The practice of surrogacy made national news in August when surrogate mother McKenna West fled to Texas to give birth to a baby after its biological parents requested it be aborted due to a treatable heart condition.
West was sued by the couple for not adhering to the terms of the surrogacy contract, which included a clause allowing them to request abortion of the baby if it were found to have fetal abnormalities.
The mother sought refuge in Texas and gave birth there to the baby, whom she named Gabriel; the state ordered a hospital system to provide the baby life-giving care.
The controversial case has generated significant commentary around gestational surrogacy, the practice in which a woman is paid to grow and birth a baby for the parents.
The Catholic Church explicitly opposes surrogacy, describing it as a comprehensively immoral practice that offends the dignity of everyone involved. But why specifically does the Church so strongly forbid this arrangement?
Practice is ‘contrary to the unity of marriage’ and of human dignity
Joseph Meaney, a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, described surrogacy as an arrangement in which “a woman agrees to carry a child for another — either a couple or another individual — with the express purpose of giving that child to them.”
“Traditional” surrogacy involves using the birthing mother as the biological mother, Meaney said. One example of this, he said, can be found in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis’ account of Sarai allowing her servant Hagar to serve as a surrogate with the former’s husband, Abram.
The “modern version” of surrogacy, meanwhile, involves impregnating a surrogate using in vitro fertilization (IVF) either via a donor or using gametes from the “intending parents.”
The Catholic Church has condemned and prohibited this practice for decades.
Meaney pointed to the 1987 instruction from what was then the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith known as Donum Vitae, which describes surrogate motherhood as “contrary to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person.”
The practice of surrogacy, according to the instruction, “represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity, and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; [and] it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological, and moral elements which constitute those families.”
Meaney summed up the instruction’s claims on surrogacy as: “It’s bad, bad, really bad, worse than bad.”
Joe Zalot, the director of education at the Catholic bioethics center, told EWTN News that the dispute in Texas over baby Gabriel is a “textbook example” of what is wrong with surrogacy.
That case, he said, demonstrates “how commercial surrogacy denigrates the surrogate, seeking to reduce her to a subservient role viz-a-viz the genetic ‘parents,’ as well as how surrogacy contracts denigrate the dignity of the preborn child through the demand that it be killed if a prenatal anomaly is diagnosed.”
Catholic opposition to surrogacy has become more outspoken in recent years. Both Zalot and Meaney pointed to Pope Francis’ January 2024 address to the Holy See’s diplomatic corps; in those remarks Francis decried surrogacy as “deplorable.”
The practice “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child,” the pope said. He expressed hope for an international ban on the procedure.
In the United States, meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) says in its ethical guidance for Catholic healthcare that Catholic health providers may not participate in surrogacy arrangements.
The bishops in that directive cite “the dignity of the child and of marriage” as well as “the uniqueness of the mother-child relationship.”
In an August 2025 essay, Meaney further argued against “altruistic surrogacy” in which a woman agrees to carry a child for someone else with no monetary reimbursement.
The intentions of these women, he acknowledged, “seem … frequently generous” and compassionate. Yet such arrangements retain “most of the unethical qualities” of commercial surrogacy, he said.
He further noted that the biblical account of Sarai’s arrangement with Hagar functions as “a cautionary tale of how badly such arrangements can go,” insofar as Hagar and her child Ishmael “ended up banished and almost died in the wilderness.”
The practice is widely legal in the U.S. Only one state, Louisiana, outlaws commercial surrogacy entirely; more than a dozen states broadly allow it, while a majority of states are at least generally permissive of it.
Meaney said the matter “really does come down to ethics. There’s what can be done, and what should be done; there’s the technically possible, and the moral. And the two are not coterminous.”
“One’s reproductive capacity should be reserved for the sacred purpose of bringing a new life into the world, not a commercial contract with strangers,” he said.
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