The Spokane Spokesman-Review's Spin Control blog reports today on the debate over state Rep. Jamie Pedersen's (D-43) proposal (which we've written about here and here) to allow people in Washington State to pay women to bear children for them. The bill would also change a provision in current law that presumes that a birth mother has parental rights to her birth child so that lesbian and gay couples no longer have to go through the lengthy adoption process to gain parental rights.

On one side of the debate: Social conservatives (and some feminists) who argue that the bill exploits women by allowing rich couples to pay for the use of their bodies. On the other: Social liberals, gay and lesbian couples, and parents who used surrogates who argue that surrogacy provides an opportunity for people who can't get pregnant (for fertility reasons or because they're male) to have children who are genetically related to them.

The Spokesman Review reports:

HB 1267 would also turn surrogate mothers, and the babies they have, into commodities, opponents told the Senate Government Operations Committee Tuesday. The state doesn’t allow people to sell kidneys or other organs, and shouldn’t allow surrogate mothers to receive money for having a child…

Russell Johnson of the Family Policy Institute likened the bill to slavery: “It allows legal rights to be attached to a person based on the exchange of money.”

Families that have paid surrogate mothers in states where that is legal told the committee about the difficulty and expense of repeated travel to where the surrogate lives. Steven Glass of Seattle said he and his wife made some two dozen trips to Portland to be with their twins’ surrogate mother during the pregnancy, but couldn’t get there in time for an emergency Caesarean section and had to fly the babies to a Seattle after they were born prematurely. The whole process cost about $80,000, although most of that was for legal and medical expenses and travel, he said.