Surrogacy: Why the pope wants it banned

Pope Francis “surprised the world” last week with his call for a global ban on surrogacy, said Kathryn Jean Lopez in National Review. During a speech in which he addressed wars, terrorism, and other threats to humanity, Francis called surrogate motherhood a “deplorable” practice that commercializes pregnancy and turns an unborn child “into an object of trafficking.” Many commentators were stunned that this “progressive” pope would condemn a practice that allows same-sex and infertile couples to have families. Yet this is not simply a matter of Catholic doctrine; some secular feminists share his belief that surrogacy is inherently exploitative. Doesn’t surrogacy, which can cost more than $100,000, use the wombs of the poor to satisfy the desires of the rich? And can a surrogate really give informed consent before she has seen her newborn, which will be taken away immediately and handed over to the “commissioning parents?”

Francis is playing political games, said Fabrice Houdart in his Substack newsletter. Having offended conservative Catholics by allowing the blessing of same-sex unions, he’s now trying “to appease them by shifting the attention to another conservative crusade: surrogacy.” Are those critics really offended by surrogacy, or the fact that many of the thousands of surrogate births in the U.S. each year are for LGBTQ families like my own? Presuming surrogacy is always “an exploitative last resort” for desperate women doesn’t reflect reality, said Elizabeth Nolan Brown in The Dispatch. Research shows that surrogates, who typically earn about $40,000 in the U.S., have a variety of motivations. They also “largely report positive experiences”: one surrogate told researchers that she was proud to help “make [a] family whole.”

None of this excuses the “buying and selling of children,” said Laura Perrins in the Catholic Herald (U.K.). How can we ignore stories of commercial surrogacy operations in Kenya, where women are forced to have abortions when foreigners decide they don’t want a baby? Or how some newborns with disabilities have been abandoned by parentsto-be? Even in the U.S., which lacks federal regulation on surrogacy, some surrogates have reported “shocking maltreatment,” said Jill Filipovic in CNN.com. But does this “ethically thorny” practice require the “extreme response” of the Catholic Church, which historically values procreation over women’s bodily autonomy? We need more rules, but ones that preserve choice. Let’s treat this issue with “the nuance and concern it deserves.”