Italian Bishops Reaffirm Condemnation of Surrogacy as 'Wombs for Rent'

The Catholic Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) has reiterated its opposition to surrogacy, likening the practice to renting a woman’s womb while treating the children born of surrogacy as objects.

The Permanent Council of the CEI affirmed its stance on surrogacy, calling it an “unacceptable” practice that could risk “commodifying” women and their ability to have children, as some politicians have made moves in Italy to legitimise the practice.

“As the Pope said, there is a risk of the commodification of women, especially the poorest women, and of transforming the child into an object of a contract,” Archbishop of Cagliari and secretary general of the CEI Giuseppe Baturi stated, newspaper Il Giornale reports.

The archbishop added that “this does not correspond to the idea of motherhood and fatherhood accepted as a gift, which characterizes the Christian vision.”

“For us, it is a universal problem,” the archbishop continued, saying that it was not just homosexual couples engaging in surrogacy but also heterosexual couples.

“Recognizing the family institution in its originality, uniqueness and complementarity means protecting, in the first place, children, who can never be considered a product or the object of an understandable desire,” he said.

Unlike the United States and Canada, surrogacy is far more controversial in many European countries, particularly those with traditional Catholic populations like Italy and Spain.

Populist Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who now serves as Deputy Prime Minister in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, expressed his distaste for the practice in 2019, stating that surrogacy “makes me sick.”

“The thought of a womb for rent and women for sale makes me sick,” Salvini said.

“I think womb for rent is the most squalid thing a person could propose, for a woman, for a man, for a child.”

In Spain, the country’s supreme court ruled last year that surrogacy exploits women and violates the laws of the country, as it “entails damage to the best interests of the child and an exploitation of women that is unacceptable.”

“Both are treated as mere objects, not as persons endowed with the dignity proper to their condition as human beings and the fundamental rights inherent in that dignity,” the court said, asserting that a child born to a surrogate is “deprived of the right to know his origins, is treated as an object of change, is ‘objectified’.”

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