Surrogacy Undermines Dignity, Marriage, and the Family

It is said that the family is the building block of society.¹ It is the place where children grow to love and serve others and develop knowledge of who they are so they can realize their potential and flourish.  Strong families, where virtue is encouraged and nurtured, gift society with citizens invested in contributing to the common good. 

In the instruction Donum Vitae, the Catholic Church declares that,

the vitality and stability of society require that children come into the world within a family and that the family be firmly based on marriage.  The tradition of the Church and anthropological reflection recognize in marriage and in its indissoluble unity the only setting worthy of truly responsible procreation.²

Marriage between one man and one woman is central to the flourishment of the children they beget as the fruit of their one-flesh union.  Therefore, families, and the children welcomed into them, are a great good for society.

Family is under attack

Yet, the family is under attack from ideologies that proclaim a distorted vision of the human person, dignity, rights, and marriage.  Many practices that purport to assist in building the family up actually restructure the meaning of familial relationships and offer new models of family life, undermining the solid foundation of the natural family. 

Archbishop Anthony Fisher notes that as time progresses, “the marriage-based natural family, so long recognised as the basic cell of society, will no longer be normative, and to privilege it in any way is increasingly regarded as discriminatory.”³ This rejection of the natural family, coupled with the embracing of alternative family-like structures, offends the sanctity of marriage and the dignity of the human person.

Surrogacy undermines the family in society

Surrogacy is one such practice that undermines the family in society.  Increasingly popular, surrogacy presents many moral dilemmas.  Although its proponents declare that the method is an excellent way to “grow a family,” it does so at a great cost.⁴ 

Surrogacy is immoral because it severs the generation of human life from the marital act and dehumanizes the child conceived, undermining the family in society.

Far from mirroring the welcoming of children in the marital act, surrogacy utilizes illicit reproductive technologies to engender human embryos at the request of “intending parents.”⁵ These new human lives are placed in the surrogate mother’s womb to gestate until birth, completely independent of any marital relationship or act. The arrangement may be altruistic or undertaken with the view of commercial gain.  When the baby is born, the surrogate mother hands over the child to the person(s) who contracted her services, severing herself from the child she has nurtured in her womb.

Surrogacy dehumanizes the child conceived

The surrogacy process emphasizes how children engendered in this way are not welcomed as a gift, begotten in an act of total self-giving between spouses, but are reduced to objects of desire, made, using whatever means necessary, to satisfy the desires and dreams of adults.  Thus, the child created in a sterile laboratory, and with multiple actors in their coming into being, is dehumanized, reduced to an object to be used.

Marriage and the natural family are further undermined as same-sex couples employ reproductive technologies, donor gametes, and surrogate mothers to form a caricature of family life.  In these situations, the child conceived is more clearly seen to be dehumanized, viewed as a product desired and produced, for it is impossible, in the natural order, for two people of the same sex to beget a child. 

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only place where children can be engendered in a way that respects their rights which flow from their inherent dignity as a human person created in the image and likeness of God.

This post is the introduction to an essay titled “The Gift of Life: How Surrogacy Undermines Dignity, Marriage, and Family.” To read the essay, please click here.

END NOTES
^1.  John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (November 22, 1981), n. 46. The concept of the family being the “building block of society,” or the “basic cell of society,” has now become a generally accepted notion both within secular and Catholic circles. 
^2.  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae: Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation; Replies to certain questions of the day (February 22, 1987), n. 5.2.A.1.
^3.  Anthony Fisher, Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14.
^4. “Fertility Associates offers support and treatment options for LGBTTQI+ couples and individuals hoping to start a family,” Fertility Associates, accessed May 8, 2024, https://www.fertilityassociates.co.nz/lgbttqi
^5. “Surrogacy,” Repromed, accessed April 18, 2022, https://www.repromed.co.nz/fertility-treatments/surrogacy/.