individuals. In contrast, much of modern higher education has become narrowly utilitarian, focused on credentialing, specialization, and workforce outcomes, often at the expense of intellectual depth and coherence.  So, is the current model losing its authority? And what does this transformation mean for the future of colleges and universities? In a recent op-ed, Pepperdine University President Jim Gash warned of the troubling trajectory of American higher education, a concern he further expanded upon in an interview with The Daily Signal. The Education Paradox  “The challenge is figuring out what education ought to be,” Gash said, citing the identity crisis in higher education.  He added that many students don’t even fully know what they’re looking for until they encounter it.  Reflecting on visits to classical schools, Gash described what genuine education can look like: “I often have the opportunity to … watch what it looks like when students are excited about cultivating virtue in themselves as they are learning about the world.”   In those environments, students are not only preparing for careers but “becoming the kind of leader that this country wants and needs.”  Too often, he warned, colleges fall short of that ideal, offering “either a technical education or something that is not calling them to a high level of learning but instead trying to appease them in their desire to have fun.”  For the first time in decades, college is no longer seen as the default path to a good life. Increasingly, it resembles an extension of high school, something to do before entering the workforce.  Education Used to Mean Something—Does It Still?  It wasn’t always this way.  From early institutions like Harvard and Yale to the expansion of public universities under the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in 1862, higher education had a clear mission: forming thoughtful, virtuous, and informed citizens. A degree carried weight because the formation behind it carried weight.  Over the past 30 years, that mission has eroded. College has shifted from intellectual formation to lifestyle experience.  At the same time, academic rigor has declined. According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, just 18% of public universities require even one course in history or government.  The result is a system that increasingly resembles a four-year lifestyle experience with a credential attached.  Hollowing Out Universities  The academic shift hasn’t helped restore confidence.  Gash noted in his op-ed, “If the American experiment is to flourish in the coming generations, our diagnosis must be honest: Education has too often been hollowed out to make room for technical skill.”  Many institutions have moved away from core curricula in favor of more fragmented or ideologically driven coursework. In doing so, they’ve weakened their identity as places dedicated to truth-seeking and intellectual development.  As a result, Americans see universities as more focused on culture than on competence.  When institutions drift from their purpose, professors pushing more activism than education, people notice and eventually walk away. Falling enrollment, financial strain, and campus closures are the result.  The Decline of ‘Traditional Learning’  As colleges move away from traditional education, students are moving away from traditional colleges.  Liberal arts enrollment is shrinking, while trade programs and alternative credentials are growing. Many students now prioritize convenience and efficiency over depth.  Technology has accelerated that shift. With artificial intelligence tools widely available—up to 90% of college students use them, according to Forbes—students can outsource much of the reading, writing, and research once central to their education.  The traditional model—four years of broad intellectual formation—has lost both its appeal and its credibility.  If college is no longer clearly about truth, virtue, or serious study, the question becomes unavoidable: Is it worth the $30,000 to $200,000 cost?  For many Americans, the answer is increasingly no.  According to data from Inside Higher Ed and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, 14 colleges closed in 2023, 28 in 2024, and 16 in 2025, with more closures already announced this year.  This isn’t a temporary downturn. It’s a slow-moving collapse.  A Chance to Rebuild  Yet this moment of decline is also an opportunity.  If colleges want to survive, they must recover what once made them valuable. Expanding access to education was a success, but in the process, the purpose of education itself was blurred.  In his op-ed, Gash writes, “Most of all, we as institutions of higher education must boldly and unashamedly reclaim our greater purpose, our most fundamental reason for existing: the cultivation of virtue in our students. We must teach them integrity, humility and courage—traits that they will learn more thoroughly from our actions than merely from our words.”  That insight points to a path forward. If colleges refocus on serious learning, they can restore their value.  The question now isn’t just whether colleges can stay open. It’s whether they can once again become places where education, not just experience, actually matters.  The post America Built the Most Educated Generation in History—So Why Are Its Colleges Collapsing?  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Conservative women from all seasons of life gathered last month to discuss the challenges they face and to share solutions for balancing work, marriage, and family. The March 18 event on “Women, Work and Family,” hosted by The Heritage Foundation, brought together working women, moms, policy experts, and one Illinois congresswoman to explore how American women can forge their own path in an age of feminism. “You can’t do it all at one time,” Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said during the panel discussion. Severino said one way she balances her career and family is by finding jobs that offer flexibility. For example, when she worked as a clerk at the Supreme Court, her parents watched her children. By the time the kids were ready for middle school, however, she decided that homeschooling was the right choice for her family. “We live in a world where there are flexible options,” Severino said. “You can keep it in a place where your family is what’s driving the decisions, and not how do I get this next achievement.” In modern life, women often believe they must choose between having a career or a family. Additionally, some women who desire to have children and stay at home may feel pressured by feminism to choose a career instead. Judy Lopez, program manager at The Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, said “it’s normal and it’s good to want