Among the new law’s provisions, it requires prospective parents seeking a gestational surrogate to pay for “comprehensive health insurance and independent legal counsel of [the surrogate mother’s] choosing.”
However, the legislation explicitly denies any and all rights to babies in utero, stating that they may not be viewed as a ‘child' under the laws of New York, with the presumption that they must instead be viewed as manufactured products or disposable goods. As a result, the law allows surrogate mothers to abort the children they are carrying.
Gallagher has noted that many other nations worldwide, including almost all European Union members as well as Nepal, Thailand and Cambodia, have outlawed commercial surrogacy “because of the exploitation of women and commodification of children that inevitably results from the profit-driven surrogacy industry.”
India, once the capital of “fertility tourism,” passed a bill banning surrogacy in 2018, amid increasing concern and outcry over the exploitation of poor women who were being used for paid surrogacy, sometimes multiple times over, and usually by foreigners.
Gallagher also criticized the legislature’s move to include the lifting of the ban in a large budget bill in the midst of a pandemic.
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“The Church needs to continue to educate our Catholic faithful about why we take the position we do: surrogacy is immoral because it replaces the natural act of unitive and procreative love, within marriage, to achieve pregnancy.”
“Our Church loves and empathizes with infertile couples, and supports medical interventions which assist the natural act of unitive/procreative love to achieve pregnancy, such as fertility drugs, surgery to overcome blocked tubes and other restorative reproductive medical measures.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 2376 teaches that: “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,’” the Catechism continues.