Australia: Bill would allow surrogate mothers to bear children for homosexuals

February 09, 2010

On February 10 and 11, the parliament of the northeastern Australian state of Queensland will debate a measure that would allow surrogate mothers to bear children for single men, single women, and homosexual couples.

“A child can have in effect six parents,” notes Ray Campbell, director of the Queensland Bioethics Centre: “the genetic parents, the surrogate mother and her partner, and the commissioning parents who become the social parents.” The bill, he adds, would “commodify children, reducing them to the level of chattels to be dealt with by a contract.”

In its 1987 instruction on respect for human life, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith noted that surrogae motherhood is morally illicit

for the same reasons which lead one to reject heterologous artificial fertilization: for it is contrary to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person. Surrogate motherhood 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; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.

 

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Further information:

• Queensland Debates Surrogacy Bill (Vatican Radio)
• Rights at risk (Brisbane Catholic Leader)
• Queensland Votes On Surrogacy & Same-Sex Parenting, Feb 2010 (Kids Rights Count)
• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on respect for human life (Donum Vitae, 1987)