Pope Francis on surrogate pregnancies

Science is usually steps ahead of legal jurisprudence and church teachings and only when scientific innovations and inventions become controversial and not in the realm of the natural as we know them do we hear from lawmakers, moral theologians, bioethicists, and the like who question the processes used to achieve outcomes. For example, should human beings be cloned if cloning has been proven possible? Does human life already begin at the embryonic stage while it is still in a petri dish or test tube and why does this question matter? Should a couple cause the conception of another child in order that a body part of the forthcoming child can save the life of an older sibling? How do we treat extraterrestrials if and when they land on our territory? Do they have legal/”human” rights?

Pope Francis recently called for a ban on the decades-old medical practice of surrogate pregnancies whereby women nurture in their wombs babies-to-be that are not their own. It is a womb-for-rent arrangement. For a fee, of course, unless an altruist is willing to go through the whole nine months for free. The process of gestation does not happen in the baby’s biological mother’s uterus but in someone else’s. The baby’s biological parents who had provided the sperms and eggs (frozen or fresh) to their fertility doctor would have legal rights to the baby. That is putting it simply. The laboratory and medical procedures, not to mention the counseling and health history taking as well as the search for the right surrogate, is a novella, a movie in itself.

Said Pope Francis: “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.” Material needs for the surrogate mother who gets paid, but maternal/paternal need for the paying would-be-parents who want a child they can call their own. The parents could be a man and a woman, same-sex couples (legally married or not) who cannot get pregnant (due to age, infertility, etc.) but who want to raise a family carrying their own DNA and therefore not through adoption. For them, surrogate pregnancy could be the solution.

“Surrogacy,” Wiki says, “is an arrangement often supported by legal agreement, whereby a woman agrees to delivery/labor on behalf of another couple or person who will become the child’s parents after birth.” Fear not, the surrogate birth mother will not pass on her DNA to the baby.

The practice has long become mainstream if we go by the known personalities here and abroad who have unabashedly presented to the world their offspring conceived/fertilized in the laboratory and implanted in the wombs of surrogate mothers who carried the babies until birthing time. Or, it could be, though rarely, I presume, that the surrogate mother owns the egg to be fertilized by a man’s sperm through sex or a medical procedure called artificial insemination. With the wife’s permission, of course. This procedure could cause problems because the surrogate is, in fact, the biological mother. I will not hazard a guess in the case of single men who hire surrogates to bear their children. There was a reported case where the grandmother was the surrogate “preggie” and everybody was happy.

If there is a whole array of procedures to make a wanted child come into being besides sex, there must be plenty of legal processes that parties concerned must also go through. Family lawyers must know the legal conundrum involved. It is a different and more contentious issue in the moral theology department.

Pregnancy through surrogacy is illegal in many countries including the Philippines so couples or singles with oodles of money and who want biological offspring go places to find women willing to go through surrogacy. If legalized in the Philippines, surrogacy might be accepted by financially challenged women of a certain age. A contract in the vicinity of P1 or P2 million could support her own growing brood. Church authorities must hang their heads thinking about it. As I said, it is a womb for rent any way you look at it. How many indigent Asians/Filipinos have given up one of their kidneys for a price? But to use the Pope’s own words on a different issue: “Who are we to judge?”

While the monetization of surrogacy is an issue and while the medical procedures involved have been proven generally effective and safe (in vitro fertilization) albeit expensive, there are other moral and ethical issues, too, as to where all of these might lead to. If you have read Kazuo Ishiguro’s science fiction “Never Let Me Go” or watched the movie, you’d wonder if that kind of dystopian future could not be far off. Or think of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. Who rises to rule in that future age when, at last, human beings can be created on a petri dish or in a human fertility farm?