Bishops of UGCC and RCC demand that Ukrainian authorities ban surrogate motherhood and international child trafficking
A video posted on the page of BioTexCom clinic from Venezia Hotel in Kyiv, which shows 46 newborn babies crying in beds deprived of parental warmth and treated as a product for which there was no buyer, prompted the bishops of the UGCC and RCC in Ukraine to appeal to the authorities with an urgent demand to ban surrogacy.
“Surrogacy, that is, the treatment of people as a product that can be ordered, manufactured and sold, which, unfortunately, is allowed by the current Ukrainian legislation, constitutes a problem, it is trampling on human dignity... It is difficult to imagine such a demonstration of disregard for the human person and its dignity. All this makes legalized surrogate motherhood possible.” This phenomenon is a moral evil that brings countless suffering and ordeal to both the child born in this way and to the woman who gave birth to this child... “The commercial basis of surrogate motherhood from a moral point of view deserves an even more severe judgment, as it is aggravated by the moral evil of buying and selling the functions of the body and the person of a newborn child. No circumstances or consequences can justify the practice of surrogate motherhood,” the bishops note.
According to them, such a gap in Ukrainian legislation discredits our country in the eyes of European society.
The bishops agree with the call of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to prohibit international trafficking of children in Ukraine at the legislative level and demand to ban surrogacy in any form (altruistic and commercial) and to assure the children born proper custody and the possibility of adoption in families.
“We demand that the state authorities finally pay attention to family policy in Ukraine and set up an appropriate stale body that would deal with Ukrainian families and take care that Ukrainian mothers are not compelled to sell their bodies and children they bear under their hearts for the sake of their own and their relatives' survival,” the bishops of the UGCC and RCC in Ukraine call.
The letter was signed by Patriarch Sviatoslav on behalf of the Synod of Bishops of the Kyiv-Galician Supreme Archbishopric of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and by Archbishop Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki, Metropolitan of Lviv on behalf of the Conference of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine.
The appeal was distributed by the Catholic Media Center.
