Pope’s dig at surrogacy was the only ‘despicable’ action here

COME back with me to a delivery room in a North London hospital 25 years ago, when, on the hottest day of the year, I attempted to push a nine-and-a-half-pound baby out of a body that had previously been cut open for an emergency Caesarean section.

I’ll never know if I could have done it. What I do know is that after many hours of exhaustive, wrung-out pushing, my son had gone thus far and no further. Amidst a great deal of vomiting, tears and protests, the delivery team made the decision to whisk me away for a second emergency section. First, I had to sign the consent forms, and there it was in black and white, the reason for the surgical intervention: ‘Failure to progress’.

I’ll spare you the mental trauma of the next decade or so, during which I frequently pretended I had given birth vaginally to all three of my children – the second section acting as a medical third strike that precluded future attempts at natural delivery – and cut to the chase: that language is never more incendiary for a woman than when it is about childbirth. In short, because of a single word on a form in a hospital – and in spite of three beautiful, healthy children – I felt I had failed as a mother, a woman and a human for a huge, stupid part of my life.

I bring you back there only because, in his latest speech listing global threats to peace and human dignity, Pope Francis has included surrogacy, describing the practice as ‘despicable’. As the Holy Father himself must say a hundred times a day: Jesus.

Calling for a universal ban on this modern business of women carrying babies for other women and couples who can’t, the Pope lamented the ‘commercialisation’ of pregnancy. ‘I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood,’ he went on, ‘which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.’

There are a number of ways to respond to the Pope on this one. There is the measured, mature response that acknowledges that a lack of universal regulation of surrogacy has undoubtedly resulted in cases of exploitation, but argues that the solution is not abolition, but for better governance and codes of practice to be devised and enforced.

Then there is the Catholic response, which probably applies to many of us, no matter how long or how far we have moved away from the Church. We could call this the And Then You Go And Spoil It All By Saying Something Stupid response – another exasperated, one-step-forward-two-steps-back reaction after Francis had appeared to be softening in his approach to samesex marriage when he announced, before Christmas, that priests could bless such unions.

Admittedly, the Pope’s statement did describe these marriages as ‘irregular’ – prompting Ursula Halligan of We Are Church to lament that the condemnatory language in this shift in official Church policy still obliged same-sex couples to ‘go skulking around the corner’ in search of a priest’s blessing. Still, it seemed a small step in the direction of tolerance and compassion, which for someone purporting to represent a loving God didn’t seem like a huge ask.

OR there is the response of the thousands of women, many of them Catholic, whose lives have been blessed by babies carried by surrogates. Women like Senator Mary Seery Kearney, whose daughter was born by surrogate in India in 2015. She rejected the Pope’s comments as ‘deeply disrespectful’, when I’d guess what she really wanted to do was throw a rock through his French doors. Women like Rosanna Davison, who suffered 14 miscarriages before travelling to Ukraine to start her beautiful family through surrogacy. And thousands of other women who, broken, desperate and in the most vulnerable places in their lives, turned to an expensive and frequently dangerous option because of their need to become parents.

I can’t speak for Brian Dowling and Arthur Gourounlian, whose daughter Blake was carried by Brian’s sister, Aoife. I do not have their experience, though like many others, I have blinked back tears at photos of their unbelievably adorable, lucky – and almost certifiably spoilt – little girl. But I hope that, busy with baby, they don’t give a fiddler’s about the Pope and his mean, hateful comments.

I can only speak as a woman who understands the power of the wrong word when they are at their most vulnerable, desperately trying and fighting with all their might to bring a child into their world. And ‘Jesus’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.