A Canadian same-sex coupleʼs lawsuit against the surrogate mother who refused their request to abort their unborn child is drawing attention not only to abortion but also to deeper questions about surrogacy itself, Canadian bioethicist Moira McQueen said.
Contracting a surrogate mother to carry an implanted embryo separates what the Church calls the unitive and procreative dimensions of marriage, McQueen said. “If you start interfering with that, there will be problems.”
McQueen said the Ontario dispute illustrates how separating conception, pregnancy, and parenthood among different people can create conflicts that no contract can fully prevent.
In this case, the problems read like a checklist of all that can go wrong in surrogate parenting. A same-sex couple allege that the Ontario woman who carried their son to birth breached their surrogacy agreement during the pregnancy and after his birth.
The lawsuit in Ontario Superior Court alleges the surrogate failed to keep the couple informed about the babyʼs health, disregarded medical advice, excluded them from decisions about the pregnancy, and failed to follow their directions regarding the babyʼs medical care. It also accuses her of interfering with legal steps to establish parentage, disclosing confidential information, defaming the couple on social media, and improperly seeking reimbursement for expenses.
The statement of claim doesn’t mention the coupleʼs reported request that the surrogate have an abortion after a prenatal diagnosis.
The National Post, which interviewed the woman, reported that an ultrasound indicated the baby had a cleft lip and other possible conditions. She received a letter from the couple asking that “the pregnancy be terminated,” which “devastated” her, according to the newspaper. When doctors later determined the baby was otherwise healthy, the parents agreed the pregnancy should continue.
The lawsuit doesn’t specify a dollar amount, but the surrogate told the newspaper the couple were seeking approximately $600,000.
That exploitation has global dimensions through the growth of “reproductive tourism” because it’s cheaper to pay a woman in a third-world country, McQueen said. “People have gone to other countries but then not carried out their part of the contract when something [unplanned] happens.”
The contractual nature of the relationship has “nothing to do with love,” she said. McQueen questioned where the child fits into an arrangement driven by contracts and negotiations rather than a loving family relationship.
Even if the arrangement works out, “itʼs what theyʼve done to that person in the other country. It’s using people. Itʼs exploiting them.”
Pope Leo XIV has raised concerns with surrogate parenthood in recent remarks. He told the Vatican diplomatic corps in January that surrogacy turns “gestation into a negotiable service,” violating the dignity of the child and mother, “exploiting her body and the generative process.”
Surrogacy advocate Sally Rhoads-Heinrich, whose organization worked with the parties, rejected the suggestion that the case exposed flaws in surrogacy itself.
“This arrangement soured terribly because sometimes parties (even with the best interests and contracts) can change their minds,” she told Canadian Catholic News. “Everyone went through intense screening, counseling, legal contracts, and had support.”
Although the abortion element is catching attention, she said abortion is “incredibly rare” for a surrogate pregnancy in Canada.
“We’ve only had two cases in our 26-year history,” she said. One was for a baby with hydrocephalus who she said would have died at birth and the other was when parents asked their surrogate to abort one of three triplets in utero in a high-risk triplet pregnancy.
McQueen pointed to the 1987 Vatican instruction Donum Vitae, issued under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. It says children have the right “to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world, and brought up by his own parents.”
Surrogate arrangements set up “to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological, and moral elements which constitute those families,” Ratzinger said. “Such damage to the personal relationships within the family has repercussions on civil society: What threatens the unity and stability of the family is a source of dissension, disorder, and injustice in the whole of social life.”
Benedict made clear that no matter how children enter the world, they must be accepted as a living gift of Godʼs goodness and brought up with love.
McQueen said that because surrogacy is “a contract more than a loving relationship,” a surrogate whose pregnancy no longer meets the intended parents’ expectations can come to be viewed as having “broken the contract.” She pointed to cases in which intended parents have abandoned surrogate mothers after pregnancies did not unfold as planned.
Similar questions arose in California in 2015 when gestational surrogate Melissa Cook refused a request by the intended father to abort one of the triplets she was carrying. The dispute prompted a Minnesota legislative study of surrogacy.
Testifying before the Minnesota Legislative Commission on Surrogacy in 2016, University of St. Thomas law professor Teresa Collett argued surrogacy contracts tend to prioritize the expectations of intended parents while leaving surrogate mothers and children more vulnerable when conflicts arise.
Canadian law prohibits paying a woman to act as a surrogate, while allowing reimbursement of pregnancy-related expenses. Rhoads-Heinrich argues Canada should instead permit surrogate mothers to receive compensation.
“Altruistic surrogacy is not ideal as surrogates should be properly compensated for their time, effort, and risk,” she said. Without compensation, she argued, there is a shortage of surrogate mothers, leaving “thousands of embryos frozen in clinics in Canada that will never get the chance at life because of the lack of surrogates available.”
McQueen said frozen embryos raise a separate ethical dilemma. While the Church clearly opposes creating and freezing embryos in the first place, it has not given a definitive answer on whether Catholics should adopt frozen embryos because competing moral considerations are involved.
“Itʼs a terrible problem,” she said. “Itʼs a very sad situation” for infertile couples who long for children, she added, but their suffering does not change the Churchʼs moral concerns about the technologies used to create and freeze embryos.
