Because there’s a name for the buying and selling of human beings:
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. In this regard, I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which 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. A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract. Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally. At every moment of its existence, human life must be preserved and defended; yet I note with regret, especially in the West, the continued spread of a culture of death, which in the name of a false compassion discards children, the elderly and the sick.
The path to peace calls for respect for human rights, in accordance with the simple yet clear formulation contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose seventy-fifth anniversary we recently celebrated. These principles are self-evident and commonly accepted. Regrettably, in recent decades attempts have been made to introduce new rights that are neither fully consistent with those originally defined nor always acceptable. They have led to instances of ideological colonization, in which gender theory plays a central role; the latter is extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal. These instances of ideological colonization prove injurious and create divisions between states, rather than fostering peace.”
“It is essential that technological development take place in an ethical and responsible way, respecting the centrality of the human person, whose place can never be taken by an algorithm or a machine. “The inherent dignity of each human being and the fraternity that binds us together as members of the one human family must undergird the development of new technologies and serve as indisputable criteria for evaluating them before they are employed, so that digital progress can occur with due respect for justice and contribute to the cause of peace”. [14]
Consequently, careful reflection is required at every level, national and international, political and social, to ensure that the development of artificial intelligence remains at the service of men and women, fostering and not obstructing – especially in the case of young people – interpersonal relations, a healthy spirit of fraternity, critical thinking and a capacity for discernment.
In this regard, the two Diplomatic Conferences of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which will take place in 2024 with the participation of the Holy See as a Member State, will prove particularly important. In the view of the Holy See, intellectual property is essentially directed to the promotion of the common good and cannot be detached from ethical requirements, lest situations of injustice and undue exploitation arise. Special concern must also be shown for the protection of the human genetic patrimony, by prohibiting practices contrary to human dignity, such as the patenting of human biological material and the cloning of human beings.
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8 Responses
I was appalled to see how popular surrogacy is in USA. It comes as no surprise that pro-life media suppresses this information and that pro-life advocacy groups do virtually nothing to protest surrogacy.
I was also dismayed to learn how absurdly expensive adoption is.
Again, considering the power of the almighty dollar, none of this should come as a surprise, but one would expect that pro-life groups would pay at least token attention to the topic.
We have friends who were unable to have children, but were able to adopt. Both couples had to jump through many hoops and lay out a lot of money to adopt children. What should have been fairly simple, turned out to be an ordeal, costing many thousands of Dollars. Why?
I cannot fathom this. Perhaps it’s because USA never faced a total war on its soil and never had millions of war orphans that needed food and shelter, so the laws surrounding foster care and adoption never evolved in the same way as they did in the rest of the world?
The worst bit is that it costs so much money when it should be completely subsidized.
The attitude of some adoption agencies is that you should be wealthy to adopt a child. So, if you are working class, you don’t deserve to have a child? I don’t like this attitude.
If you have a million couples on the waiting list and a 900 thousand babies up for adoption, it’s fairly easy. Rule out the one hundred thousand couples who would definitely be a bad home and allocate the remainder.
But what do you do if you have just 100 thousand babies up for adoption and you already ruled out half a million of the couples on various grounds? How do you decide which one out of five couples who fulfill all the criteria should receive a baby?
It’s an extremely hard decision to make, that’s for sure.
And I guess it’s just easier to give the babies to couples with the highest income because that way, the child will have all its needs funded, it will be able to attend college, etc. It’s certainly preferable to a struggling family raising a child who later finds out he or she could have been adopted by a wealthier family.
As I said, it’s an extremely hard decision and I for one am glad I don’t have to make it.
I don’t mean to play the semantics game here, but if I may ask: isn’t it true that what is paid for in surrogacy *not* the child, but for the services related to conception and gestation? A surrogate mother is selling her labor (no pun intended) just as anyone else does as an employee. And children are often the basis of all sorts of commercial contracts – childcare, private schools, and myriad services. Why should this one be singles out?
Also, some surrogates will give freely to a friend or family member who cannot conceive themselves. I know of one family with a child born of surrogacy that was helped by a sibling. They have an adorable child and are very happy.
I’ll start with your last paragraph. I know a couple who had four miscarriages and did IVF and had a healthy baby. Yay for IVF, right? Not necessarily. You see, they were in bad care in the first four pregnancies and doctors ignored symptoms of an at risk pregnancy. The fifth pregnancy was of course under much better care so the risk factors were all accounted for. If the expecting mother was under such care in her first pregnancies, it’s possible that no fertility treatment would ever be necessary.
There was another couple who had a similar experience and genetic tests revealed that both spouses were carriers of a genetic disease and incapable of having a child of their own. So they used donor gametes and had “their” baby to remove the genetic risk. They used a shady lab and broke the law by using both donor sperm and donor ovum, lying that they would be using their own complementary gametes (so the donors were unaware who the biological father/mother would actually be). It was pointed out that their child would not be their biological child and that pregnancy carried risks for the wife, but she just wanted to feel the baby inside. Realistically, it would be the same as adopting a baby, but they were adamant to try it “naturally”.
As for your first paragraph, if I understand you, you drew the line between surrogacy and raising a child by placing it in childcare, school, activities or other services, is that correct? By that same measure, putting a child in preschool at age of 3, at school at age of 7, and raising it to adulthood is the same as putting it up in slave labor at age of 3 or 7, and selling it to a slave owner at 18.
Rebecca Hamilton published an article on that topic a short while ago:
“Pope Frances Says Ban Surrogacy. I Say Stop the $$.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2024/02/pope-frances-says-ban-surrogacy-i-say-stop-the/
I think she makes a few good points when it comes to getting rid of the profit motive behind the practice.