GAY male couples in Australia paying overseas women to have their babies is degrading to women, children and marriage, says research fellow for the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Dr Warwick Neville.
Dr Neville was commenting on a report in The Age newspaper on August 23 about this practice.
The report referred to a gay Melbourne man who, with his male partner, is parenting an eight month-old boy born to a surrogate mother in the United States.
The man referred to several other cases of homosexual men, singles and couples, who have children born of US surrogates.
The Age quoted Melbourne GP, Dr Ruth McNair, who said she was aware of three male couples in Melbourne who had paid US women ‘tens of thousands of dollars’ to have babies for them, using sperm from one of the partners in the relationship.
Dr Neville said this practice was highly degrading to women.
‘It makes women into, effectively, objects,’ he said.
‘It’s degrading to children to have them commercially incubated and handed over to a third party. It makes children into commodities.’
Dr Neville said it was degrading to marriage in that it made children into manufactured beings instead of an expression of the love between a man and a woman.
He said surrogacy contracts were illegal in most jurisdictions in Australia and overseas.
St Patrick’s Cathedral dean, Msgr Les Tomlinson told The Age: ‘Such ways of procuring offspring are stepping outside the natural order.’
Msgr Tomlinson said depriving a child of a mother and father could ‘impair the psychological and emotional growth’ of the child and contribute to dysfunction at a later stage.
