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Surrogacy is like an organ transplant? Reddy, I understand where you're coming from (I think) but bear with me, I’m going to try to explain:

(Madprof, you want to listen in? Or add your thoughts?)

Almost any bodily organ (heart, kidney, lung) is part of a system whose function is that it keeps a person alive. It’s about survival. And if you can donate a kidney, or blood, or something under ethical conditions (not selling organs, not having an organ confiscated by some Organ Committee, but free gift) to help somebody else survive, well and good.

But the sexual organs have not a personal survival, but a maritally interpersonal meaning. For two reasons: they mean "you and I belong to each other (maritally) in an exclusive manner; and they can generate a new person, which gives sexuality an even deeper interpersonal meaning.

This isn't true of animals. That's why veterinary processes (insemination, cloning, interspecies breeding --- like making mules --- or any other laboratory reproduction technique) are not "depersonalizing" for animals. Not at all. But they would be for humans. It has to do with our identity, which is important to us. Animals don't have an intense “personal” interest in their "identity" or their "relationships" or a transcendent drive to ask “Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” or any sense of personal violation. They aren't personally violated no matter how they are bred with each other. They don’t give a flip who their mama is or who their daddy is.

It's quite otherwise with humans. One of the main immoral aspects of slavery, for instance, is that it fractured interpersonal relations, separated husbands from wives, separated children from parents, treated persons as if they were some kind of livestock. It broke natural marriage (husband – wife) and natural parenthood (father–child and mother–child) to pieces.

OK. Here’s the bottom line: Hiring a woman to be a surrogate is that sort of wrongdoing. It treats her not as a whole person, but as a rented uterus. It’s as depersonalizing as just renting her vagina (prostitution); it intentionally thing-ifies her so that she is to have no ongoing relation to the child or children she bears; and it makes human procreation a for-hire contract rather than a love til-death-do-you-part two-in-one-flesh union.

Human procreation is an image of God. It is life-giving and love-giving at the same time, and it creates another image of God, a new human. Surrogacy make the child-bearer less than a mother, makes her as hired procreative collaborator less than a wife, and makes the child the end-result of a kind of manufacture, as if he were a product, less than a person.

I'm not saying this detracts from the worth of the child: eery child has a right to life. God bless the child, the children: God belss them forever. I am saying that the child will lack something basic that any child would want and have a natural right to: to be the child of the woman who gave him birth, the fruit of the love-union of his father and mother. He is being deliberately deprived of that.

Surrogacy is just another example of our tendency to treat the lives of others as commodities to serve our needs. Of course, a child born through surrogacy is a precious gift from God, but that does not make the circumstances of his or her conception morally acceptable—no more than it is acceptable for children to be conceived in one-night stands or even rapes. In those cases too, what is at issue is not the worth of the child but the bad behavior of one or more of the child’s parents.

Your explanation might make sense in a perfect world... but we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a fallen one. Where disease and illness can strike anyone. And so when an infertile husband and wife turn to modern science to give them the child they desire, who are you to tell them that God says they shouldn’t have a child? I believe that God decides, not us.

Thank you, Mrs. Don-o. Excellent explanation.