Pope Francis called Monday for a universal ban on the “despicable” practice of surrogate motherhood, as he included the “commercialization” of pregnancy in an annual speech listing threats to global peace and human dignity.
In a foreign policy address to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, Francis lamented that 2024 had dawned at a time in history in which peace is “increasingly threatened, weakened and in some part lost.”
Citing Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, migration, climate crises and the “immoral” production of nuclear and conventional weapons, Francis delivered a lengthy laundry list of the ills afflicting humanity and the increasing violation of international humanitarian law that allows them.
But Francis also listed smaller-scale issues that he said were threats to peace and human dignity, including surrogacy. Francis said the life of the unborn child must be protected and not “suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking.”
Have you ever considered that the high expense of paying someone to be pregnant on your behalf pays a great deal of cash to potentially poor women? Just because rich people are the ones paying for it doesn’t mean they are the only ones that benefit from it. I’d like to imagine a public healthcare system that will pay for the procedure if you can convince a friend or relative to carry the baby for you. That’s conceivable to me. But being pregnant is 9 months of hard work and has health risks. Even if we can imagine making surrogacy available to all, it’s hard to imagine making surrogates easily available to all. I say if you have the wealth to make this a job for someone, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of women in the world who have very healthy bodies and can tolerate a pregnancy well who don’t have high paying professional skills.
So while we wait for the perfect egalitarian world to arrive where wealth has no meaning and everything is equally available to all, should we ban this? That’s the only question, really.