Are you in Washington State? Or know someone who is? Contact your senator here (http://leg.wa.gov/LIC/Pages/hotline.aspx), forward this article to them, and tell them that if they support SB 6037, they are violating the rights, needs, and desires of children.

"I was conceived by anonymous donor conception in the early 1970’s. I have since won a high court test case in England against the practice of anonymous donation and written a PhD on the topic, demonstrating in many w...ays why this practice is wrong. To intentionally deprive a person of their personal medical, cultural information and kinship is beyond reckless. To have our government’s and medical practices condoning it is even more unconscionable. Empathy for those who are childless must not become one-eyed and one-sided. Future generations need to be protected from the needy-combining-with big industry. If left to their own devices, this results in the wholesale ransacking and plundering from what should not be for sale or forsaken, from those who can’t yet speak."

Yesterday we shared Part 1 of Elizabeth's story of being a donor-conceived woman with no idea who her father was. Here's what happened next:

"I lost heart. I gave up. But one evening, out of sheer habit, I did fitfully check the websites. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw that, at last, I had a close relative match – a half-sister! I was cautiously excited as I messaged her, asking her how she felt having discovered a half-sister, and how she felt about being donor-conce...ived.

Elizabeth speaks out against the practice of donor conception. Here's the first half of her story:

"I did not know, until I lost it, how much my sense of identity was rooted in my knowledge of who my parents were. Incidentally, discovering I was donor-conceived was in many ways a relief, since by that point “Dad” had been imprisoned for indecent assault of a child; but even though I was liberated from a genetic link with him, I was also cast adrift from who I thought I was,... and from all the stories that make up a family’s sense of identity. My sense of exile was all the more acute because, ironically, I had spent several years researching my family tree. It turned out that I had nothing to do with those illiterate peasants in Leicestershire after all.

Our latest submission. Look at how much this donor-conceived woman's biological identity mattered to her even though she was raised by a loving mother and father:

"Ten years later commercial DNA testing was finally starting to look promising, and was now affordable enough for me to get my hands on. My sweet husband encouraged me to go ahead and purchase an Ancestry DNA test. The results came back confirming that I was not related to the dad who raised me. My closest match...es were 4th cousins, too far away to make any quick determinations. But I was determined, and I spent 4-5 hours per evening over the next 6 months comparing the public family trees of those 4th cousins until one night I figured out a single couple from the 1800’s who was repeated in several of those distant trees. I built their family tree, with all 20 of their children and their descendants, down to present day. I looked for someone who was in that tree who had also attended medical school in the city where I was conceived. Eventually I found a possibility. I looked for a photo of him on social media and saw an older version of my son’s face staring back at me. My adorable son whose features no one could ever quite place. I had finally found the other half of me."

How do you know that Surrogacy is exploitive? Because poor women in Hubei wont be using rich women in Shanghai as surrogates anytime soon.

“Poor villagers in central China are making more than 100,000 yuan (US$15,000) by acting as surrogate mothers, a Chinese news site has reported. In some areas, most women of child bearing age had been hiring out their wombs, even though the practice was illegal.

The news portal’s investigation highlighted the case of a village in Hubei pr...ovince, where more than 100 women were bearing the fertilised eggs of couples they had never met.”
#StopSurrogacyNow

I love my state, but I hate it's politics. First up on the legislative docket for 2018, a massive overhaul of parenting laws around surrogacy and donor conception. Highlights:

-There are ZERO references or even hints to the rights/needs of children to be known and loved by both biological parents.

- According to this bill, you are the parent to a donor conceived child if you "intend" to be regardless of genetics. Of course, that doesn't apply for adoptive parents who still... must undergo extensive scrutiny, training and supervision. Yet in both situations, biological strangers are being granted custody of children which is inherently risky.

Even as an adoptive mom, I know that biological parents offer something distinct to their children. Not in the level of love we have to give, but that many children still long for the missing love of a biological parent regardless of how loved they are by their adoptive family. Know what that means? We should never casually or intentionally sever the parent-child bond.

“Christmas and my birthday are the hardest times and are the times that I think about my mom the most.

I tr...y thinking of meeting her except it’s too hard to really know what that would be like.

This is happening in Seattle schools now. I just discussed with one mom whose son’s kindergarten class covered these transgender “lessons”. She was able to opt him out. This time. But it’s now law for all elementary schools in Seattle to cover this material.

One of the books that elementary school students will be reading in this program is “I am Jazz,” a kids book on one of the most well known transgender teens- Jazz Jennings. What the book doesn’t reveal is that, as a resul...t of the (off label) puberty blockers and hormones, Jazz now has what is called a “micropenis.” One that does not allow him even enough material to surgically construct a cosmetic vagina. Jazz is almost certainly chemically sterile. He will likely never be able to have children. There’s also a good chance that Jazz cannot and will not be able to have any kind of normal sexual function or arousal. He hasn’t transitioned from a boy to a girl, he has transitioned from a healthy child to a lifelong consumer a pharmaceuticals and cosmetic surgery. My heart grieves for this wonderful boy.

When babies become commodities, what do you do when you get a defective product? Abortion is a common requirement in surrogacy contracts. The surrogate has very few rights, and the baby has none at all:

"What was even more shocking, however, was that the [commissioning parents] wanted [the surrogate] to abort their son.

She told the local news:

Concerned about justice and success for our black brothers and sisters? Congratulations, you are a marriage advocate:

“Traditional marriage, beyond procreation, offers us so many things that we tend to take it for granted. Things like success and empowerment, cultural stability and a sense of identity. As reported by divorcesaloon.com, the divorce rate for black couples is about 70 percent. That number doesn’t include the number of couples separated – legally or not. Addition...ally, according to the Hoover Institute, black women are half as likely to marry as white women, but twice as likely to divorce. Not to mention, approximately 75 percent of black children are born out-of-wedlock...