Europe’s bishops have denounced surrogacy as “a violent assault on human dignity” in a new document released this week.
At a special event at the European Parliament in Brussels, the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) unveiled its ‘Opinion on Gestational Surrogacy: the question of European and International Rules’ towards explaining the prelates’ position on surrogacy.
Authored by COMECE’s Working Group on Ethics in Research and Medicine, the Opinion asserts that “all forms of gestational surrogacy represent a violent assault on the human dignity of all involved in this exchange; in particular, it instrumentalises the gestational mother (often trapped in involuntary poverty and ruthlessly trafficked) and treats the child as an object”.
Referring to Church teaching, and specifically to the 1987 document Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), COMECE further points out: “[A] child should be the fruit and the sign of conjugal relations ‘of the mutual self-giving of the spouses, of their love and of their fdelity’, to the exclusion of any other parent. This is not the case in ‘surrogate motherhood’ which ‘offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families’. In addition, ‘it is contrary to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person’.”
Two Member States of the European Union have legislated for gestational surrogacy, while seven prohibit the practice, six partially prohibit and twelve have no legal provisions on the subject.
Calling for a joint and consistent approach to surrogacy by all Member States, the COMECE document stresses that just as “the Member States of the EU have always deemed unacceptable the commodifcation of the body of the ‘surrogate mother’ and of the child…it therefore seems possible that agreement can be reached on this subject” and warns that an absence of agreement “would only allow the commercial system of gestational surrogacy to fourish”.A Pdf version of the ‘Opinion on Gestational Surrogacy: the question of European and International Rules’ can be downloaded at: http://www.comece.org/site/en/press/pressreleases/newsletter.content/1901.html