She Was Imprisoned for Selling Her Baby. Now Delaware Wants to Make It Legal.
Josh Wood /
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child) is already legal in most U.S. jurisdictions, and not a single state maintains a criminal ban after Michigan repealed the last one in 2024.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.
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