children” when making decisions about life. “We’ve been sold that you have to choose between starting a family and work,” she said. “But what if that is the wrong premise altogether? What if instead we could focus on the seasons of life, and if policy and culture could support that for women?” U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, the event’s keynote speaker, said she uses her role in Congress to help support women and families. “The foundation of our country is faith and family,” the Illinois congresswoman said. “It’s no secret that marriage is in serious decline, and couples are delaying or not having children at all.” Miller said she helped launch the Congressional Family Caucus during the 118th Congress to save the family, the foundational institution for society. According to Miller’s congressional website, the Congressional Family Caucus seeks to advance legislation that “strengthens parental rights” and promotes the values of the nuclear family. “I started the Congressional Family Caucus to stand up for the traditional family,” she said. “We’re getting amazing things done. I invite you all to get engaged and to help me represent the American family.” One policy the panelists held up as good for women was homeschooling. For women who need to juggle work and children, homeschooling can often provide greater scheduling flexibility than public schools. Additionally, the National Home Education Research Institute’s website states that children who are homeschooled “typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests.” Mary Rice Hasson, the Kate O’Beirne senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said women should reflect on the greater meaning of life when deciding between family and career. “The only place where you’re irreplaceable is in your relationships,” she said. “[If] you walk out of here [and] get hit by a bus, your employer will send flowers, will miss you, will write nice things about you. But who you matter to is your family.” The post Heritage Foundation Hosts Panel on Women, Work and Family appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The California Exodus is quickening, and it turns out the people leaving don’t have to wander too long to find a new promised land. That’s the takeaway from several recent reports showing that the population decline in California is becoming extreme, but that the people who choose to leave the state are finding life much better—certainly more affordable—elsewhere. Census data published in late March highlighted a dramatic population drop in Los Angeles County from 2024 to 2025. “The region recorded the largest population drop of any in the nation between July 2024 and July 2025, according to newly released estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau,” the New York Post reported. “The data, published March 26, shows roughly 54,000 residents left the county during that one-year period. The losses mark a continuation of a steady slide for the nation’s most populous county.” LA County’s population dropped below 10 million for the first time since 2020. It appears that outlying regions have particularly benefited from the departures, including Las Vegas, which saw a population increase of 20,000. As more than a few noted on social media, it’s remarkable that people want to leave Southern California. But the high cost of living, crime, poor governance, and general disorder are making it intolerable for many. LA has amazing weather year-round and one of the most beautiful coastlines and climates in the world. But decades of mass migration, and the dysfunctional government that came with it, means that even these immense natural advantages cannot stop population exodus. Paradise Lost. https://t.co/XQ8YejkYVj— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) March 30, 2026 While there are many reasons an area can experience a sudden population drop, LA’s precipitous one coincides with a general trend for the Golden State. Much of the state has been bleeding residents (particularly middle-class ones) for over a decade. The numbers stabilized due to immigration, but now that is petering out, too.   The problem is obvious. People don’t leave California for Texas for the better weather, they go because they can’t afford to stay in a state with high taxes (if you buy Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “low-tax state” spiel, you are a chump), an outrageous cost of living, and dysfunctional government to boot. When the price of gas in your state is generally 50 cents higher than the next highest state, you know you have a problem. But California’s powers that be appear to be in no hurry to fix the situation. The California Air Resources Board aims to choke the remaining oil refineries out of existence. Lawmakers are looking to go back to the well of taxing the rich, which will allegedly solve all problems. And Newsom has chosen to mock journalists for uncovering fraud in his state while bragging about how wealthy it is. This has caused many people, whether they’ve wanted to or not, to pull up stakes and leave the state that used to be the American dream within the American dream. And leaving has turned out for most expatriates to be a wise financial choice. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found that Californians who left between 2016 and 2025 have generally found more affordable places to live and have seen “large increases in homeownership.” “On average, movers relocate to neighborhoods where monthly housing costs are $672 less,” the report said. “After seven years, they are 48% (or 11 percentage points) more likely to own a home.” Renters are doing better, too, as the study found that for those who left California: “Rents are about 30% (or about $631) lower in their new neighborhood.” Funny enough, most people moving out find greener pastures in states more known for their deserts. “Nevada is the standout, receiving a net 81 Californians per 10,000 residents annually, followed by Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona,” the report found. This all comes down to what the study called California’s “affordability crisis,” where most residents simply can’t find a way to make a decent life for themselves and their families. Keep this in mind as Democrats talk about “affordability.” Talking about affordability on the campaign trail is one thing, but governing is another. In states like California that are blue state model-maxxing, pretty much nothing is affordable unless you are rich or on the public dole. The California dream is dying as its residents are waking up to dehydration, an empty wallet, and a financial headache that won’t go away until they do. The post The California Exodus Grows as Affordability Crisis Pushes Residents Out appeared first on The Daily Signal.

