This section seeks to protect the interests of the child in several ways. The major protection of the child is the authorization procedure itself. The Act requires closely supervised gestational arrangements to ensure the security and well being of the child. Once a petition has been filed, subsection (a) permits--but does not require--the court to validate a gestational agreement. If it validates, the court must declare that the intended parents will be the parents of any child born pursuant to, and during the term of, the agreement.

Subsection (b) requires the court to make five separate findings before validating the agreement. Subsection (b)(1) requires the court to ensure that the 90-day residency requirement of § 802 has been satisfied and that it has jurisdiction over the parties;

Under subsection(b)(2), the court will be informed of the results of a home study of the intended parents who must satisfy the suitability standards required of prospective adoptive parents.

The interests of all the parties are protected by subsection (b)(3), which is designed to protect the individuals involved from the possibility of overreaching or fraud. The court must find that all parties consented to the gestational agreement with full knowledge of what they agreed to do, which necessarily includes relinquishing the resulting child to the intended parents who are obligated to accept the child.

The requirement of assurance of health-care expenses until birth of the resulting child imposed by subsection (b)(4) further protects the gestational mother.

Finally, subsection (b)(5) mandates that the court find that compensation of the gestational mother, if any, is reasonable in amount.

Section 803, spells out detailed requirements for the petition and the findings that must be made before an authorizing order can be issued, but nowhere states the consequences of violations of the rules. Because of the variety of types of violations that could possibly occur, a bright-line rule concerning the effect of such violations is inappropriate. The consequences of a failure to abide by the rules of this section are left to a case-by-case determination. A court should be guided by the Act's intention to permit gestational agreements and the equities of a particular situation. Note that § 806