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In one of the more shocking underreported stories from recent months, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is attempting to strip legal parentage from families who conceive children using a genetic donor, launching an attack on one same-sex couple that has sweeping ramifications for thousands more—including heterosexual and adoptive parents. The Miami Herald reported last week that Uthmeier, a Republican appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, intervened in a routine case to argue that Florida’s surrogacy contract language violates the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on slavery, and, more sweepingly, that the state constitution bars biological parents from transferring parental rights at all. These theories—which one far-right judge has already endorsed—would end both surrogacy and donor conception in Florida, while imperiling parents’ ability to adopt out their birth children. They would render some parents legal strangers to the children they are already raising, potentially leaving those kids without recognized parents at all.

Uthmeier says he is doing all this to protect children from what he calls “modern-day slavery.” But the consequence would be a massive disruption of stable, loving families, as countless parents are told that they have no legal claim as parents to their own kids.

The attorney general’s crusade against Florida’s donor-conceived and adoptive families has an unusual genesis. It began when two married men from France asked Judge Marlon Weiss to issue a pre-birth order acknowledging them as the lawful parents of a child who was about to be born via surrogacy. (In this arrangement, the parents conceive with one father’s genetic material and an egg donor; the gestational carrier has no biological relationship to the child.) Florida has allowed for surrogacy since 1993, and couples typically have no problem obtaining the order establishing their rights as parents. Judge Weiss, a DeSantis appointee, begrudgingly granted the pre-birth order, as required by law. But alongside it, he issued an opinion speculating that the surrogacy contract may be unconstitutional and void. Establishing parentage through a contract, he wrote, may violate the rights of “unborn........

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