Outsourcing Birth

The Christian Science Monitor examines a booming new industry in India: surrogate motherhood. Christianity Today weighs in:

This mechanical approach to procreation has been widely repudiated, and for good reason. Its logical extension would be the use of animal wombs (which could become possible), the use of an "artificial" womb (on which there has been work for many years), and indeed gestation in a man. The radical separation of biological parenting and gestation—like all efforts to sunder the genetic, birth, and social mothers of a child, three roles that should be in one woman—strikes deep into the Christian understanding of procreation.

An additional source of concern is the "exploitation inherent in the economic disparities, which are grossly underlined in the case of outsourcing to a developing country with many, many poor women," especially because "renting a womb" amounts to a "prostitution of the human body" akin to selling organs and tissues.

Rob