Pope Francis Calls for Global Ban on Surrogacy

By

NEW YORK, January 12 (C-Fam) In his annual address to foreign ambassadors to the Holy See, Pope Francis called for a global ban on surrogacy, calling it a “deplorable practice” and a “grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.”

He said, “I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally.”

The unequivocal statement calling for action against surrogacy came as the Italian Senate debates a law to ban surrogacy and as advocates propose an international treaty banning it.

Surrogacy is the practice whereby a woman’s womb is procured to gestate a child for another person or couple, usually in exchange for money. It is a growing global industry and a practice homosexual couples use to obtain children.

“This was the first time that a Pontiff spoke in a so clear way regarding this practice, whose use has been growing during the last years,” said Nicola Speranza, the Secretary-General of the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE), one of the organizations backing the international treaty.

Echoing his own past statements in the same setting, and those of his predecessors, Francis linked the preservation of peace internationally with the protection of life in the womb.

“The path to peace calls for respect for life, for every human life, starting with the life of the unborn child in the mother’s womb, which cannot be suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking,” he said before specifically addressing surrogacy.

In the same vein, Pope Francis accused Western countries of being the source of a “culture of death.”

“At every moment of its existence, human life must be preserved and defended; yet I note with regret, especially in the West, the continued spread of a culture of death, which in the name of a false compassion discards children, the elderly and the sick,”

Pope Francis also called for respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 75th anniversary was commemorated last December, against attempts to create controversial new rights related to sexuality and gender.

“Regrettably, in recent decades attempts have been made to introduce new rights that are neither fully consistent with those originally defined nor always acceptable,” he said, before criticizing gender ideology specifically. “They have led to instances of ideological colonization, in which gender theory plays a central role; the latter is extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal.”

Pope Francis said such “instances of ideological colonization prove injurious and create divisions between states, rather than fostering peace.”

This harmful ideology, Francis said, threatens also international institutions like the United Nations.

“Even agencies devoted to the common good and to technical questions, which have thus far proved effective, risk paralysis due to ideological polarization and exploitation by individual states,” he explained.

The Holy Father greets the members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See at the beginning of every year. His address traditionally highlights the diplomatic priorities of the Holy Father for the year ahead. The Holy See has diplomatic relations with 184 countries, several of these, as well as international organizations like the European Union, maintain a permanent diplomatic mission to the Holy See.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter