Vatican Rejects Surrogacy and Gender-Affirming Care

“Infinite Dignity,” a twenty-page doctrine approved by Pope Francis after five years of development, was released on April 9. In addition to reiterating decades of Catholic precepts, the document condemns gender-affirming care, claiming that undergoing surgery to alter one’s sex “amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”

Though Pope Francis has accepted members of the LGBTQ+ community into the Church, “Infinite Dignity” contradicts previously extended papal support for people identifying as queer. The document blasts “gender theory” as the gravest danger society currently faces, denouncing the “ugly ideology” as a challenge to human dignity that undermines man’s relation to God.

The Pope states that the critical examination of gender as fluid rather than fixed “envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.” To preserve human dignity, the Vatican suggests, “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman” must be refuted. 

Pope Francis’s position on gender-affirming surgery, particularly the affirmation contained in the document that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift” and the call to “protect our humanity, …[which] means accepting it and respecting it as it was created” has been criticized by transgender activists as hypocritical, given the doctrine’s endorsement of surgical procedures performed on those born with “genital abnormalities.”

In an interview with AP Press, Mara Klein, a non-binary Catholic lobbying for church reform in Germany, stated that the message of “Infinite Dignity” is at odds with the harmful effects of intersex surgery, which is typically performed on children who are too young to consent.

Klein further censured the document for its failure to account for the experiences of transgender individuals: “The suggestion that gender-affirming healthcare – which has saved the lives of so many wonderful trans people and enabled them to live in harmony with their bodies… – might risk or diminish trans people’s dignity is not only hurtful but dangerously ignorant.”

In addition to disparaging sex reassignment surgery and hormone therapy, the document seeks to prohibit surrogacy and other forms of “artificial” fertilization. Such “deplorable” processes, in the words of Pope Francis, “violates the dignity of the [surrogate] child.” Because of its inherent dignity, a child “has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin.” Francis then goes on to emphasize the role of the “conjugal union,” granting importance to traditional practices that many would find outdated.

“Surrogacy also violates the dignity of the woman,” the document asserts, “whether she is coerced into it or chooses to subject herself to it freely. For, in this practice, the woman is detached from the child growing in her and becomes a mere means subservient to the arbitrary gain or desire of others.”

Image Credits: Alfredo Borba, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons