By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-10-31 20:16:28 | Updated at 2024-11-01 00:42:45
4 hours ago
CV NEWS FEED // A recent Daily Mail report has revealed that after a couple saw on social media that the surrogate mother they hired appeared to be having an alcoholic drink, they asked the mother to abort the unborn child.
The American couple, Marty and Melinda Rangers, told the Daily Mail in an article published on October 24 that they wanted to have a family, so they hired a surrogate mother through a California-based surrogacy agency. According to the Daily Mail, the couple’s reasoning for hiring a surrogate was that they were in their early 40s, lived in the Caribbean, and regarded their local medical resources as “unreliable.”
Marty said the contract with the mother was about 40 pages long. It included statements that taking drugs or having alcohol during the pregnancy was forbidden.
During the first few months of pregnancy, the Rangers spoke on the phone twice a week with the woman they hired, according to the Daily Mail. After Melinda saw the woman tagged in an Instagram post where she appeared to be having an alcoholic beverage, the couple spoke to the woman about it and the woman said that it was water. Marty said he was “unconvinced.”
“After much deliberation, we decided the best thing to do would be to terminate our baby at 20 weeks,” Marty told the Daily Mail. “It was a very tough decision, but the trust had been broken and we were unsure what else this woman was capable of.”
The Daily Mail reported that the Rangers “asked for their surrogate to terminate the pregnancy for breach of contract, and she complied. They ‘cut ties and moved on.’”
Marty told the Daily Mail, “‘It gets very complicated with the contract and so on, so we handled the matter outside of the agency and ensured the surrogate was well compensated.” He also said, “Luckily our surrogate was communicative and respected our wishes and we just left it there.”
According to the Daily Mail, after working with this first surrogate mother, the Rangers worked with a different California-based surrogacy agency. The surrogate they hired this time delivered a baby girl for the Rangers. Two years later, the Rangers hired another surrogate mother, who delivered a baby boy.
Marty said they were close with the third surrogate mother, and said that when she delivered, they were present. Marty said that “my wife held the baby first, and then once all the medical checks were done and things settled down after about 20 minutes we brought the baby for the surrogate to hold as well.”
He also told the Daily Mail, “She was so happy for us and happy to meet the baby, but she also had the attachment of having raised the baby for nine months.”
The couple said they have maintained a “strong relationship” with the third surrogate mother and communicate regularly to share photos and videos of the son.
“Despite the drama we had with some of our initial journeys, our last surrogacy journey was magical,” Marty said.
Catholics and non-Catholic Christians have spoken out about how surrogacy is an unethical practice that commodifies both women and children, and violates the marital bond between husband and wife.
In an email statement to CatholicVote, Emma Waters, a senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, commented on the transactional, commercial nature of surrogacy and decried how it harmed the most vulnerable person involved: the child.
“I am heartbroken to hear about yet another child whose life is destroyed due to an under-regulated, adult-first surrogacy industry,” Waters said.
She also said, “Commercial surrogacy … reduces the intimate bond of marriage, sex, and procreation to a highly lucrative transaction.”
“Even with the best of intentions,” Waters explained, “surrogacy reduces childbearing to a market transaction: Instead of delighting in their child and accepting them as they are, couples like this one in the Daily Mail story, are tempted to view their child as the product of a market contract.”
She added that if there is a violation of the contract, “the couple may be tempted to simply abort the child and start over.”
Waters continued:
Rather than working with the surrogate-mother and their agency, the parents in the Daily Mail story required a vulnerable baby to pay the price — with his or her life — for the fears, indifference, and failure of the adults involved.
This is the definition of conditional love, where adults place their desires over the well-being of children.
Regarding surrogacy regulation, Waters noted that some states’ laws on surrogacy are much more specific than others. However, “none of them require the intended parents to undergo a background check, home visit, or interview to ensure they are fit parents,” Waters said.
She further explained that her use of the term “under-regulated” is meant to “highlight[ ] how all aspects of surrogacy — including our laws — are tilted against the well-being of children in favor of fulfilling any adults’ wish for a child.”
The Catholic Church holds that surrogacy, abortion, and in vitro fertilization are all grave evils and contrary to the dignity of the human person.
In January, Pope Francis denounced surrogacy as “deplorable.”
“A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract,” he said, as CatholicVote previously reported. The Pope also called for the practice of surrogacy to be banned universally.
Backing Pope Francis in January, Bishop Robert Barron of the diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota wrote, “Surrogacy represents the commodification and instrumentalization of a woman’s body, treating her as a ‘carrier’ rather than a human person.”
“And just as troubling is the fact that the child is reduced to terms of buying and selling as an object of human trafficking,” he added.
“The desire to utilize surrogacy might feel like the desire to form a family naturally,” Bishop Barron said, “but no matter how well-intentioned, surrogacy always does grave injustice to the child, any discarded embryos (who are our fellow human beings), the commodified birth mother, and the loving union of the spouses.”
Waters also told CatholicVote that stories like the one detailed in the Daily Mail are a major factor in why a number of other countries have heavily or fully restricted surrogacy.
She said, “Stories like this one are a big reason why many developed nations — including Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, to name a few — have prohibited all or most forms of surrogacy.”
