The Vatican on Monday issued a declaration condemning surrogacy and gender transition procedures as “grave violations of human dignity,” listing them alongside abortion and euthanasia as practices that degrade God’s vision for humanity.
Repackaging what has been said on the various subjects individually, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a 20-page declaration titled Dignitas Infinita, outlining specific practices that the church sees as contradictory to human dignity.
The document as a whole draws from St. John Paul II‘s substantial work on developing the theology of the human person, which builds upon centuries of Catholic thought. The Vatican clarified in its Monday publication that dignity “belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God.”
Pope Francis approved the final draft on March 25 and set the publication date.
The document quotes a previous statement from Francis characterizing surrogacy as turning a child “into an object of trafficking.” Francis also condemns “so-called surrogate motherhood” because it is the transactional “exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
The Vatican argues that, whether the surrogate mother is coerced into the position or freely chooses it, the woman is “detached from the child growing in her and becomes a mere means subservient to the arbitrary gains or desire of others.”
In similar lines to the Catholic Church’s stance on contraception and abortion, the Vatican argues in the document that surrogacy also erodes the sanctity of the child by disregarding the “dignity of the conjugal union and of human procreation.”
The Vatican contends that every child has the “right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin.”
“[T]he legitimate desire to have a child cannot be transformed into a ‘right to a child’ that fails to respect the dignity of that child as the recipient of the gift of life,” the document reads.
The Vatican also denounced gender theory on the basis that it denies the differences between male and female, what the document calls “the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings.”
“[T]he Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God,” the document reads. “Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.”
The Vatican ties the evolution of gender theory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, established by the United Nations in 1948, arguing that there have been attempts to introduce new human rights that are tantamount to “ideological colonization.”
Along similar lines, the Vatican urges advocates of gender transition medicine to contemplate that “humans are inseparably composed of both body and soul.”
“Constituting the person’s being, the soul and the body both participate in the dignity that characterizes every human,” the document reads. “It follows that any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”
The Vatican is careful to clarify that those with “genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or develop later” may seek healthcare procedures to address or alter their condition medically. However, the Vatican argues that such care “would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.”
The Vatican also denounced all forms of imprisonment, torture, and depravation of life due to sexual orientation as “contrary to human dignity.”