Every Modern Surrogacy Contract Articulates Conditions Under Which The Surrogate Mother Is Obligated To Abort.
Image: Intended parents attend the birth of their child by a gestational surrogate Image Credit: Staff Sgt. Delia Martinez, Public Domain
Submitted by Jenny Hay [founder of Knoxville Nobility] –
After 25 years in microscopic mechanical testing, I resigned earlier this month over the issue of surrogacy.
Corporate owners have come and gone, but I have worked for the same business unit in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, since 1999. I loved my job, and I was good at it. Over the years, my work has garnered five patents and nearly 3,000 scientific citations.
In 2017, our business unit was acquired by a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Milpitas, California. Last year, the company announced that it would begin subsidizing surrogacy as an employee benefit, reimbursing $15K per baby.
I filed an ethics complaint and fought it all the way to the top, but the company wouldn’t budge. A senior human-resource manager told me that subsidized surrogacy was a “comp-benefit” in California’s Bay Area. So, I gave notice, wrapped up my projects, and resigned. My last day was May 2, 2025.
As I told friends and colleagues why I was leaving, I learned that many decent people are not aware of the horrors of surrogacy.
How It Works
In a surrogacy arrangement, the “intended parents” contract with a woman, called the “surrogate mother” or “gestational carrier,” to carry and deliver a baby for them. Multiple embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF) are implanted in the surrogate mother’s womb, but the surrogate mother generally has no biological relationship to the embryos. The embryos may be the biological offspring of one or both intended parents, or the intended parents may have acquired the embryos from a donor.
The Trouble With IVF
Because it is accomplished by means of IVF, surrogacy entails all the moral problems of IVF. Unwanted embryos are discarded, or they are frozen indefinitely for some future use. If multiple embryos survive implantation, all but one or two are selectively terminated. In its treatment of embryos, IVF defies a fundamental reality of the human person—that, as Pope St. John Paul II said in his Letter to Families, “at the moment of conception itself, man is already destined to eternity in God.”
Forced Abortion
Every surrogacy contract articulates conditions under which the surrogate mother is obligated to abort. This surrogacy contract, published by National Public Radio (NPR), is typical:
“If Intended Parents jointly request Gestational Carrier to terminate the pregnancy because of the Child’s medical condition(s), she will do so promptly. If Gestational Carrier refuses to terminate, Gestational Carrier will have materially breached this Agreement and Intended Parents’ obligations under this Agreement shall cease immediately. In such event, Intended Parents shall be entitled to reimbursement of all compensation and expenses paid by them pursuant to this Agreement.”
What “medical conditions” might lead to abortion? Last fall, the Daily Mail published a story entitled, “I caught our surrogate drinking alcohol and made her abort the baby.” I guess when you’re buying an heir, the specifications are tight. This little one didn’t make the cut. He was snuffed out upon reaching his 20th gestational week.
I have friends who are pro-life, and I have friends who think that abortion should be legal. I don’t know a single person who thinks that it’s ethical to compel a woman to undergo an abortion on pain of financial ruin. Yet every surrogacy contract anticipates that very thing.
Health Risks to the Mother
Even when the baby is healthy, the health risks to the surrogate mother are significant. A study published last year by the American College of Physicians found that the risk of severe maternal morbidity (SMM) was 7.8% for surrogate mothers, 4.3% for mothers who conceived with the help of IVF, and 2.3% for natural mothers. (I purchased the full article, but an extended abstract is available for free here.)
This study wasn’t small. Physician Maria Velez and her colleagues analyzed hospital records from singleton births in Ontario, Canada, between 2012 and 2021, including 846,124 births from natural conception, 16,087 births from IVF conception, and 806 births to surrogate mothers.
Summarizing their results, the researchers wrote:
“This study suggests that, among singleton births, gestational carriage has a higher associated risk for SMM, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, and post-partum hemorrhage compared with women who conceive with and without [IVF] assistance.”
They suggested that the adverse outcomes for surrogate mothers, even when compared with mothers who conceived by IVF, might be due to an immunologic response to the biologically unrelated child:
“For gestational carriages, having a nonautologous embryo may heighten that risk, such as from immunologic mechanisms.”
Finally, Dr. Velez and her colleagues suggested that their study may underestimate the risks to surrogate mothers, because they only analyzed singleton births, which are less risky than multiples. While including 806 surrogate births in their study, they deliberately excluded another 130 surrogate births, because these were twins or triplets. About this weakness, they wrote:
“This study excluded multifetal pregnancies, common occurrence after IVF, with reported higher risks for adverse outcomes. Accordingly, adverse maternal and newborn outcomes may have been underestimated herein.”
Violations of Human Dignity
The root problem with surrogacy is that it treats women and children as products to be bought and sold, not persons made in God’s image. In his 2024 address to diplomats from around the world, Pope Francis called for the practice to be universally banned:
“I deem deplorable 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. A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract. Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally.”
For all these reasons and more, I’m honored to offer the small sacrifice of my job toward the goal of ending the horrific practice of surrogacy.
I’m grateful to Mrs. Taylor Williams for her editorial assistance with this article.
About the Author: Jenny Hay is the founder of Knoxville Nobility, a Substack publication for local pro-life, pro-family news and insights, including firsthand reporting on Knoxville’s 2021 Planned Parenthood arson.
