‘Sale of a child’: 160 organizations ask UN to abolish surrogacy

(LifeSiteNews) — The United Nations should formally condemn surrogacy as a form of slavery, according to a petition from 160 organizations.

The Declaration of Casablanca: For the universal abolition of surrogacy sent a letter September 14 to the Committee on the Rights of the Child asking it “to clarify that remunerated surrogacy, directly or indirectly, constitutes by definition a sale of a child.” The same committee reached this conclusion in 2019.

The request follows on a report last year from Reem Alsalem, the U.N. special rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, which similarly warned of the harms of surrogacy and called for its abolition. In 2017, a different special rapporteur also confirmed surrogacy “often amounts to the sale of children.”

Advocates for the abolition of surrogacy argue:

Surrogacy is defined as the contract by which one or more commissioning parties agree with a woman that she will carry one or more children with a view to their handover at birth, regardless of the name and the terms and conditions of that contract. Surrogacy is thus a process whose object is the commissioning and handover of a child.

The object of this contract is not merely the gestational service. It is the child. No
commissioning party would agree to remunerate a surrogate mother for the pregnancy alone if the child were not handed over to them.

Surrogacy, the letter states, is “particularly insidious because it is often concealed behind images of love, while depriving the child of their biological filiation and exposing them to the trauma of separation from their birth mother.”

Children, not purchasers, must be at the forefront of the debate, the group stated in a news release.

“The question we are putting to the Committee is a legal one: when a child is handed over to commissioning parties in exchange for direct or indirect payment, can we continue to refuse to legally name what is taking place,” the Declaration of Casablanca asked. “We are asking the Committee on the Rights of the Child to place the rights of the child at the centre of this analysis and to provide a clear response.”

Surrogacy involves coerced abortions, mass production of kids

The Catholic Church has condemned surrogacy because it exploits women and separates sex from procreation.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ “right to become a father and a mother only through each other.”

Recent stories have also drawn attention to the significant ethical problems with creating a child and having a woman who is not the mother carry the baby for nine months.

A single woman, McKenna West, agreed to be the surrogate for a couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed. The purchasers of the baby demanded West abort him when they found out he would be born with a serious but treatable congenital heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome.

West refused an abortion and, with the help of podcaster Ellen Fisher and Live Action founder and President Lila Rose, flew to Texas to receive medical care. The baby, named Gabriel, has since been born and is being treated following an intervention from Attorney General Ken Paxton, as LifeSiteNews previously reported.

The purchasers and West are now locked in a legal battle over custody of the child and the Supreme Court has been asked to intervene.

At the same time, another surrogate mother has gone viral after finding out she is carrying a child for a Chinese billionaire who has purchased at least 100 children (and up to a possible 300).

Due to America’s generous “birthright citizenship” provision, all of the children born in the U.S. are legally American citizens.

Other surrogates report being misled as to who the actual parents are, according to an eye-opening report by CBS News.