This January sales time it appears you can get yourself a half-price baby. Or at least one at a reduced price, excluding delivery charge.
This isn’t as flippant as it might sound. The reality we now inhabit is one in which the buying and selling of children increasingly exists in the form of surrogacy. This commodification of women and children, turning them into consumer goods, has rightly been called out by Pope Francis.
In a 8 January speech at the Vatican to the world’s representatives to the Holy See, Pope Francis declared: “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.”
He went on to call out the “practice of so-called surrogate motherhood” as “deplorable”, saying it “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs”.
In a sad reflection of where the modern world has got to, the Pope felt the need to issue the reminder that “a child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract”. The Pope then called on the international community to prohibit the practice of surrogacy universally.
His comments follow the Italian government’s plan to introduce legislation which could see potential fines of up to €1 million or two years in jail for those who elect to have a surrogate baby abroad.
Carolina Varchi, the politician spearheading the Italian government’s proposal, says “surrogacy is a degrading practice that affects women who often face economic difficulties”.
It is encouraging that Pope Francis has called out surrogacy for what it is: a grave attack on the humanity and dignity of both mother and child. This is a practice that has long been fought against by both feminists and Christians alike.
The buying and selling of a child – which is ultimately what surrogacy is and involves – is so obviously wrong, so blatantly exploitative that a global ban should be introduced. And yet we couldn’t be further from it due to the vested commercial interests of a burgeoning surrogacy industry and the sense of entitlement of those who believe they have the absolute right to buy a child (rather than acknowledge that it is the most precious gift a person can be given).
If you want to see how women and their eggs are chosen – by gay couples in particular – a quick look through the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, demonstrates how women are dehumanised and degraded in this industry.
They are chosen from catalogues that literally contain “thousands of them”. One couple discussed how they had specific requirements in relation to eyes and hair – just like choosing a new pair of shoes. The mother is no longer a mother, she is an “egg donor” or merely the “she”. This dehumanisation process is necessary when buying children, if you think about it, otherwise how could you live with or rationalise what you are doing.
I’ve seen a clip that features two men discussing how they “wanted the egg donor to be super fit” and “to find someone who was an absolute smoke show”. One of the men continues: “I think it’s quite fabulous, the eggs were terribly expensive, but we got a Brazilian supermodel”.
The above it why the feminist Julie Bindel has declared surrogacy “absolute misogyny”. The cruelty dispensed through surrogacy should not be underestimated. Surrogacy involves three or four people agreeing that a woman should conceive a child only to have that infant separated from its mother very soon after birth.
This is a critical distinction from adoption, whereby a mother becomes pregnant and feels she cannot raise her child after it is born. She continues with her pregnancy, giving her child the gift of life that she believes in, and only gives the child up for adoption because she truly feels she cannot raise her child herself.
This is a world away from surrogacy and couples, often same-sex male couples, choosing women from catalogues, using artificial insemination to impregnate the woman, paying her to carry the baby, before separating the new-born baby from its mother very soon after birth, if not immediately.
Commercial surrogacy contracts often stipulate that birth mothers must not be allowed to hold their baby after they are born and must give them up straight way, lest a mother potentially bond with her child, posing a big problem for “commissioning parents”.
It is particularly striking that all too often those who condemn the Church the loudest for historically forced adoptions have absolutely no problem separating babies from their birth mothers today – as long as there is a contract, “consent” (who knows what pressures the mother is under) and large amounts of money exchanged.
But the baby never consents to being separated from its mother, and often mothers only consent because they are in dire financial circumstances. Many surrogates are coerced by abusive husbands and pimps into hiring out their womb. All of this amounts to coercion, if not a form of enslavement.
It is also common surrogacy practice to plant embryos in two or more surrogates and then perform an abortion if more than one pregnancy takes hold. Similarly, if several embryos are implanted in one surrogate and a multiple pregnancy occurs, unwanted foetuses will often be aborted.
Such is the cruel world of surrogacy and wombs for hire, and the trauma involved in the inevitable separation is hugely damaging.
Whether they are desperately poor or the much vaunted Brazilian supermodel type, in every surrogacy agreement women are reduced to being vessels.
Surrogacy is exploitation pure and simple – whether it is altruistic or for-profit. It turns the female body into a commodity for hire and children into consumer goods. The human rights abuses involved in surrogacy are staggering. And yet it is happening – not only is it happening, it is a growth industry.
The Pope is infallibly right on this one. It should be banned.
(Photo credit: SvetaZi; iStock by Getty Images.)
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