How much would you pay a surrogate to carry your child? How much would you charge to offer that service?
A lot more people could soon be negotiating a price as lawmakers move to make surrogacy a legal business enterprise in Washington.
Surrogacy is officially outlawed. Yet some women will tell you it occurs all the time. Most often the motive is compassion on behalf of a relative or friend unable to bear a child, but there also are women doing it for the dough.
This week, the House passed legislation bringing surrogacy out in the open and letting its practitioners get paid. Under the bill, the surrogate and the intended parents sign a contract covering payment, insurance, reimbursement for maternity clothes and a whole host of other items.
The state won’t regulate this relationship but it will tax the surrogate, who will be treated as the owner of a service business.
No taxes are due until one’s gross income reaches $46,667. There are tax credits, too.
For example, one earning $70,000 would owe $835 after taxes and credits are calculated. Once a surrogate eclipses $93,334, tax credits end and they will be taxed at the regular rate for service businesses.
Deporting prisoners?
Should prison continue to be a state-funded service for illegal immigrants?
It’s been a subject of conversation in Olympia this week as lawmakers wrestle with trying to squeeze out some savings by deporting some illegal immigrant inmates at the beginning of their sentences, instead of at the end.
At this point, the state won’t seek to deport anyone convicted of sex crimes or other violent offenses until they complete their prison time.
A bill wending its way through the Legislature focuses on those convicted of felony drug and nonviolent offenses. In early February, the Department of Corrections calculated this to be about 210 of the roughly 930 inmates pegged as being in the country illegally.
Getting them out of the prison could save the state close to $3 million in its next budget.
It’s not easy to send them home.
Today, the Department of Corrections must get the sentencing courts and prosecuting attorneys to agree to hand an offender over to federal authorities.
And it doesn’t usually happen. In the last two years, the state pushed to deport 50 people and gained the needed agreement in only two cases.
This week, the House overwhelmingly passed the bill. It includes language erasing the requirement for the agency to get approval from judges and prosecutors.
Political reporter Jerry Cornfield’s blog, The Petri Dish, is at www.heraldnet.com. Contact him at 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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