Paris Hilton and the scandal of surrogacy

In a 1953 jovial letter to an American woman, C. S. Lewis wrote that her mistaking pregnancy for seasickness “is one of the funniest I ever heard. In our country there are usually alterations of shape which would throw grave doubts on the sea-sick hypothesis.”

Recently Paris Hilton had a baby, born through surrogacy. The baby was a surprise to her family, revealed at a holiday gathering. Hilton said, “My parents did not know when it was happening; they just knew it was going to happen.”

How odd this is. Furthermore, how anti-incarnational surrogacy is. Bless her heart, Hilton’s belly would have stayed as flat as ever throughout all these months that the baby was being gestated by the surrogate mother: No such “alterations of shape” for Hilton.

Through Advent, we sit with Mary in her pregnancy and contemplate the coming of the long-expected Jesus. She would have seen alterations of shape of her own body—felt it, lived through it. From the Annunciation to the Visitation, then on to the journey toward Bethlehem, she would have felt the weight of being great with child.

And the Word became flesh. Jesus had a particular face, a particular eye color, a particular shape of the face. His hands and feet had a shape that was His. Mary chose not these particularities of His person. She did choose to say yes to God. But in doing so, Mary simply received Christ, begotten of His Father before all worlds, now incarnate—as He was given to her.

How different from surrogacy. Imbedded in it is IVF, with the practice of picking and choosing of traits in embryos, perhaps also the sperm and eggs. What sex would you like the baby to be? Eye color, hair color, height, body type, medical history? IQ and academic pedigree? Likelihood of survival? (Those embryonic humans who don’t make the cut are trashed, or else indefinitely frozen.)

This picking and choosing (and trashing) reveals the commodification of the human in IVF, and no wonder. IVF’s predecessor in third-party reproduction is artificial insemination, whose roots were in animal husbandry—for improvement of stock: the quest for higher yield of the dairy cow, semen of stud horses or prize bulls. So Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson, the American Gynecological Society president during the 1920s, declared that artificial insemination had “enormous potentialities of betterment of the race.” He was for sterilizing the criminal, sick, and mentally ill. Few are the degrees of separation between eugenics and IVF.

To be sure, no picking and choosing of traits has been reported about Paris Hilton’s baby. But a basic point is that such practice is de rigueur in IVF. The goodness of the body of the child and thus the person as he is, not as we choose him to be, is antithetical to the logic of IVF.

The surrogate mother is commodified too, and the reality of pregnancy’s embodiment is disregarded. It matters not that she is objectively a mother to the baby she is carrying by virtue of their shared life and gestational tie, regardless of strength of feelings. In the articles covering Paris Hilton’s new baby, no mention was breathed of the woman who did undergo alterations of shape for the baby. She is meant to disappear. Nothing but a contract worker, an oven.

Hilton lists trauma from her youth for why she chose surrogacy. To be sure, trauma calls for compassion. It is also true that babies are wonderful: each child good, loved, unique, and unrepeatable. But the good and worthy end of life doesn’t justify any which means to procure him or her.

Contra the posture of receiving the child as a gift from the hands of God, surrogacy makes consumers and commodities out of us. Man, bearing the imago Dei and participating in the divine nature, whose incarnate nature is ennobled by the Incarnation of Christ, is properly begotten, not made. But surrogacy turns on this and causes man to be made, not begotten. In sundering the conjugal and procreative unity, surrogacy dishonors our incarnate nature.

What a modern, Gnostic thing this is. “Surprise! Here’s a baby out of a hat!”—or so it seems to the commissioning parents and family. Pregnancy’s incarnate reality is skipped wholesale. It is like magic, then—which, going back to C. S. Lewis, is precisely what he says modernity is like. “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality,” Lewis writes, “and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique.”

The real is embodied. Surrogacy confuses the entire picture, and those who speak of Paris Hilton “having” this baby just add to the confusion.