The other crisis in Ukraine

Nastya already has two young boys at home in Ukraine, and she was pregnant again. Russia was heavily bombarding her city when she went into the bomb shelter to go into labor. There, she gave birth to twins. Two tiny little lives arrived amid the horror of war.

Now came an even harder part of her story. Nastya had to travel across Ukraine to the border with the newborns, bringing along her two older boys, to deliver the newborn twins to the foreign parents who had hired her as a surrogate. So off she went, trekking across the country, her post-partum body still recovering, risking her life and the lives of all of the children. Then, handing the twins off to the contracting parents, it was time for farewells to the babies who had been in her womb—to the soft, smooth curve of their cheeks, to their little noses and tightly curled fingers. She won’t ever see them again.

The twins were thus delivered safely even in the context of war. Nastya didn’t even hear back from the contracting parents.

Nastya was hired to be a surrogate mother—to have embryos created by in vitro fertilization technology implanted in her womb, to carry the babies to term, and to give birth to the babies. Here is what we now know: Ukraine is a top destination for surrogacy worldwide. A typical payment for the job is $15,000 per child, which, for 38 weeks of pregnancy and, say, 15 hours of labor and birth, comes out to a wage of $2.34 per hour.

An untold number of Ukrainian surrogates now face terrible choices. The excruciating context of war has just intensified the moral issues at stake—and the risks.

How about the babies? Some are picked up by their commissioning parents through the crush of war or smuggled out of Ukraine. But many more are stranded, languishing in basement nurseries, lined up in rows of plastic bins, a smattering of nurses around. They are away from the loving embrace of their commissioning parents, but they are also away from the loving embrace of the only mother they’ve ever known—the mother whose heartbeat and voice they’ve known from inside the womb, who gave birth to them, whose specific presence and touch and body and milk they need now, without whom they are distressed.

Studies are clear about the importance of maternal-newborn bonding: The newborn’s heart rate, sleep, and other wellness markers suffer without the close presence of the birthing mother, with repercussions possibly lasting long in life. We care aplenty that puppies not be separated from their mothers before they are of age. Rabbits and monkeys too. But human babies? Well.

We are embodied beings, but surrogacy denies the integrity of that embodiment. We commodify the body, and thus the person—against their immeasurable worth as beings made in the very image of God. The surrogate mother is reduced to a “gestational carrier,” little more than an oven. The child we treat like luxury goods.

Our children ought to be understood as begotten, not made, but we manufacture (“handmake”) them in a petri dish in a lab—sometimes even according to our specifications: sex, eye color, height, IQ. We are to love our neighbor, and love is willing the good of the beloved.

To be sure, the baby’s genetic parents are supremely important. A child’s genetic parents are part of who he is, part of his identity and self. They should raise, know, and love him. Thomas Aquinas said that a child “is by nature part of” his parents, as “enfolded in the care of its parents.” But Aquinas also says that the child is physically first “enfolded within its mother’s womb.”

Surrogacy splits the child’s mother in two: the genetic mother separated from the gestational mother. The child, by definition in terms of surrogacy, cannot be loved and known and raised by all his parents, good intentions notwithstanding. Fragmentation and loss in his life are the name of the game.

The entire picture is filled with confusion and loss. Just think of the suffering surrogate mothers and babies of Ukraine, the distressed parents who contracted for surrogacy, the messiness of the whole thing. Doesn’t all this brokenness point to the moral problems that come with surrogate parenting? Our children ought to be begotten of their parents from the loving embrace of the marriage bed, not contracted through surrogacy. Perhaps we could say it thus: What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.