The Holy See has called for the complete eradication of surrogacy to protect women and children from exploitation.

An envoy told a UN panel the practice risks reducing children to “commodified products” and women to “service providers”.

“The issue of surrogacy is an urgent one — the technology and practice have run laps around law and ethics,” Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, told the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York last week.

Although prohibited as a form of human trafficking in most European countries, commercial surrogacy remains widespread in the USA, Asia, and Latin America, and so-called ‘altruistic surrogacy’ is even more widely practiced.

In his address, Archbishop Caccia said that the global “surrogacy industry” was fuelled by poverty. He said that the demand for children exceeded supply, and that many women were “pressured or even forced” by family members into acting as surrogates.

Women who agreed to be employed as surrogates could find themselves in a “perverse competition for commissioning parents”, he said, while a child diagnosed with a disability became “a flawed product or problem to be solved”.