Olivia Maurel, a 31-year-old Franco-American mother of three living in Cannes, recently met with Pope Francis to share their common advocacy against surrogacy.
According to EWTN, Maurel was born via surrogacy in the United States in 1991 and has since suffered abandonment trauma, identity issues, and several suicide attempts.
"I was a product of surrogacy, and I've always felt it inside me—a baby made to order, a commodity for money," she said. "We're used to having in the news a lot of beautiful stories of children born via surrogacy ... and we are not used to hearing the bad aspects of surrogacy and how it's totally unethical."
Maurel is one of the very few people who were involved in surrogacy—both surrogate mothers and children born of surrogacy—speaking out against the practice.
Back in January, the pope called for a universal ban on surrogacy and the "commercialization" of pregnancy, which he called "despicable."
"I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother's material needs," he told members of the Vatican's diplomatic corps in his New Year message. "A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract."
@maurel_olivia Surrogacy needs to be abolished woldwide, it’s everyone’s concern! #surrogacy #abolishsurrogacy #surrogacytiktok #surrogate ♬ son original - Olivia Maurel
Pope Meets Surrogate Baby
While identifying as "a feminist and an atheist," Maurel celebrated the pope's condemnation of surrogacy around a month after she sent a letter to Francis about her own story as someone conceived and born via the practice.
She explained that she decided at the time to write to the pontiff after hearing Ana Obregón, a 68-year-old Spanish TV actress, speak on the Spanish Catholic bishops' radio network COPE about the actress's experience of traveling to the US to obtain a surrogate baby conceived with her dead son's frozen sperm.
"I was a bit shocked that she was able to give a testimony on the Church's radio station and to make it sound like it's a wonderful story," Maurel explained. "I thought that the Church was against surrogacy. So what I did is that I wrote to the pope, explaining my situation ... that I was born via surrogacy, and that I'm an atheist and a feminist. ... [A]nd I asked him kindly if he could take a stance against surrogacy."
Maurel was able to meet Francis privately last week as part of her role as spokeswoman for the Casablanca Declaration for the Abolition of Surrogacy, a document signed in 2023 calling for the abolition of surrogacy.
She also shared her testimony on Friday (Apr. 5) at a conference at Rome's LUMSA University to mark the first year since the declaration was signed.
The conference was held near the Vatican days before the Holy See's doctrine office published "Dignitas Infinita," a document on the "moral questions" regarding human dignity, gender, and surrogacy.
"The reality of surrogacy is a woman that is used for her reproductive system. ... When you read a surrogacy contract, it's literally renting a woman," Maurel told the conference. "And then the other reality is that in the midst of the contract, there is an object that is to be sold at the end, and that is the child. So we commodify children. We are selling and buying babies. That is the reality of surrogacy."
"Dignitas Infinita" is scheduled for publication on Monday (Apr. 8).
Surrogacy and National Security
While surrogacy was banned across most countries in the European Union, the practice has been permitted in the majority of US states.
Aside from Maurel, other whistleblowers have raised concerns after surrogate mothers have died from complications of a surrogate pregnancy or suffered from trauma from the experience.
"It's not medical ethics to ask a woman to take money when we knowingly are asking her to risk her health," Center for Bioethics and Culture president Jennifer Lahl told EWTN. "We've had many surrogate deaths in the United States and several in my state, California."
Lahl recently directed the documentary "#BigFertility," which focused on the story of Linda, a surrogate mother in the Golden State who was hired by a couple in China to carry twins.
Lahl told a conference in Rome for the universal abolition of surrogacy that, during the woman's pregnancy, "the purchasing parents told Linda that they were now getting a divorce and wanted Linda to terminate the pregnancy" and would pay her an additional $80,000 for it.
"Linda was shocked and offered to adopt the twins once they were born," she added. "The purchasing mother, who was quite wealthy, explained that she didn't want her children to be raised in a lower income household."
Lahl insisted that a total ban on what she called "renting wombs and buying children" was needed due to the inevitable limits of regulation.
"How do you regulate to prevent health risks to mother and child? How do you regulate to prevent trauma to mother and child?" she asked. "How do you regulate to prevent death to mother and child? What law could our lawmakers write and pass that would save lives?"
The Heritage Foundation analyst and research associate Emma Waters voiced her concern last year about how untraceable foreign surrogacy arrangements between Chinese and Americans are and how it could become a major national security risk for the US despite the practice being outlawed in China.
"We have no idea who these children are," she told Fox News Digital then.
"Should they come back and get involved in academic research, purchase contracts, or even apply for jobs in sensitive areas, we don't have clear tracking to show that these US citizens actually had a far more complicated background and path to the United States."
Last week, a man in Chicago was arrested after it was discovered he was planning to sexually assault the surrogate baby he had commissioned, which was due to be born in March.
According to Kajsa Ekis Ekman, author of the book "Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self," surrogacy was "the only way that a single man can gain sole custody of a newborn child."
