4.33 What about artificial insemination and surrogate mothers?
Children are the fruit of an intimate experience of love between a man and a woman. The Church can only accept medical procedures that retain the connection between this union and procreation. Therefore, the Church rejects almost all methods of artificial insemination, even though she understands very well the grief of couples who cannot conceive children.
Surrogate motherhood leads to all sorts of unnatural and inhuman situations, and should always be rejected.
What is the Church’s judgment on surrogate motherhood and artificial fertilization?
All assistance in conceiving a child through research and medicine must stop when the common bond of parenthood is loosened and destroyed by the intrusion of a third person or when conception becomes a technological act outside of sexual union in marriage.
Out of respect for human dignity, the Church cannot approve of the technologically assisted conception of a child through artificial insemination or fertilization. Every child has in God’s plan the right to have a father and a mother, to know his parents, and if at all possible to grow up surrounded by their love. Artificial insemination and fertilization with the sperm of another man or the ovum of another woman (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) also destroy the spirit of marriage, in which husband and wife have the right to become a father or a mother only through the other spouse. But even homologous artificial insemination and fertilization (in which the sperm and the ovum come from the spouses) make a child the product of a technological procedure and do not allow it to originate from the loving union of a personal sexual encounter. If the child becomes a product, however, then that leads immediately to cynical questions about product quality and product liability. The Church also rejects pre-implantation diagnosis, which is carried out for the purpose of killing imperfect embryos. Surrogate motherhood, too, in which an artificially conceived embryo is implanted into another woman, is contrary to human dignity. [Youcat 423]
What emerges ever more clearly in the procreation of a new creature is its indispensable bond with spousal union, by which the husband becomes a father through the conjugal union with his wife, and the wife becomes a mother through the conjugal union with her husband. The Creator's plan is engraved in the physical and spiritual nature of the man and of the woman, and as such has universal value.
The act in which the spouses become parents through the reciprocal and total gift of themselves makes them cooperators with the Creator in bringing into the world a new human being called to eternal life. An act so rich that it transcends even the life of the parents cannot be replaced by a mere technological intervention... Rather, it is the scientist's task to investigate the causes of male and female infertility, in order to prevent this situation of suffering in spouses who long to find in their child a confirmation and completion of their reciprocal self-giving. [Pope John Paul II, To the Pontifical Academy for life, 21 Feb. 2004]
