THE Vatican has called for an end to surrogacy worldwide, saying that it risks reducing children to “commodified products” and women to “service providers”.
“The issue of surrogacy is an urgent one — the technology and practice have run laps around law and ethics,” the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations and Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, the Most Revd Gabriele Caccia, told the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York last week.
“Many view surrogacy as a compassionate solution for those wishing to be parents. . . Yet when a child is the object of a contract and transaction, how can commodification be avoided?”
Although prohibited as a form of human trafficking in most European countries, commercial surrogacy remains widespread in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and is projected to have a net value of £150 billion by 2032, Global Market Insights says.
In his address, Archbishop Caccia said that the global “surrogacy industry” was fuelled by poverty. He said that the demand for children exceeded supply, and that many women were “pressured or even forced” by family members into acting as surrogates.
Women who agreed to be employed as surrogates could find themselves in a “perverse competition for commissioning parents”, he said, while a child diagnosed with a disability became “a flawed product or problem to be solved”.
The UN’s 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child enshrined the right of children “to know and be cared for by their parents”, the Archbishop told government and NGO representatives, and the Holy See hoped for steps toward ending surrogacy “in all its forms”.
Representing the World Council of Churches, Bishop Susan Johnson from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, said that many parts of the world were currently “experiencing pushback” over women’s rights and gender justice.
The UN Commission said in a statement that there still needed to be “reflection, dialogue and awareness-raising” about the “violence, coercion and exploitation” surrounding the global surrogacy market.
A French campaigner, Olivia Maurel, told Austria’s Kathpress agency that surrogate mothers had been forced to have abortions if the child “developed differently than ordered”, and typically received 20 per cent of the 200,000 euros paid by European clients for a child, the remainder going to agencies, clinics, and lawyers.
The demand for surrogacy’s worldwide abolition was, she said, “one of few issues on which Vatican representatives and radical feminists are united”.