An international campaign to ban surrogacy received a robust endorsement Friday from the Vatican, with a top official calling for a broad-based alliance to stop the “commercialization of life” catering to wealthy would-be parents.
A Vatican-affiliated university hosted a two-day conference promoting a global treaty to outlaw surrogacy, based on the campaigners’ argument that the practice violates U.N. conventions protecting the rights of the kid and surrogate mother.
At issue is whether or not there’s a fundamental right to have a baby, at any cost, or whether the rights of kids trump the desires of potential parents.
The conference, which also drew U.N. human rights representatives and experts, marked an acceleration of a campaign that has found some support in parts of the developing world and western Europe. At the identical time, Canada and the United States are known for highly regulated arrangements that draw heterosexual and homosexual couples alike from world wide, while other countries allow surrogacy with fewer rules.
Pope Francis in January called for an outright global ban on the practice, calling it a despicable violation of human dignity that exploits the surrogate mother’s financial need. On Thursday, Francis met privately with certainly one of the proponents calling for a universal ban on surrogacy, Olivia Maurel, a 33-year-old mother of three.
Maurel was born within the U.S. in 1991 via surrogacy and attributes a lifetime of mental health issues to the “trauma of abandonment” she says she experienced at birth. She says she was separated from her biological mother and given to oldsters who had contracted with an agency in Kentucky after experiencing infertility problems once they tried to have children of their late 40s.
Maurel says she doesn’t blame her parents and he or she acknowledges there are “many joyful stories” of families who use surrogate moms. But she says that doesn’t make the practice ethical or right, even with regulations, since she said she was made to sacrifice “for the will of adults to have a baby.”
“There isn’t any right to have a baby,” Maurel told the conference on the LUMSA university. “But children do have rights, and we are able to say surrogacy violates a lot of these rights.”
Monsignor Miloslaw Wachowski, undersecretary for relations with states within the Vatican secretariat of state, concurred, saying the practice reduces human procreation to an idea of “individual will” and desire, where the powerful and wealthy prevail.
“Parents find themselves within the role of being providers of genetic material, while the embryo appears an increasing number of like an object: something to supply — not someone, but something,” he said.
He called for the campaign to ban the practice not to stay within the sphere of the Catholic Church and even faith-based groups, but to transcend traditional ideological and political boundaries.
“We shouldn’t close ourselves amongst those that think the exact same way,” he said. “Rather, we must always divulge heart’s contents to pragmatic alliances to comprehend a typical goal.”
The Vatican’s overall position, which is predicted to be crystalized able paper Monday on human dignity, stems from its belief that human life begins at conception and should be given the resultant respect and dignity from that moment on. The Vatican also holds that human life must be created through intercourse between husband and wife, not in a petri dish, and that surrogacy takes in vitro fertilization a step further by “commercializing” the resulting embryo.
As the conference was getting underway, Italy’s most important gay family advocacy group, Rainbow Families, sponsored a pro-surrogacy rally to counter proposals by Italy’s hard-right-led government to make it a criminal offense for Italians to try to make use of surrogates abroad, even in countries where the practice is legal.
“We are families, not crimes,” said banners held by a number of the 200 or so participants, a lot of them gay couples who traveled abroad to have children via surrogate.
A 2004 law already banned surrogacy inside Italy. The proposed law would make it illegal in Italy for residents to interact a surrogate mother in a foreign country, with prison terms of up to 3 years and fines of as much as 1 million euros ($1.15 million) for convictions.
In the U.S., Resolve, the National Infertility Association, which advocates for people experiencing infertility problems, has criticized any calls for a universal ban on surrogacy as harmful and hurtful to the various people experiencing the “disease of infertility.”
“Resolve believes that everybody deserves the proper to construct a family and will have access to all family constructing options,” Betsy Campbell, Resolve’s chief engagement officer, said in a telephone interview. “Surrogacy, and specifically gestational carrier surrogacy, is an option.”
She said the U.S. regulations, which include separate legal representation for surrogate and the intended parents, and mental health and other evaluations, safeguard all parties in the method.
“Most people don’t expect to have infertility or to wish medical assistance to construct their families,” she said. “So when non-medical people discuss IVF and surrogacy in a negative way, it may possibly be very discouraging and make an already difficult journey all of the more difficult.”
