Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 11, 2024 / 14:00 pm
Speaking on behalf of the U.S. bishops, Bishop Robert Barron condemned the practice of surrogacy, joining Pope Francis in calling it a “grave injustice” that results in the “commercialization of women and children.”
Barron, who is the head of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, and chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family, and Youth, issued his statement on Jan. 10. His statement follows the pope’s speech Jan. 8 to the ambassadors to the Vatican in which he called for a global ban on surrogacy, calling it a “grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.”
“The desire to utilize surrogacy might feel like the desire to form a family naturally, but no matter how well-intentioned, surrogacy always does grave injustice to the child, any discarded embryos (who are our fellow human beings), the commodified birth mother, and the loving union of the spouses,” Barron said.
“Surrogacy represents the commodification and instrumentalization of a woman’s body, treating her as a ‘carrier’ rather than a human person,” he went on, adding that “just as troubling is the fact that the child is reduced to terms of buying and selling as an object of human trafficking.”
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