RealClearWire—Picture this: a 12-year-old stands at the edge of a cold lake at 0600, staring down his swimming merit badge. Nobody asked if he was emotionally ready. Nobody offered a participation ribbon. His scoutmaster told him to jump in. He jumped. He earned it. That is scouting—or rather, that is what scouting was, and, if the Pentagon has anything to say about it, what scouting will be again. I earned my Eagle Scout rank in the mid-1980s amid the last flicker of Reagan-era optimism. My father served as a district executive with the Boy Scouts of America from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, when the mission of scouting was unambiguous and its reputation beyond question. I served as an assistant scoutmaster at summer camps. My son earned his Eagle Scout rank, went on to graduate from West Point, and now flies as an Army aviator. Three generations. One through-line. When I graduated from Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in 1988, the discipline I carried in—compass work, land navigation, physical endurance, mental toughness under discomfort—owed no small debt to what scouting had already built into me. The memorandum of understanding signed on Feb. 27, 2026, between Scouting America and the Pentagon is not bureaucratic fine print. It is a cultural rescue operation. Under pressure from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Scouting America agreed to abandon divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; enforce biological sex distinctions in membership and facilities; discontinue the politicized “Citizenship in Society” merit badge; introduce a new Military Service merit badge developed with the Department of War; waive registration fees for children of active-duty, Guard, and Reserve families; and rededicate itself formally to duty to God, duty to country, and service. The agreement aligns with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” The Pentagon gave scouting six months to demonstrate meaningful compliance. Hegseth was unambiguous: “Ideally, I believe the Boy Scouts should go back to being the Boy Scouts as originally founded—a group that develops boys into men.” The stakes are not abstract. Scouting has long served as a reliable pipeline to the U.S. Armed Forces, with Eagle Scouts heavily represented in ROTC, service academies, and military leadership tracks at rates far exceeding the general population. Meanwhile, roughly 77% of young Americans are currently ineligible for military service, with obesity as the single leading disqualifier. The U.S. Army fell 25% short of its 2022 recruitment goals, and that trend has not reversed. An institution that once produced physically prepared, morally grounded young men willing to serve their country is not a luxury. It is a national security asset. Scouting’s founding philosophy was never complicated. William D. Boyce chartered the Boy Scouts of America in 1910 after an unnamed scout in fog-shrouded London refused a tip for guiding a lost American—because a scout does not accept payment for a good turn. Robert Baden-Powell’s model translated Aristotelian virtue ethics into an applied curriculum. Character, as Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics, is not innate—it is forged through repeated habit and deliberate challenge. One does not become courageous by reading about courage. One becomes courageous by building a fire in the rain, navigating by stars at 0200, and rappelling a cliff face with a Scoutmaster who has no interest in excuses. The patrol method, rank advancement, merit badge requirements—the entire architecture is an applied Aristotelian curriculum. The national office spent a decade dismantling it in favor of ideological programming. The irony is almost too rich to catalog. The membership figures tell the story no press release can obscure. Enrollment peaked at roughly 6.5 million in the early 1970s. By 2026, fewer than 1 million combined boys and girls remained enrolled. The 2020 bankruptcy filing, driven by historical sexual abuse claims, produced a $2.4 billion settlement compensating more than 82,000 claimants in 2023—a catastrophic institutional failure that, to put it with considerable understatement, did not help recruitment. The progression of policy changes is well-documented: gay youth membership opened in 2013; openly gay adult leaders followed in 2015; a 2017 case in New Jersey involving an 8-year-old opened transgender membership; girls entered Cub Scouts in 2018 and the flagship program in 2019. The 2025 rebrand to “Scouting America” completed the transformation—apparently because “Boy Scouts” contained the word “boy,” which had become inconvenient. The “Citizenship in Society” merit badge, required for Eagle Scout rank, captured the broader problem with admirable brevity. The badge directed participants to “realize the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion” and practice “ethical leadership” through the lens of identity politics. Think about that sequencing: instead of studying the Declaration of Independence, constitutional structure, or proper flag etiquette, scouts were directed to contemplate microaggressions and systemic bias. As someone who earned merit badges in camping, first aid, and rifle shooting—skills that translated directly into my experience at Marine Corps OCS—the substitution struck me as roughly equivalent to replacing a wilderness survival course with a corporate HR seminar and then expressing genuine puzzlement at falling enrollment. The MOU eliminates that badge effective immediately. The reforms are a start. The next step is enrollment. Parents with sons in the target age range should investigate local troops directly, ask hard questions about how the new biological sex policies are actually being implemented, not just acknowledged, and choose units that are executing the reforms in good faith rather than grudging compliance. Adults with relevant skills should volunteer. The merit badge counselor system runs entirely on people with genuine expertise: navigation, wilderness medicine, marksmanship, and engineering. If you served in uniform, your experience is directly applicable and badly needed. Watching a hesitant twelve-year-old master the bowline knot and then use it confidently three days later on a climbing wall is, I can report firsthand, among the more satisfying experiences available to a middle-aged man who has otherwise run out of things left to prove. My father spent a decade building boys into men because he believed the mission mattered. I carried that conviction into my own service at summer camp. My son carried it all the way to West Point. The Scout motto, Be Prepared, has never been more operationally relevant. These reforms restore a foundation. What gets built on it is up to us. This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Restoring Duty to God and Country by Saving Scouting appeared first on The Daily Signal.