Pope Francis called Monday for a universal ban on the \u201cdespicable\u201d practice of surrogate motherhood, as he included the \u201ccommercialization\u201d of pregnancy in an annual speech listing threats to global peace and human dignity. In a foreign policy address to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, Francis lamented that 2024 had dawned at a time in history in which peace is \u201cincreasingly threatened, weakened and in some part lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Citing Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, migration and climate crises and the \u201cimmoral\u201d production of nuclear and conventional weapons, Francis delivered a lengthy laundry list of the ills afflicting humanity and the increasing violation of international humanitarian law that allows them. But Francis also listed smaller-scale issues that he said were threats to peace and human dignity, including surrogacy.<\/p>\n
Francis said the life of the unborn child must be protected and not \u201csuppressed or turned into an object of trafficking.\u201d \u201cI consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother\u2019s material needs,\u201d he said. He called for the international community \u201cto prohibit this practice universally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Francis has previously voiced the Catholic Church\u2019s opposition to what he has called \u201cuterus for rent,\u201d and some European countries prohibit it, including Spain and Italy. At the same time, however, the Vatican\u2019s doctrine office has made clear that homosexual parents who resort to surrogacy can have their children baptized. In his geopolitical roundup, Francis singled out Russia by name in noting that \u201clarge-scale war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine\u201d had ground on.<\/p>\n
It marked an unusual break with Francis\u2019 usual tendency to spare Moscow direct, public blame for the invasion when expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Francis was more balanced in his lament of Israel\u2019s ongoing war in Gaza, condemning Hamas\u2019 October 7 assault on southern Israel \u201cand every instance of terrorism and extremism.\u201d At the same time, he said the attack provoked a \u201cstrong Israeli military response\u201d that had left thousands dead and created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pope Francis called Monday for a universal ban on the \u201cdespicable\u201d practice of surrogate motherhood, as he included the \u201ccommercialization\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":24259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[7582,1380,493,1418,536,1264,265,7581,7583,5243,7584],"class_list":["post-24256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-commercialization-of-pregnancy","tag-gaza","tag-humanitarian-crisis","tag-israel-hamas-war","tag-palestine","tag-pope-francis","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-surrogacy","tag-threats-to-global-peace-and-human-dignity","tag-vatican-city","tag-violation-of-international-humanitarian-law"],"reading_time":"2 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}