Vatican condemns sex-change surgery
Church also reaffirms opposition to gender theory, calling it grave threat to human dignity
The Vatican yesterday declared sex-change operations and surrogacy as grave threats to human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that violate God’s plan for human life, just four months after supporting blessings for same-sex couples.
The Vatican’s doctrinal office (DDF) released the “Dignitas infinita” (Infinite dignity) declaration after conservative resistance, especially in Africa, against its document on LGBT issues.
There is no suggestion the new text, which describes what the Church perceives as threats to human dignity, was prepared in response to the rows over samesex blessings, as it has been five years in the making. But it has undergone extensive revisions over the period.
Pope Francis approved it after requesting that it also mention “poverty, the situation of migrants, violence against women, human trafficking, war, and other themes”, the head of the DDF, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, said.
The declaration said surrogate parenting violated the dignity of both the surrogate mother and the child, and recalled that Francis in January called it “despicable” and urged a global ban.
“The child has the right to have a fully human [and not artificially induced] origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver,” the document said.
“Considering this, the legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a ‘right to a child’ that fails to respect the dignity of that child as the recipient of the gift of life.”
On gender theory, the declaration said “desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel”.
Gender theory, often called gender ideology by its detractors, suggests that gender is more complex and fluid than the binary categories of male and female, and depends on more than visible sexual characteristics.
On changes of gender, the declaration said “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception”.
It acknowledged some people may undergo surgery to resolve “genital abnormalities”, but stressed “such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here”.
The text denounced the fact “in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation”.