In this video, Russell Moore suggests some reasons for prevalence of surrogacy among evangelicals and argues that adoption and foster care are better options.
I often receive questions from Christians trying to think through issues of surrogacy. And I think one of the reasons why evangelical Christians are sometimes confused about this is because sometimes leaders or pastors or others will tell them that there are no passages of Scripture that speak directly to issues of surrogacy. That’s true, of course. But we need to have a whole-Bible approach to human dignity, what child-bearing actually is and how it relates to the family. So we can’t just look in the concordance and find the word “surrogacy.”
We also need to understand that often the reason that people are drawn toward surrogacy is because we just haven’t had very good or extensive teaching about infertility. And couples who are going through the pain and the heartbreak of infertility don’t hear those sorts of issues being addressed. Maybe, in a best-case scenario, they are surrounded by an infertility support group, but that’s all. But usually the only people talking to them with compassion or with direction are those who have a financial stake in moving them toward some of these extreme reproductive technologies.
I think that surrogacy is not the direction that we ought to go for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that surrogacy severs the one-flesh union that God has designed as the place where children are born. It turns children into a product or a commodity rather than a gift. And I think that really ought to be significant for us.
The other thing is that surrogacy exploits people. One should look around see what’s happening all around the world. Women in India, for instance, who are often an extreme poverty, are being driven into surrogacy arrangements. We see even in the developed world that people arrange surrogacy contracts without understanding the sort of heartbreak that’s going to come with bearing a child that one has no legal claim to at all.
So I think a better answer to infertility and the heartbreak that comes along with it is adoption and foster care rather than surrogacy.
