Birth tourism is human trafficking

 The president’s new executive order hits the nail on the head, both in legal terms, and ultimately in human rights abuse.  It puts the issue beyond partisan controversy, or even legal contention, because it accurately frames the deeper tragedy: birth tourism is human trafficking. 

No longer is the context one of only constitutional law, which is subject to interpretative abuse by the courts, but is now one unequivocally of criminal law.  It has been firmly declared as a crime against the United States, while also calling attention to the involvement of organized criminal cartels. This is a matter not just of individuals and groups, but also of foreign states using birth tourism as a mechanism of effective warfare. 

The progressive Left will now be put to the test: Are they going to side with criminal cartels and hostile foreign nations that traffic women into the U.S., using them as effective “mules,” or are they going to side, not only with the correct, limited meaning of the 14th Amendment, but side with the actual women who are being abused in a widespread international organized crime operation? 

The president’s executive order puts an end to it. 

If the issue before progressives was otherwise adult female trafficking, or selling women into forced prostitution, they, and progressives on the SCOTUS, would zealously come to their defense, and seek to prosecute their abusers.  So what can the left now claim is the difference between that abuse of women, and a criminal abuse that uses them to transport fetuses, for the same criminal profit?  

And how is a woman who is exploited as a drug mule, smuggling illegal substances within her body, different, in principle, than using her to smuggle an innocent fetus into the U.S., acting as a “courier” for a crime ring, and converting a baby into effective contraband?

I don't mean to be insensitive. With all due respect to the tens of thousands of women so exploited, and to the innocent unborn who are turned into objects of grotesque profiteering, it is hard, however, to see this issue in another way.

Except that the progressive left surely will, because they will undoubtedly seek to complicate the new EO by arguing a complex set of rules, and lobbying for ambiguous exception language that will obscure legal birth from illegal trafficking, or overlook trafficking altogether by redefining it, or simply denying it.  

Standard of proof for a birth crime will also be the left's new legal cause. As a matter of legal strategy, the left routinely interferes in actual justice, including by the manipulation or suppression of cold hard facts, if it suits their ideology.  And their standards of proof, of course, depend on their interest: If it involves voter eligibility, for example, it is low (or nonexistent); if it involves absolving conservative political protesters of false chargers, it is high (or unachievable).  

This is also why the term “birth tourism” is far too casual a description of what is actually going on.  Birth tourism does indeed describe the use of the tourism visa that is fraudulently exploited, including by cartel traffickers to disguise their operation. But it surely does not describe the actual crime.

In many ways birth tourism is a form of terrorism because it results in operational, social, economic and personal terror, all in one.  Terrorism by definition is the use of violence against a civilian population in order to realize a political goal, but the “terror” results in violence against everyone it touches.  Most of all, birth trafficking terrorizes the women used in the operation, then their infants, and then terrorizes American citizens by invading their country under the false pretense of visitation, followed by economic and social terror through political extortion of taxpayer, government and corporate resources.

It is hard to resist cynicism about the DNC’s certain objections to the EO, because just as they turned their backs on human exploitation resulting from the Biden administration’s massive open border project, where millions of people were herded and transported like zoo animals into U.S. cities and towns, they will likewise turn their backs on birth crime because it also serves their political cause: repopulation of the U.S. with a dependent underclass that triggers endless taxation, wealth transfer, social programs, and political profiteering, if not votes. It is also hard to ignore the likelihood of DNC and donor financing of birth tourism itself, as illegal border crossing was financed.

The executive order press conference that the president held, surrounded by staff including Stephen Miller who succinctly summarized the EO in legal terms, was ultimately a powerful demonstration of human rights advocacy, combined with new hardline rule-of-law standards.  There was no mincing of words, or legal ambiguity.  

In no way overstating the significance of the executive order, it created legal history of the finest kind: the kind that stands on principles recognized as natural law from the moral code of a civilized society. The EO elevated the standard of executive order privilege by setting it next to the standard of pioneering legislation, because it represents the people’s will. It creates true landmark law that is long overdue, and it has no partisan fingerprints. 

All that is left for radical progressives and judges to do now, is defy the executive order, break the law, and thereby join human traffickers as effective criminal accomplices. 

Matthew G. Andersson is a law and policy author and a former business chief executive.  He has testified before the US Senate and is a graduate of the University of Chicago and University of Texas at Austin.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/birth-tourism-is-human-trafficking/