The Surrogacy Debate Is About to Break the Christian Right Wide Open
Surrogacy has always seemed to me to be perfectly compatible with conservative values. It involves a carefully planned pregnancy designed to deliver a baby to two loving parents. There is very little chance the fetus will be aborted. Its soon-to-be parents are almost certain to be well off and won’t need to lean on the welfare state while raising their child. Surrogacy is, in other words, the least risky way to approach the inherently risky endeavor of reproduction.
But a cri de coeur published in the National Review on Monday reminds me exactly how wrong my assumptions are. For a certain subset of conservatives—most of them orthodox Catholics—surrogacy is a chief evil of modern sexual liberty, lagging behind abortion but keeping pace with gay marriage. Intriguingly, principled opposition to surrogacy isn’t even about homosexuality—though those who oppose surrogacy generally oppose gay parenthood as well. It’s about fidelity to relatively esoteric Catholic notions of natural law. And the larger question of surrogacy is poised to cause a catastrophic rift within the conservative movement as a whole.
To understand the deep ideological divisions surrounding surrogacy, you need only look to Louisiana, where the surrogacy debate has thrown conservative Republicans into a complex intra-party debate. In 2013, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal vetoed a Republican-sponsored bill that would have legalized surrogacy contracts throughout the state, following pressure from conservative Christian groups. The bill’s sponsor then overhauled the bill, affixing amendments that satisfied conservatives’ concerns. But at the last minute, these groups decided the new bill was still fundamentally immoral, and Jindal vetoed the revised bill earlier this year. (Overcome by zeal, anti-gay activist Robert P. George promptly suggested Jindal would make a great president.)
Why do some Republicans want to legalize surrogacy contracts? Easy: Straight people, including straight men, need surrogates. Although some surrogacy opponents try to frame their argument as a fundamentally anti-gay one, this is a bit of a ruse. Gay couples represent only a fraction of all potential surrogacy clients; most people in need of a surrogate are infertile straight couples. Surrogacy opponents, then, may try to capitalize on existing anti-gay animus to further their cause—but really, their hostility to the practice is tethered to their broader enmity toward modern conceptions of sexual autonomy.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/08/11/surrogacy_and_the_christian_right_the_coming_schism.html
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