I met a girlfriend for drinks last month and we got to talking about infertility during a lull in the conversation. Knowing what I do for a living, she raised her glass ever so slightly and asked me, “can you explain what the Church teaches about surrogacy? Because friends of ours are struggling and it’s so sad and if I weren’t already pregnant myself I’d volunteer to carry a baby for them, they’ve been trying so long.”
I took a big sip myself and smiled at her; “that’s beautiful. Of course you want to help your friends.”
And then I did my best to explain why that kind of help cannot be – and will never be – okay.
Infertility is a brutally heavy cross, and it’s easy enough to explain the “rules” when you’re not sitting in the bathroom, gutted over another negative pregnancy test, another cycle of “no.” But also easy – and becoming all the more so as science and technology speed along – to lose sight of the fact that the entire industry which has sprung up around the problem of childlessness deals not in products, but in people.
…….