Moscow, January 29, 2020
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His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia participated in the Russian Federation Council’s annual Christmas Parliamentary Meetings yesterday, January 28, addressing a number of societal and moral issues.
In particular, the Russian primate highlighted the moral ambiguity of the practice of surrogate motherhood, reports Interfax-Religion.
“While appreciating the desire of science and health care to solve urgent human problems, I can’t help but note the semantic substitution that occurs in relation to the so-called surrogate motherhood. Banned in many countries and available in Russia only to wealthy people (I want to emphasize this), the procedure, in fact, of course, in some sense exploits women and even encourages the sale of children,” the Patriarch said at the meetings.
The surrogate mother is the one being exploited, Pat. Kirill said. “After all, it’s not for free, it’s not out of enthusiasm—she gets money for it and, in a sense, sells her children.”
And, in the Patriarch’s view, this problem is largely based on social stratification, as well-off women don’t have to bear children for other women to get money.
“This choice is driven by social insecurity; poverty, the desire to provide for her own children, the spread of commercial surrogacy—this is obviously the demeaning of Russian women, the most vulnerable of them,” the Russian spiritual head emphasized.
The Patriarch also warned against risky genetic experiments on humans, saying, “The development of technologies for the so-called modification of the human genetic code cannot but cause concern. These trends are correlated in a certain way with the selective experiments of the Nazis in the framework of eugenic theory.”
According to him, God's gift of life is inviolable, and the risks from such interventions have yet to be assessed. In this regard, Pat. Kirill called for “drawing a dividing line between the treatment of genetic diseases and the breeding of human individuals with programmed genetic engineering qualities.”
