Gulf Pine Catholic

8 Gulf Pine Catholic • February 16, 2024 At the start of 2024, Pope Francis offered strong public criticism of surrogate motherhood. His willing- ness to speak out on this important topic has helped to pull surrogacy out of the shadows, where it has often been relegated, and shine some much-needed light on the children at the center of the process and their rights. Surrogacy is often framed as a generous act, since the surrogate mother seeks to offer her own body to help another woman unable to carry a pregnancy. Judith Hoechst, who hired a surrogate to have a son, was quot- ed in a National Catholic Register article as declaring: “There’s nothing more selfless and more loving than a woman who says, ‘Let me share my uterus with you. Let me do for you what you cannot do.’” When you examine it more deeply, however, surro- gacy offers only the veneer of a selfless act. It relies on evil means to achieve a good end. It tends to be driven by the selfish slant of “entitlement thinking.” It often in- volves a coercive financial angle, as wealthy individu- als offer significant remuneration to secure poor women as “volunteers.” Pope Francis cut through much of the duplicity around this issue when he provocatively observed that surrogacy involves a form of “trafficking” of children, implying that children are being bought and sold, treat- ed as property and often transported across international borders, which, all in all, sums up many contemporary aspects of surrogacy. The whole process of surrogacy typically begins with the creation of children for implantation through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a practice that itself raises numerous moral objections. Most fundamentally, IVF misappropriates the gen- erative powers we have received from God that are or- dered to procreating new life. The powers we have are not meant to be used any way we wish. For example, we have the power to use our hands to pick things up, to write, and to reach out to help others. But that same power in our hands can be used in reckless and improper ways to hit people, to choke them, or to otherwise harm them. Just because we have the power to do something -- or the fact that science may open up a new power to us -- does not automatically mean we should utilize it. Our power to procreate is a very special gift, meant to be shared in collaboration with God and our spouse in an exclusive manner. That we have the technical prowess to take hold of our sex cells and manipulate them to manufac- ture a new life constitutes a misuse of our God-given powers. We fail to respect our children’s dignity when we turn them into “projects” to be engendered in labo- ratory glassware and implanted into third party carriers. By such an approach, we end up twisting the designs of human sexuality and turning what is meant to be an act of love into an act of production. Yet many people today have accepted the notion that children are a kind of “entitlement” or even a “right” to be claimed for themselves. This flawed thinking en- ables a facile movement into the twin evils of IVF and surrogacy, and ultimately encourages the trafficking of unborn children. Clearly, a child -- or any person -- is never a “right,” or a possession, or a piece of property to whom we are entitled. The only “entitlement” or “right” operative here would be the right of the child to be conceived uniquely through the marital act. Rather than being summoned into being in glassware and implanted into surrogates by fertility clinic employees in exchange for valuable consideration, children have the inalienable right to be conceived through the one flesh, body-to-body spousal communion of their parents’ marital embrace. Having a sense of “entitlement” about children and imagining that I “deserve” a child corrupts the delicate order of our receptivity towards the mysterious gift of new life in marital sexuality. Whenever we turn to IVF and surrogacy to satisfy the desire of adults for offspring, we override that deli- cate order of receptivity and arrogate to ourselves the right to control and even dominate our children. We pay to have them implanted into strangers who act as “gestational carriers.” We impose on them a multitude of “parental-role figures,” ranging from the surrogate mother who becomes pregnant, to the woman who re- ceives the baby afterwards, to the third-party egg do- nor. We multiply father-role figures, depending upon the source of the sperm. We trap our left over embry- onic children, potentially for decades, in the wasteland of frozen orphanages connected to fertility clinics. We carry out genetic testing and discard less-than-perfect embryos. We selectively reduce children when multi- plet pregnancies arise. The use of the term “deplorable” by the Pope is not excessive, but spot-on when it comes to describing these offensive aspects of surrogacy. His observations help refocus our attention on the runaway train that IVF and surrogacy have become, and invite us to push back against the problematic-but-widely-endorsed approach that seeks to satisfy adult desires for children while largely ignoring the consequences to the kids. Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. earned his doctor- ate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese of Fall River, MA, and serves as Senior Ethicist at The Nation- al Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See www. ncbcenter.org and www.fathertad.com. Making Sense of Bioethics Fr. Pacholczyk Surrogacy and child trafficking My friend and colleague Carl Trueman recently observed that “the West is no longer a consortium of serious cultures.” To which I am sorely tempted to add, “...or serious polities.” The two are connected, the cultural decay of the West being a not-insignificant factor in our descent into political infantilism. The exploration of that connection can be left for a later date. Here, let me simply assert that the political mindlessness currently on display in the West is threatening to unravel the victory of freedom in the ColdWar: the victory of what were admittedly imperfect democracies over what were indisputably pluperfect tyrannies. Who with a sense of history can deny that the current, gelatinous policy of the great Western powers toward Ukraine is ominously reminiscent of the errors the democracies made in the mid-1930s? Western dithering in providing the willing, courageous Ukrainians the wherewithal to defeat a Russia bent on destroying the Ukrainian nation inevitably recalls the fecklessness that led Great Britain and France to acquiesce to the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, to the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, and to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39. (And please do not talk to me about “tattered, old analogies to the 1930s;” they’re only tattered and old if they’re wrong, which they’re not.) Today’s geopolitical blindness about Ukraine -- this willful deconstruction of the Western capacity to deter aggressive authoritarian powers -- is a failure of moral insight and moral nerve as well as a political failure. And those failures are having global effects that are likely to worsen in the year ahead, causing even more suffering and death. What are French, German, and American political leaders thinking when they wring their hands and whine about being “tired” of the war in Ukraine? I’m quite sure that Ukrainians are also tired: tired of having their children kidnapped and taken to Russia for brainwashing; tired of burying their dead after Russian drone strikes on civilian targets; tired of being denied adequate arms and ammunition. Yet they carry on. How dare a comfortable French president, a comfortable German chancellor, and comfortable American con- gressmen and senators speak of “Ukraine-fatigue” when our ally is being bled white and yet fights on? Fortunately, others with stronger moral fiber get it. They include a coalition of Ukrainian Christian leaders, who on Jan. 11 issued a joint statement condemning the “aggressive ideology of the ‘Russian world,’” which underwrites Russia’s genocidal war in and on Ukraine. This ideology, promoted and blessed by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, “has been claiming for years that Ukrainians, as a people, ‘do not exist.’” The statement continues: “Inciting hatred and waging war based on the ideology of the ‘Russian world’ violate Christian principles and contradict the spiritual norms that the Church is supposed to embody.” SEE CATHOLIC DIFFERENCE, PAGE 12 The Catholic Difference Weigel Standing with Ukraine