Lucia Gherardi
The world is still struggling with a historical ordeal that affects families first and foremost; but while in some cases the pandemic has restored value to the family, in other cases it has revealed the ailments of society. Too often childhood is at the service of adults; too often for the satisfaction of adults we forget the children.
This is what has happened in Ukraine, where the practice of the “factory production” of children has spread. The chilling news, kept rather out of the spotlight, is that of a hotel-clinic in Ukraine where about fifty children born from surrogacy were stuck and could not be “picked up” by buyers because of the global pandemic and subsequent lockdown.
Children’s clinic or horror factory?
The term clinical evokes the idea of a structure dedicated to the care of the sick, to the protection of health, certainly not to the commodification of children. And this might be enough to at least raise some concerns, but we took it even further and witnessed the most atrocious of cruelties: children placed side by side in transparent cribs, wrapped in pastel-colored blankets, each with its own name on the cradle, in an environment with a calm and quiet air; a pity, however, that it is not the nursery of any clinic, but the lobby of a hotel that houses these little innocent lives ordered, paid and not picked up, as if it were an Amazon warehouse. Children who were carried in the womb for nine months by mothers so desperate to sell their bodies first and their offspring later, mothers who were then separated from the babies immediately after birth, so that there could be no danger of attachment. But what is the result? Children momentarily orphaned. The reason? To make a wish come true at any cost, and this time the cost is the lives of innocent children. In the video that circulated on the Internet, everything seems perfect: beautiful children in perfectly aligned cots, cared for by wonderful nurses and baby sitters and excellent pediatricians, but perfection hides the tragedy of disrespect for fundamental and universal ethical principles, first of all the one for which human life is not to be bought.
The Ukrainian Catholic bishops pronounced on the matter: “The coronavirus pandemic reveals many pathologies in our modern public life. One of them is the phenomenon of surrogacy, in which people are treated as a commodity that can be ordered, manufactured and sold (…)”.
Surrogacy: a step back for women
The practice of surrogacy is not only present in Ukraine, which has become an epicenter for production with demands from every country in the world thanks to its competitive “prices,” but unfortunately it is spreading more and more all over the world.
The woman is reduced to a vessel and pregnancy becomes a service for others. But how can one think of giving away that gift of self to the other, from which life is generated? Is it possible that a child has become an object of desire, to fulfill a satisfaction at all costs regardless of the biology of the generation, which requires a man and a woman with their sexual organs and their male and female gametes to give birth to a child?
Is man really progressing in this way? What does progress mean? Is it progress in the destruction of the universally ethical foundations or progress in the search for truth and the good of humanity (and not in the satisfaction of the individual), in building better societies from children?
Scientific research is a precious endeavor at the service of a greater good – that of the person, of every person, and a newborn is a person from the moment the two parental gametes meet. However, unfortunately in the now-too-widespread practice of surrogate motherhood, if you really find a “good,” which is selfish (and if you go to see the anthropological meaning of “good” you will discover that it is so), it is only that of the parents, because the child is reduced to a commodity of purchase. For this reason alone, the dignity of the human person is violated. It goes without saying, besides, that there other problems like the psychological implications of these children deliberately taken away from their newborn mothers, so as not to risk any attachment, and of how many other children are bought by homosexual couples depriving the child of the right to have a father and a mother.
The opinion of Dolce and Gabbana
In this regard Dolce and Gabbana, Italian designers who lived together for many years, openly declared in 2015 that the family is not a passing fad, but a sense of supernatural belonging, and in plain words they stated: “The family has been made an icon by the Holy Family, but there is no religion, there is no social status that limits it: you are born and you have a father and a mother”; for this reason Domenico Dolce states that he does not share the practices that allow you to have a child produced by chemistry, but stresses that procreation must be an act of love. “Life has its own natural path, there are things that should not be changed. And one of them is family,” says Dolce.
It is striking that these events coincided with World Parents’ Day on past 1 June. On that occasion FAFCE (Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe) recalled the importance of motherhood and fatherhood and called for recognition of their fundamental roles during the current pandemic. Vincezo Bassi, President of FAFCE, said that the family in Covid’s time has proved to be the rock of people’s lives. The family has suddenly re-evaluated itself for what it is: the vital cell of society, even more so, the DNA of society. Yet often the family is not considered a priority, instead what we hope is that this pandemic will restore the value of the family, of the role of parents, which must not be tarnished by the so called “new rights” that affirm the right to have a child but do not consider the greatest right of a child to have a father and a mother.
The family, made up of mother, father, and children, is rooted in the deepest essence of the human being, created incontrovertibly male and female, and created in the image of God, hence one’s own dignity; and the right relationship between man and woman must begin from this concept.
