Polish bishops call surrogacy ‘incompatible’ with faith as Warsaw event looms

Poland’s bishops have condemned surrogacy as commercial services seek to expand in the country.

“Surrogacy is by its nature evil and incompatible with Christian faith and morality,” the bishops’ bioethics committee said. “The desire to have children cannot be interpreted as a right to have children, because a child, in the ontological sense, as a human being, is not the property of its parents.”

The bioethics committee of the Polish Bishops’ Conference issued a statement on Aug. 27 signed by the head of the committee, Auxiliary Bishop Józef Wróbel of the Archdiocese of Lublin. The committee warned that the “conception and birth of a child cannot be the subject of a commercial transaction” between those who offer their body for rent and those who want to obtain offspring in this way.

The committee underscored that the practice of surrogacy cannot, therefore, “be tolerated, permitted, accepted, or, even less so, promoted by state institutions.”

The statement noted that “more and more offers are emerging in Poland guaranteeing the birth of a healthy child through surrogacy,” likely a reference to an event organized in the Polish capital, Warsaw, for Sept. 12-13 by the Ukrainian fertility clinic BioTexCom: Center for Human Reproduction.

The company says it has a “wide database of donors who meet all individual requirements of clients” as well as “the latest techniques” to achieve “positive results” of in vitro fertilization.

BioTexCom describes surrogacy “as a program during which a healthy woman carries a child for the infertile couple” and promises “best surrogate mothers,” lower prices, and better services than other medical centers in Europe.

However, the bioethical experts of the Polish episcopate pointed out that surrogacy is available only through artificial insemination, usually performed through in vitro fertilization, which has a variety of “genetic, developmental, and psychological” consequences.

Moreover, the experts said such “conceived children will be killed through eugenic abortion if genetic or developmental disorders are detected,” stressing that “the murder of an unborn child is always an extremely evil act” and that under “law in force in Poland, it is also a crime.”

The bioethicists said conducting surrogacy outside Poland does not make it legal, adding that it rather resembles “international human trafficking, which cannot be justified either by the desire to have offspring or the consent” of the parties involved.

The experts concluded that children are “treated as commodities and not as endowed with an inalienable dignity attached to their humanity.” Thus, they called for “the state authorities to take immediate and decisive action to prevent surrogacy by Polish citizens and to block” companies that “offer such procedures.”

Some analysts noted that Poland lacks surrogacy limitations, unlike Slovakia and Italy, where the practice is banned.