Pope Francis distributed sweets to children during the weekly general audience in Paul VI hall at the Vatican on January 3, 2024. Earlier this week, the Pope called for a worldwide ban on surrogacy during a speech to diplomats on Monday, stating that the practice exploits the women who carry children. He said that surrogacy turns a child into “an object of trafficking” and that a “child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”
However, Sunshine Hanson, a three-time gestational surrogate and founder of the surrogacy agency Surrogacy Is, disagrees with Pope Francis’ characterization. She believes that surrogates deserve to be paid for their efforts, which are supposed to compensate them for the time, effort, sacrifice, and struggle of being pregnant and giving birth and going through postpartum recovery.
In the U.S., gestational surrogacy is legal, but it is not regulated by the federal government, so the practice is up to individual states. Only some U.S. states expressly allow surrogacy, and not all of them allow surrogates to be compensated. Some U.S. states allow surrogates to earn roughly $40,000 or more, and all medical costs are typically paid for by the intended parent or parents.
In addition to paid surrogacy, some celebrities, such as Chrissy Teigen and Anderson Cooper, have publicly shared their stories of using surrogacy to expand their families, contributing to the normalization of the practice.