TALLAHASSEE — Florida’s attorney general isn’t alone in trying to reshape Florida’s surrogacy laws.
Attorney General James Uthmeier, inserting himself into what had been a standard surrogacy case, is arguing that surrogacy is unconstitutional. The case is in front of Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal.
Meanwhile, Uthmeier’s former boss, Gov. Ron DeSantis, has also tried to reshape Florida’s surrogacy laws through the Legislature.
Most of his office’s ideas, which the Times/Herald obtained from public records, weren’t adopted during this year’s regular legislative session. Lawmakers did, though, take a first swipe in decades at changing surrogacy laws.
The ideas pushed by DeSantis are broader than what lawmakers ultimately introduced. Here’s what to know about his push and about Uthmeier’s legal fight.
What are Florida’s rules around surrogacy?
Florida’s surrogacy laws were put in place in 1993 and have remained largely untouched since. The state requires all surrogacy cases to include a contract between the surrogate and the legally married commissioning couple.
It also requires that the surrogate have the sole right to consent to medical interventions related to the pregnancy, although it specifies that she should agree to “reasonable medical evaluation” and “reasonable medical instructions about her prenatal health.”
The law restricts surrogacy to cases where a mother can’t physically carry a pregnancy to term or where pregnancy would harm her or the fetus.
Though the statute assumes that couples using surrogacy are a man and a woman, the statute applies equally to same-sex couples.
In the surrogacy case that Uthmeier used to launch his challenge, for example, Judge Marlon Weiss wrote that the couple met the contract requirement because, as a same-sex male couple, they couldn’t have a child without medical assistance.
(Weiss, though, questioned the legality of surrogacy as a whole.)
State law also says that the couple seeking the surrogate must agree to take custody of the child regardless of any physical impairment.
The law allows the couple commissioning the surrogate to pay reasonable living, legal, medical, psychological and psychiatric expenses for the surrogate during and after her pregnancy.
What did lawmakers change?
Lawmakers this year passed legislation prohibiting citizens or residents of a country of concern — China, Iran, Cuba and others — from entering into a surrogacy contract.
The change was embedded in a broader bill about preventing foreign influence.
Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, sponsored the legislation in the House. She pointed to “alarming reports” of Chinese nationals using surrogates to have American-born children.
Persons-Mulicka said those children, who would be U.S. citizens by birthright, could pose a threat.
“In the future, they can return to the United States, participate freely in our open society as citizens, even run for political office, all while being required under Chinese law to owe allegiance to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party),” she said earlier this year.
Some Democratic lawmakers said reports about Chinese citizens commissioning children via surrogate were alarming, but worried that proposals to redefine surrogacy could have unintended consequences.
“The reality is that for so many families, surrogacy is the only path to start that family,” Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, said in March. “I think it’s very concerning that this amendment is being attached to a bill that I would agree, to the point made earlier, is not relevant.”
DeSantis signed the legislation into law last Friday. It will be effective starting July 1.
What did DeSantis propose?
DeSantis’ office in January sent proposed bill language to Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, who carried the foreign influence legislation in the Senate. Grall also is adamantly opposed to abortion and sponsored the bill that led to Florida’s six-week ban.
The proposal from the governor’s office would have prevented anyone who isn’t a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident or a Florida resident from commissioning a surrogate. Surrogates would have to be citizens or lawful permanent residents.
The office also proposed requiring background checks for all involved, would have required a couple to agree that the surrogate is not required to get an abortion under any circumstance. It would have required the court to appoint a guardian ad litem to represent the child until custody is established.
Under the proposal, any person convicted of a sexual offense, violent crime, domestic crime or crime against a child, along with “any other conduct” that the court deems “inconsistent with the best interests of the child,” would be disqualified from the surrogacy process.
None of those proposals were adopted during the 2026 session.
What is Uthmeier doing?
Uthmeier is fighting against surrogacy in a pending case in front of Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal. He has called the practice modern-day slavery and said it “must be stopped.”
The case began last August, when a married couple went before a Broward County judge to secure early parental rights.
The judge, Weiss, granted their petition. But in November, roughly 24 hours after the couple told the court about the baby’s birth, Uthmeier began pushing to intervene in the case.
Surrogacy cases, based on state law, are supposed to be confidential. It’s not clear how Uthmeier found out about the case.
His office has since argued that surrogacy violates the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery, according to a lawyer representing the fathers who commissioned the surrogate.
Katie Jay, an attorney representing the couple, said Uthmeier’s office hasn’t taken issue with her client’s fitness as parents. Instead, she said he seems solely interested in securing a court opinion limiting reproductive technology.
If Uthmeier gets the court to agree with him, it could affect areas beyond surrogacy, including on abortion and in vitro fertilization.
