Pope Francis called for a global ban on surrogacy, which he described as “despicable.”
He held that a child is a gift and “never the basis of a commercial contract” and called for a global ban on surrogacy “to prohibit this practice universally.”
The Pope said, “I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
The Pope said families must protect the life of the unborn child and not be “suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking.”
Francis has previously talked about the Catholic Church’s opposition to what he has called a “uterus for rent.”
Presently, commercial surrogacy contracts are accepted in some parts of the world and are banned in some other parts.
