(LifeSiteNews) – The Australian Bishops Conference, in a recent letter to the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) reviewing the country’s commercial surrogacy ban, urged the commission in a nine-page letter to recommend that the law remain in effect with stricter enforcement.
The July 9 letter, signed by Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Tony Percy and shared with Catholic News Agency (CNA), highlighted the grave harms of surrogacy to both women and children, and not only wrote against legalizing commercial surrogacy but also called for the ban of all forms of surrogacy. The ALRC was tasked last year with reviewing the country’s surrogacy laws after leftist activists had pushed for further legalization of the immoral practice.
Currently, all commercial surrogacy is illegal in Australia, but the law is rarely enforced, while altruistic surrogacy, in which the woman is not paid and thus the pregnancy cannot be used for profit, remains legal.
“Surrogacy, in all its forms, undermines the dignity of women and children by commodifying human life and turning pregnancy into a transaction. At its core, surrogacy treats women as instruments to be used and children as products to be commissioned,” the prelates wrote at the beginning of the letter.
As stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2376), the Church has consistently condemned all forms of surrogacy:
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.
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Speaking to the effects of surrogacy on children, the bishops emphasized that every child has the right to be raised by their biological parents.
“Every child has the right to be conceived, carried, and raised within the stable, loving bond of its biological mother and father. To deliberately bypass this context is to violate the child’s inherent dignity and best interests,” the bishops said.
The prelates further underscored how surrogacy undermines the sacred role of motherhood.
“Surrogacy reduces this sacred role (of motherhood) to a service contract — an arrangement that denies the women’s full humanity,” the letter says. “Surrogacy attempts to divide a woman’s body from her identity, as though she could be a vessel without being a mother.”
The letter acknowledged the need to be compassionate with couples who are struggling with infertility but stressed that surrogacy only introduces them to further harm, such as increased medical risk, emotional trauma, and exploitation.
The bishops also noted the disturbing fact that while commercial surrogacy is technically illegal the law is rarely enforced.
“As a result, Australians are continuing to commission children through international commercial surrogacy with little scrutiny or consequence, undermining the intent of the legal prohibitions, which are to protect children,” they wrote.
The ALRC’s official inquiry into the country’s surrogacy laws was launched in December 2024. This movement for the legalization of commercial surrogacy has been spearheaded by same-sex “couples” who have complained about the “challenges” and “barriers” of obtaining children from other countries via altruistic surrogacy.
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Indeed, as the Australian bishops acknowledged in the letter, the first point of consideration listed in the terms of reference for the official review of surrogacy laws focuses on “reduc(ing) barriers to domestic altruistic surrogacy arrangements in Australia” rather than focusing on the wellbeing of the women and children often exploited through surrogacy.
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“We reject the idea that expanding surrogacy serves the best interests of children or respects human dignity,” the bishops said. “Any legal reform must begin with a clear commitment to protect children from commodification, women from exploitation, and society from the normalization of contract-based human reproduction.”
Finally, the bishops asked the ALRC to recommend that all forms of surrogacy be banned due to the dangers and rejection of human dignity of the practice cited in the letter:
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference calls on the Law Reform Commission to recommend the prohibition of all forms of surrogacy in Australia. Australian law should, as far as possible, preserve the inherent dignity of every human person by giving paramount importance to the rights of children, and protect vulnerable women from exploitation and harm.