Surrogacy and the Commodification of Human Life

Recent reports from California have shocked public opinion. Authorities discovered twenty-one children—most born through surrogacy—living in deeply troubling conditions. The case, now under investigation for child abuse, neglect, and possible human trafficking, is horrifying. Yet it would be a serious mistake to dismiss it as a criminal anomaly, an aberration detached from the practice of surrogacy itself.

When Birth Becomes a Contract

What such cases reveal instead are the structural moral problems inherent in surrogacy. What appears at first glance as an extreme deviation is, in fact, the logical outcome of a system that submits human generation to contractual logic. Once birth becomes a matter of agreements, payments, and deliverables, the child inevitably risks being perceived not as a subject, but as a product.

As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas warns in The Future of Human Nature, the technical availability of human life profoundly alters our understanding of ourselves as members of the human species. When life is planned, outsourced, and delivered, its personal and relational meaning is diminished. The California case exposes what happens when the bond between generation, love, and responsibility is severed. The abuse discovered there is not accidental; it is the pathological consequence of a deeper anthropological error.

Poverty, Consent, and the Illusion of Choice

Defenders of surrogacy often appeal to the “free choice” of surrogate mothers. Yet this claim collapses under ethical scrutiny. Many women who enter surrogacy arrangements do so from situations of severe economic hardship. Their consent may satisfy legal requirements, but it is morally compromised. Pope Benedict XVI addressed this dynamic in Caritas in Veritate, noting that situations of poverty can “deprive people of the freedom to exercise responsible choice” (n. 25). When survival is at stake, choice becomes coercion by circumstance. To describe such arrangements as empowering is to confuse exploitation with autonomy.

This is not an indictment of the women involved, but of a system that profits from their vulnerability while cloaking itself in the language of rights and freedom. As the political philosopher Robert E. Goodin argues in Protecting the Vulnerable, moral responsibility falls most heavily on social arrangements that place already disadvantaged persons in positions of heightened risk. Vulnerability, Goodin insists, creates a special obligation of protection, not an opportunity for exploitation. Systems that rely on structural inequality in order to function—even when they are formally consensual—fail precisely at this moral point. Applied to surrogacy, the issue is not individual intention but institutional design: an industry that depends upon economic asymmetry cannot plausibly claim moral neutrality, no matter how carefully it frames itself in the rhetoric of choice.

War and the Logic of Delivery

The war in Ukraine made this logic painfully visible. As bombs fell and civilians fled, surrogacy agencies scrambled not primarily to protect women and children, but to ensure the “delivery” of newborns to intended parents abroad. Pope Francis condemned this practice unequivocally in his 2024 address to the Diplomatic Corps, describing surrogacy as a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, grounded in the exploitation of material vulnerability. War did not create this distortion; it merely stripped away comforting rhetoric and exposed the underlying truth. When life is produced by contract, even catastrophe becomes a logistical inconvenience.

Why Surrogacy Is Intrinsically Immoral

From a Catholic—and more broadly human—anthropological perspective, surrogacy is morally unacceptable for three fundamental reasons. First, it fragments motherhood, separating genetic, gestational, and relational dimensions that naturally belong together. Second, it instrumentalizes the female body, reducing it to a means for fulfilling another person’s project. Third, it objectifies the child, who becomes the outcome of a contract rather than the fruit of a personal act of love.

The Church’s judgment on this matter is clear and consistent. Donum Vitae teaches that surrogate motherhood “represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love” (II, A, 3), while Dignitas Personae reiterates that “a child is not something owed to one, but is a gift” (n. 16). These statements are not merely theological assertions; they rest upon a coherent vision of human dignity, one that recognizes procreation as inseparable from personal communion and responsibility.

Desire for Parenthood and Moral Limits

The desire to have a child is deeply human and often profoundly painful when unfulfilled. The Church does not dismiss this suffering. At the same time, moral clarity requires an essential distinction: a child may be desired but never claimed as a right. St. John Paul II makes this point clearly in Evangelium Vitae: “A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift…the child cannot be considered as an object of ownership” (n. 92). When desire becomes entitlement, the logic of gift gives way to the logic of production, and the weakest inevitably suffer. Compassion for infertility must never lead us to justify practices that violate the dignity of others.

Does “Altruistic” Surrogacy Change Anything?

Some argue that so-called “altruistic” surrogacy, without financial compensation, is morally acceptable. This claim fails to address the core issue. Even without payment, the essential problems remain: the rupture of the mother–child bond and the instrumentalization of procreation. As the secular bioethicist Margaret Somerville argues in The Ethical Canary, surrogacy recasts pregnancy and motherhood as services that can be detached from the mother–child bond. The moral problem is not merely economic; it is anthropological. Removing money does not heal the fracture introduced into the meaning of motherhood and birth.

Cultural Consequences

Beyond individual cases, surrogacy carries far-reaching cultural consequences. It reinforces a mindset in which technological capability is confused with moral legitimacy. Pope Benedict XVI warned against this mentality in his 2011 address to the German Parliament, insisting that technological capability alone can never determine moral legitimacy. For younger generations, this confusion erodes the sense of limits, gift, and embodied responsibility that sustain a humane society. When life itself is treated as a product, the language of dignity becomes increasingly hollow.

Who Ultimately Suffers?

In the end, all parties are diminished. Women risk being reduced to biological functions, men to contractual agents, and children to commodities. As Immanuel Kant argues in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, human beings must never be treated merely as means, but always also as ends. Applied to surrogacy, the ethical verdict is unavoidable.

Surrogacy is not a step forward in human freedom, but a regression in our understanding of human dignity. A society that accepts the contractual production of children undermines the very foundations it claims to defend. As recent popes have repeatedly reminded us, a child is never a right or entitlement, but always a gift. Any culture that forgets this truth risks losing sight of what it means to be human.

Photo by Tamara Govedarovic on Unsplash