SURROGATE BABY FACTORY OPENS IN POLAND
FROM The dailyrecord: A controversial "baby factory" producing infants for £11,000 for childless couples has opened in Poland.
The women undertake not to drink alcohol or smoke during pregnancy and sign a waiver giving up all rights to their children when they are born.
Addresses for the surrogate mothers and couples paying for children are cross-checked to ensure they don't live in the same area.
The aim is to avoid the risk of surrogates bumping into their children in later life.
Couples using the surrogacy centre have to adopt the babies immediately after birth, whether healthy or not.
The centre's chief, nurse Elizhbeta Shimanskaya, 32, says she already has orders for babies and she will give birth to three herself in the coming years.
She said: "Poland needs more people. So many of our citizens live abroad and 1.5 million couples face being childless. We are offering a service."
Recent opinion polls in the country showed that the majority of the Poles approve of the initiative..."
One surrogate mother said: "The church is wrong. We can help these people - they can not. We are living in the 21st century."
These surrogate mothers are proud of what they believe to be a charitable act. But one can never do evil in order to bring about what appears to be a good. "[Surrogacy] is contrary to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person. [It] represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families." JOSEPH Card. RATZINGER, CDF. INSTRUCTION ON RESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE IN ITS ORIGIN AND ON THE DIGNITY OF PROCREATION--REPLIES TO CERTAIN QUESTIONS OF THE DAY