The Australian Episcopal Conference (CEA) has urged the Australian Commission of Legislative Reform to prohibit all forms of subrogated gestation, including “altruistic” agreements that are currently considered legal.
The bishops made this call in A nine -page letter sent to the commission and that highlights the “deep damages” of the rental belly.
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Therefore, the Australian episcopate “urges the Legislative Reform Commission to recommend the prohibition of all forms of surrogacy in Australia,” the bishops write in the letter, shared with CNA, Ewtn News English agency.
“The woman is not a reproduction machine,” the bishops point out in the letter, “he is a person made in the image of God, called to gestate life with love, freedom and dignity.”
In that sense, “subrogated pregnancy reduces this sacred role (from motherhood) to a service contract, an agreement that denies the full humanity of women.” This practice “tries to separate the woman’s body from her identity, as if she could be a container without being a mother,” adds the text.
The letter was presented on July 9 to the commission by the Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Mons. Tony Percy, also delegate of the Episcopate for Affairs of Life. The letter warns that current laws do not protect women or children from exploitation and trauma, and emphasizes that children “have no voice” in subrogated gestation agreements and deserve to be “received with love, not produced as part of a contractual agreement.”
“While the pain of infertility is real and deserves compassion, not all responses to suffering are fair. Subrogated gestation introduces new and deep damage,” says bishops in the letter, pointing out that this practice exposes both women and children to a greater risk of medical and emotional trauma.
“For children,” continues the letter, “violates fundamental human rights, such as identity, filiation and protection against commercialization, rights enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Commercial subrogated gestation, in which women are paid to gestate the child, It is illegal in Australia. Only the subrogated “altruistic” pregnancy is considered legal, in which the mother’s pregnancy expenses are covered, but this does not obtain any benefit.
Because the commercial subrogated gestation is illegal, Australian state and territorial courts generally do not recognize those who participate in these agreements as legal parents of the born child.
However, some states, such as New South Wales, have approved laws that allow the granting of legal affiliation in certain circumstances after a commercial agreement. However, these ways “often require admitting criminal conduct before the Court”, according to the Review of subrogated gestation laws which is being examined by the Legal Commission.
“It is worrying that, although commercial subrogated pregnancy is prohibited in Australia, including international agreements in several jurisdictions, these laws rarely apply,” the bishops point out in their letter.
“As a result, they denounce,” the Australians continue to commission international commercial pregnancy with little scrutiny and few consequences, which undermines the purpose of legal prohibitions, which is to protect children. “
The letter of the bishops includes testimonies of former substitute mothers who experienced deep emotional, physical and spiritual damage when participating in practice.
A mother, identified as Cathy, declared: “The pain never disappears. I am still an emotional disaster and I fight this every day … when I signed the document, I thought I could do it. I did not realize that I would break my heart. The pain and the void I feel have been unbearable.”
Another woman, named Sherrie, said: “I cannot describe the deep sadness I felt when I returned home without the son I loved, who carried inside and who gave birth. It was as if a son had died.”
The woman continued: “I could not help loving this son as if it were mine, because it was mine … while watching her car away that day on the gravel path, I felt like the dust that spread in the corn fields.”
In short, the bishops express in the letter their deep concern for the terms of the review by the Commission, which, they affirm, “seems to prioritize easier access to subrogated gestation”, instead of promoting the “fundamental rights and dignity of women and children.”
“We reject the idea that the expansion of surrogacy benefits the best interests of children or respect human dignity,” they write. “Any legal reform must start from a clear commitment to protect children from mercantilization, the women of exploitation and the society of normalization of human reproduction based on contracts.”
Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in CNA.
Low Elhabbal
Madalaine Elhabbal is a CNA journalist based in the Washington DC office in EWTN. He has published articles in Catholicvote and has also worked as a foreign language assistant in France. She is a graduate of Benedictine College.