“The modern technical aspect of surrogacy is not what makes it objectionable. Its the depersonalization and demaritalization of reproduction - distorting procreation into being both a comemrcial transaction and a laboratory breeding technique “
But couldn’t that opinion be equally applied to heart transplants?? Placing another person’s heart into a patient could be considered distorting the Creator’s masterpiece! And heart transplants aren’t free, are they??
(Madprof, you want to listen in? Or add your thoughts?)
Almost any bodily organ (heart, kidney, lung) is part of a system whose function is that it keeps a person alive. Its about survival. And if you can donate a kidney, or blood, or something under ethical conditions (not selling organs, not having an organ confiscated by some Organ Committee, but free gift) to help somebody else survive, well and good.
But the sexual organs have not a personal survival, but a maritally interpersonal meaning. For two reasons: they mean "you and I belong to each other (maritally) in an exclusive manner; and they can generate a new person, which gives sexuality an even deeper interpersonal meaning.
This isn't true of animals. That's why veterinary processes (insemination, cloning, interspecies breeding --- like making mules --- or any other laboratory reproduction technique) are not "depersonalizing" for animals. Not at all. But they would be for humans. It has to do with our identity, which is important to us. Animals don't have an intense personal interest in their "identity" or their "relationships" or a transcendent drive to ask Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? or any sense of personal violation. They aren't personally violated no matter how they are bred with each other. They dont give a flip who their mama is or who their daddy is.
It's quite otherwise with humans. One of the main immoral aspects of slavery, for instance, is that it fractured interpersonal relations, separated husbands from wives, separated children from parents, treated persons as if they were some kind of livestock. It broke natural marriage (husband wife) and natural parenthood (fatherchild and motherchild) to pieces.
OK. Heres the bottom line: Hiring a woman to be a surrogate is that sort of wrongdoing. It treats her not as a whole person, but as a rented uterus. Its as depersonalizing as just renting her vagina (prostitution); it intentionally thing-ifies her so that she is to have no ongoing relation to the child or children she bears; and it makes human procreation a for-hire contract rather than a love til-death-do-you-part two-in-one-flesh union.
Human procreation is an image of God. It is life-giving and love-giving at the same time, and it creates another image of God, a new human. Surrogacy make the child-bearer less than a mother, makes her as hired procreative collaborator less than a wife, and makes the child the end-result of a kind of manufacture, as if he were a product, less than a person.
I'm not saying this detracts from the worth of the child: eery child has a right to life. God bless the child, the children: God belss them forever. I am saying that the child will lack something basic that any child would want and have a natural right to: to be the child of the woman who gave him birth, the fruit of the love-union of his father and mother. He is being deliberately deprived of that.