When the Supreme Court overturned President Donald Trump’s executive order last week, it held that the Fourteenth Amendment affords citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil — including those born through birth tourism schemes. It is one of the court’s most unpopular decisions in recent years, with Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent questioning whether it will stand the test of time. One underreported aspect of this issue, however, is an obvious but (until recently) largely unknown consequence of birthright citizenship: a thriving, cross-border commercial surrogacy industry. Without congressional action, women and children remain vulnerable to exploitation through lucrative birth tourism schemes. Foreign nationals are taking advantage of the U.S.’s permissive surrogacy laws, advanced technology, and birthright citizenship to have anchor babies to whom they may or may not be biologically related. And where do the plurality of such foreigners come from? China. This is perhaps why President Trump congratulated “President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN,” on X — because it certainly wasn’t a win for American sovereignty or vulnerable women and children. As the Center for Bioethics and Culture said in a press release, Although the Court framed its decision as an exercise in constitutional interpretation, the ruling fails to engage substantively with the empirical realities at the center of the controversy: women and children are being systematically exploited by actors who manipulate U.S. immigration law for commercial profit, citizenship acquisition, and immigration advantage… Women in the United States should not be reduced to vehicles for the procurement of citizenship. Children should never be treated as legal instruments, commodities, or expedients for evading immigration law. And the industry is only growing. A January 2024 report found that surrogacy cycles for international intended parents increased 78% between 2014 and 2019, with Chinese nationals accounting for 41.7% of foreign buyers.  Lax U.S. laws allow foreign nationals to outsource nearly every step of reproduction within our borders. The resulting child receives a U.S. birth certificate, Social Security number, and passport, even when neither parent is a citizen and the child is raised abroad from birth. At 21, he can petition to bring his parents and siblings to America. At 35, he can run for president of the United States.  This isn’t a hypothetical reality. Within days of President Trump’s original executive order, the agency Surrogate First promised legal workarounds, admitting that “the certainty of their child obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth is a significant factor” for international clients. Another agency pitched surrogacy as a “cheaper alternative than an EB-5 visa.” The co-founder of one California agency told NPR that dual nationality would be “a win-win situation for your children,” while a fellow agent admitted many of her clients were “high-level Communist Party officials and celebrities” seeking American citizenship for their children. The consequences are already on display. In Arcadia, California, authorities discovered 21 surrogate-born children — discovered after an infant suffered severe head trauma — in the home of a former CCP official with ties to gambling, immigration fraud, and smuggling operations. Or consider Xu Bo, a Chinese national with dynastic ambitions who has 100 children and counting through American surrogates.  With more than 107 Chinese-owned surrogacy agencies operating in Southern California alone, some with locations listed in mainland China or with Mandarin-only marketing, it is clear that birth tourism fuels a lucrative market selling children and citizenship to foreign buyers.  Beyond the citizenship abuses and national security risks, surrogacy itself presents an irreconcilable injustice to the mother and child. Given the lack of background checks, home visits, and best-interest-of-the-child assessments, children and their surrogate mothers pay the price. Take for example the stories of Melissa Cook and Brittney Pearson. In Cook’s case, she was horrified to learn that the triplets she carried through a surrogacy agreement were going to a single purchasing father who turned out to be partially deaf, under-employed, and living with a history of poor mental health — allegedly in the form of abusing pets and pulling out his own hair. He requested that she abort one of the babies, and when she refused, he pursued legal action. He remains the legal father of the three children to this day. For Pearson, she delayed her own lifesaving care after receiving a cancer diagnosis halfway through her surrogacy pregnancy. When the purchasing parents — a same-sex couple — found out the child might have health complications from his premature birth and incur additional NICU fees, they asked her to have an abortion. She refused, but in the end, they denied the child life-saving care, and the child died not long after birth. Likewise, gay men with records of pedophilic comments, child sexual abuse material, or sex offenses have repeatedly purchased babies through surrogacy. A basic adoption screening would likely reject each of these men, and yet they had no issue with surrogacy. And those are just the ones we know about. Once the child is born, the payment clears, and the paperwork comes in, no one knows what happens to these children: Do they go to loving homes, or do they suffer abuse, neglect, or labor and/or sexual exploitation? Do they act as pawns in foreign infiltration schemes? We have no idea. Unlike adoption, surrogacy involves the intentional creation of children who will be severed from their birth mothers and, at times, their biological mothers (egg donors) to fulfill another adult’s desire for parenthood. Second, strict adoption laws ensure that no parent pays a woman for her child. In surrogacy, this lucrative payment is the basis of the agreement. Indeed, the only difference between a legitimate surrogacy contract and baby selling is the timing of the contract. As legal scholar Anthony Sirven has argued, for a surrogacy contract to be enforceable, courts must treat the children themselves as property, as “something less than full persons” in which adults can hold an ownership interest. That is precisely what the Thirteenth Amendment was written to outlaw and what the Fourteenth was written to repair. Law professor Adeline Allen presses the point further: The industry’s claim that a surrogate sells only the services of gestation, not the child, is “disturbingly similar” to the argument of 19th-century slaveholders, who insisted they trafficked not in human beings but in their labor.  The Reconstruction Amendments abolished that logic. Surrogacy contracts resurrect it, and the Supreme Court’s ruling now rewards it with citizenship. As Congress and the administration scramble to craft a viable pathway to correct the Supreme Court’s error, they must keep in mind the most pervasive example of surrogacy birth tourism abuse enabled by birthright citizenship.  Florida enacted a law to prohibit foreign nationals from contracting with surrogacy agencies and mothers in the state, mirroring federal legislation introduced by Senator Rick Scott and a separate bill by Congressman Scott Perry. As most developed nations have already done, Congress can unilaterally prohibit foreign nationals from contracting with American surrogates or agencies. Likewise, lawmakers can amend requirements to deny anyone a visa who is traveling to the U.S. for the purpose of having or picking up a child born via surrogacy.  The Fourteenth Amendment was written so that no person born on American soil could ever again be treated as property. We owe its authors — and these children — better than this. *** Emma Waters is a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation and the author of the book “Lead Like Jael: Seven Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith” and host of the new podcast Rethinking Fertility.  This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.