Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Last week, a disturbing story broke about the fate of a child that was acquired through surrogacy.

Logan Riley and Brandon Mitchell, so-called married men from Pennsylvania, had chronicled their quest for a baby on social

media. And that's how the world learned that Mitchell was in fact a registered child sex offender

due to highly indecent behavior from a decade ago. Though forbidden from unsupervised contact with a

minor, he was still somehow able with his partner to buy a baby. As Katie Faust of them before us

often reminds us, nothing that these men did to acquire this baby was illegal. In fact, it's an

extra legal situation. Unlike the host of regulations and investigations that govern adoption,

no such rules apply when it comes to surrogacy.

As Faust posted about this incident, and I quote, this horrifying case of a pedophile acquiring

a surrogate boy is opening a lot of eyes. This is an adoption, and that's by design. No part of this

process considers the best interests of the child. It's a market-based delivery system

for any and every adult to acquire children, end quote. And then she later added,

this kind of failing isn't a bug of the system. It's a feature. In fact, there are two

interrelated systems at work here that produce this horrific result. There's the legal system,

which, as Faust, is basically allergic to any and all regulation or legal barrier to artificial

reproductive technologies, especially for those that provide same-sex couples with children.

But there's also the artificial reproductive technologies themselves, which are pushing

further and further into uncharted territory. For example, L.S. Dugdale recently wrote about eight

babies made in a lab. Now, tragically, that kind of thing's not uncommon these days. Why these

particular babies made headlines is that each one carries DNA from three parents, one man and two women.

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