Two gay men in Pennsylvania posted a video celebrating the birth of their surrogate baby—and it went viral when viewers discovered that one of the men is a registered child sex offender. In 2016, he was arrested for trying to solicit sex from a 16-year-old boy—one of his own students at the high school where he taught chemistry. Pennsylvania Senator Doug Mastriano responded, saying the couple acquired the child “through what appears to be a loophole in our legal system.” He added that lawmakers are “working to ensure that every authority is doing its part to protect this child and uncover exactly how this could happen.” But one thing he didn’t say: whether the child is still in the custody of the convicted offender. His post conspicuously avoids answering that. The couple crowdfunded their surrogacy journey through GoFundMe—without disclosing to donors that one of them was legally prohibited from unsupervised contact with minors. This case exposes a massive gap in surrogacy oversight. Unlike adoption, which involves rigorous state screening, private surrogacy arrangements often face little to no regulation. Pennsylvania’s adoption law prohibits sex offenders from adopting or fostering children but gestational surrogacy circumvents those laws. A surrogacy advocate group told Reduxx that “this is not the first case of a sex offender procuring a child from a surrogate mother that we have come across; we fear this is the tip of the iceberg. Vetting of commissioning parents in surrogacy is virtually nonexistent and is not comparable with checks we see in adoption.” It isn’t clear which of the fathers donated sperm to father the child but in Pennsylvania, both parents can register as the parents of the baby while the baby is still in utero giving them both equal parental rights to the baby. Mastriano says he’s now “drafting legislation to close this loophole so that sick, perverted individuals can never again exploit flaws in our legal system to gain access to innocent children.” But how do you close a loophole that allows people to biologically reproduce? The post Convicted Sex Offender Gains Parental Rights Through Surrogacy appeared first on Redacted.