For Austrian cardinal, female deacons an ‘open question’

Rome, Italy, Apr 1, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Reproductive issues often leave Catholics and secular feminists at odds, but a recent anti-surrogacy conference in Rome has created an unusual camaraderie between the two.

“Se Non Ora Quando,” a feminist group known for its left-wing views, called surrogacy “incompatible with human rights and with the dignity of women,” according to the Atlantic.

The conference met last Thursday at a lower House of Parliament in Rome. Women intellectuals, doctors, and scholars from all over the world, pleaded with the United Nations to ban European citizens from traveling abroad to procure surrogate mothers.

Surrogacy is when a woman carries a baby to term for a third party, often involving payment. The pregnancy is achieved by in-vitro fertilization, in which an egg is fertilized in a lab then placed into the woman’s womb.

While the practice is legal in Canada and most of the United States, regulations vary depending on the state. Surrogacy is banned, however, in almost all of Western Europe, including France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Italy. Some countries, such as England, do not enforce surrogate contracts and women are not required by law to give up the baby they bore for a third party.

The Catholic Church opposed surrogacy in Donum Vitae, a document on biomedical issues written in 1987.

“Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love,” the document reads. It further called the practice a “detriment” to the family and the dignity of the person by divorcing “physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.”

In recent years, left-wing feminists have actively opposed surrogacy in countries like Spain and France, claiming it as an attack against women’s dignity, especially as an injustice to the poor. They have compared surrogacy to prostitution, and the expressed their concern for its promotion of human trafficking.  

“The state of necessity of women who turn to renting their womb, for a price, is not unlike sexual exploitation,” said the Spain-based Feminist Party, who protested a local surrogacy fair in 2016.

The United Nations’ parliament condemned surrogacy in 2015, labeling it as a practice which “undermines the human dignity of the woman since her body and its reproductive functions are used as a commodity.” World leaders have also identified a high of surrogate mothers are poor women in third world countries.

Sheela Saravanan gave her testimony to the “Se Non Ora Quando” conference last week, detailing the struggle women are faced with in India.

“Our surrogate mothers are stressed physically and mentally even if they receive money,” and they experience “poverty, illiteracy, submissiveness,” Saravanan said, according to the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire.  

She also explained that these “mothers who do not claim rights” are subject to abortions if the baby is disabled.

Many feminists have expressed concern that surrogacy not only coerces impoverished women, but has unhealthy side effects. The psychologist Fabio Castriota, told the conference that birth and motherhood are inseparable, and that a “separation trauma” leaves an impression on both the baby and the woman.

“Se Non Ora Quando,” means “If not now, when?” The group emerged in response to what they view as the sexist treatment of women in the media. They are especially known for organizing the 2011 rally against then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who faced accusations of sleeping with an underage woman.

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Belfast, Northern Ireland, Oct 1, 2019 / 03:04 pm (CNA).- Religious leaders are calling on Northern Ireland Secretary Julian Smith to reconvene the region’s legislative assembly, in order to avoid new liberalizing abortion laws which are set to take effect later this month.

“Our Northern Ireland political parties have it in their own hands to do something about this,” the religious leaders said in a Monday joint statement.

The British parliament voted in July to add same-sex marriage and a loosening of abortion restrictions as amendments to the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill, which is designed to keep the region running amid a protracted deadlock in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

If Northern Ireland Assembly is not reconvened by Oct. 21, the expansion of abortion rights and the legalization of same-sex marriage will take effect. Secretary Smith would be mandated to put the laws into effect by March 31, 2020.

The Northern Ireland Catholic bishops’ conference has previously condemned the legislation’s “unprecedented” use of authority to legalize abortion in the region.

Leaders of the Catholic Church, the Church of Ireland, Methodist Church in Ireland, Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and the Irish Council of Churches, in a joint statement Monday called on their congregations to lobby their locally elected representatives, and ask them to reconvene the assembly before the deadline.

“There is no evidence that these [legal] changes reflect the will of the people affected by them, as they were not consulted. They go far beyond the ‘hard cases’ some have been talking about,” the statement reads.

“We are, along with others, gravely concerned that the imposition of this Westminster legislation,” the leaders wrote, calling for two special days of prayer over the weekend of October 12-13 for the unborn and for women facing difficult pregnancies and their families.

The Northern Ireland Assembly has been suspended for the past two years due to a dispute between the two major governing parties. The DUP, the largest party, is opposed to changing the law. Sinn Féin, another prominent party in Northern Ireland, backs a liberalization of the abortion law.

The DUP has said it is ready to return to the Assembly “immediately without pre-conditions,” according to the Belfast Telegraph.

Last year, the Republic of Ireland held a referendum in which voters repealed the country’s pro-life protections, which had recognized the life of both mothers and their babies. Irish legislators then enacted legislation allowing legal abortion in what had long been a Catholic and pro-life stronghold.

Elective abortion is legal in the rest of the United Kingdom up to 24 weeks, while currently it is legally permitted in Northern Ireland only if the mother’s life is at risk or if there is risk of permanent, serious damage to her mental or physical health.

Northern Irish women have been able to procure free National Health Service abortions in England, Scotland, and Wales since November 2017.

The UK government’s plans to decriminalize abortion in Northern Ireland has garnered opposition from hundreds of health professionals in the region, who the BBC reports have written to Secretary Smith expressing opposition and calling for reassurance that as “conscientious objectors,” they will not have to perform or assist abortions.

The Northern Ireland Office, the department of the UK government which oversees the region’s affairs, is launching an “awareness campaign” in November to educate “women and healthcare professionals” on the likely changes to abortion law, the BBC reports.

An estimated 20,000 people marched in Belfast on Sept. 7, in opposition to the loosening of abortion restrictions, in a demonstration organized by the pro-life group Precious Life.

The people of Northern Ireland made “a strong stand against the extreme and undemocratic legislation that Westminster is forcing on Northern Ireland,” Bernadette Smyth, founder of Precious Life, told CNA.

In June 2018, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission challenged the region’s abortion laws in the UK Supreme Court. While the Supreme Court concluded that the laws violated human rights law by banning abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormality, rape, and incest, it threw out the case saying it had not been brought forward by a person who had been wrongfully harmed by the law.

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