I know a lot of women, especially after taking The Pill for a decade or two, have trouble conceiving children. It’s extremely difficult. One of the avenues, especially for the uber-wealthy, is to conceive a child in a dish and then have that baby planted into another less wealthy woman’s womb.

The less wealthy woman then carries the baby for nine months and then hands the baby back to the uber-wealthy woman upon delivery. And she gets paid.

Everyone’s happy, right?

That’s a dangerous road. One, most babies in surrogacy are created through IVF in which many embryos are created and many are discarded or left in a freezer in perpetuity. That is a horror.

Think of this as an industry. It is the poor being exploited to carry the children of the wealthy. And as far as the baby, it’s treating people like merchandise which can be ordered, manufactured, and sold.

I remember a case from years ago when a man and a woman conceived a baby and had a surrogate carry the child. Soon after, they got divorced, and they ordered the surrogate woman to abort the child. She refused. It’s their baby but it’s her body?

That was a legal tangle, huh? That’s a real 21st century problem.

So, kudos to Pope Francis for taking this on. I’m glad to write that.

The Federalist: “I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs,” Francis declared during his annual address to Holy See ambassadors on Sunday. “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”

Surrogacy is a growing multi-billion-dollar industry that spans dozens of countries, especially allowing wealthy people to profit from the bodies of the poor. Francis blamed this rise of womb rentals on the “continued spread of a culture of death.”

The “false compassion” gripping Western countries, Francis warned, “discards children, the elderly, and the sick” without regard for morality.

“At every moment of its existence, human life must be preserved and defended,” he said.

Turning human life into “an object of trafficking” is an injustice that good governments must prohibit, Francis declared.