Why Pope Francis Condemned Surrogacy

The Catholic Church’s teaching on surrogacy is rooted in the desire to preserve the dignity of human life.

Few subjects are more emotional than procreation. The need to have a child is not just a personal desire, it’s often a primal instinct—the desire to see something of yourself left on the planet, carrying on your work and your legacy long after you’re gone.

That is why baby-making—or the inability to make a baby—is such a fraught phenomenon, made, as many things are, more fraught by the cultural and political climate. As celebrities and political commentators embrace surrogacy as a natural, logical, and inconsequential development in baby-making, global leaders—notably, and recently Pope Francis—have stepped in to remind a world so used to immediate gratification that scientific developments, however personally fulfilling, can have reverberating ethical, moral, and cultural consequences.

In his New Year’s address to members of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, Pope Francis attacked surrogacy directly, calling it an “exploitative” and “deplorable practice” that “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.” He added: “The path to peace calls for respect for life, for every human life, starting with the life of the unborn child in the mother’s womb, which cannot be suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking.”

One of the primary drivers of surrogacy, infertility, is a gut-wrenching journey that challenges families, couples, and, humans, in ways many marriage and family life foibles rarely do.

Back in 2012, I found out I couldn’t have kids. Although everything seemed correct and in working order, month after month, no pink lines came up on those Amazon pregnancy tests I’d bought by the gross. It would take six long years, and two miscarriages, to discover that I had such severe endometriosis that my ovaries had fused together; instead of turning out eggs for babies, I was randomly gifting my abdominal organs with ovum.

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