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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.
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”.
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”.
Source: Vatican hopes for end to surrogacy ‘in all its forms’