By Michael J Robinson, European Conservative. (Image: Unsplash)
The controversy surrounding German politician Jens Spahn has been framed as a story about political hypocrisy. A senior Christian Democrat, whose party has long opposed surrogacy, has become a father through a surrogate in the United States. Critics have accused him of saying one thing while doing another.
Perhaps. But the real question is not whether one politician has been inconsistent. It is what the episode reveals about the direction of Western civilisation.
Surrogacy is increasingly presented as a compassionate solution to an understandable human longing. The desire to have children is among the deepest we experience. The pain of infertility is real and deserves both sympathy and support. Yet compassion alone cannot settle every ethical question.
At its heart, surrogacy asks us to rethink the nature of parenthood itself. It asks us to believe that pregnancy can be separated from motherhood, that a child’s first human relationship can be defined by contract, and that what has always been understood as a gift may now be arranged as a service.
That should concern us all.
We often hear surrogacy described in the language of generosity. But the legal and commercial reality tells a different story. There are intended parents, agencies, contracts, donors, payments, parental orders, and delivery dates. The vocabulary is revealing. Reproduction increasingly resembles a marketplace.
Pregnancy, however, is not a service. It is a relationship.
For nine months, a mother and her unborn child exist in a unique biological bond unlike any other in human life. Long before birth, the child recognises the mother’s voice, responds to her movements, and develops within a relationship that is not merely biological but profoundly personal. To treat that relationship as something that can be contracted in advance and transferred at birth is not simply to alter legal procedure. It is to redefine motherhood itself.