Contributor: ATTWN Staff
What’s a multi-billion dollar industry and is steeped in ethical concerns? Creating human babies. The slippery slope is fierce because humans should never be bought and sold yet that is exactly what is happening. And one story about this is sweeping national headlines because the surrogate mother is refusing a specific request of the biological parents of the baby she is carrying: they want to have an abortion.
Ethical Concerns of the Fertility Industry
Babymaking is a fully commercialized industry with children being created in labs and sold. In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a $30.5 billion industry and surrogacy is at nearly $29 billion and is expected to grow more than 22 percent by 2031 to $78 billion.
Babies are a good thing. The longing for a child is one of the deepest desires many couples experience. Infertility can bring profound grief, disappointment, and loneliness. While there are medical solutions to some causes of infertility, not all respect the dignity of human life or the sacred meaning of marriage and due to the creation of numerous embryos with IVF, innocent life is easily discarded in the process.
Every human life begins at conception and possesses inherent dignity from the very first moment of existence. This is the foundational belief of most Christian faiths. Only the Catholic Church explicitly forbids IVF and surrogacy due to these aspects. Many of these tiny human beings created via IVF are frozen indefinitely, discarded, used for research, or selectively implanted. From a Catholic perspective, each embryo is a unique person created in the image and likeness of God, deserving the same respect and protection as every other human being.
The commercial nature of the IVF industry also raises concerns. Fertility clinics often advertise success rates, genetic testing, and embryo selection as consumer choices. As a result, human life can begin to be viewed less as an immeasurable gift and more as a product that can be created, evaluated, selected, or rejected. This shift in perspective risks undermining the dignity of the unborn and fostering a culture in which the strongest or healthiest are preferred over the most vulnerable.
Surrogacy Gone Wrong
Surrogacy presents another set of moral concerns. In commercial surrogacy arrangements, pregnancy becomes a contractual service, and the child may be treated as the object of an agreement between adults. Even when everyone involved has generous intentions, the arrangement separates motherhood into biological, gestational, and social roles in ways that are contrary to God’s design for the family.
There are also concerns about the exploitation of women. Many surrogates enter agreements because of financial need, creating situations where economic hardship may influence decisions involving their own bodies and the lives of unborn children. A market built on purchasing reproductive services risks reducing both women and children to commodities rather than recognizing their God-given dignity.
In the case of McKenna West, a nurse that lives in Alaska, the natural and good desire for a child went wrong. McKenna was contracted as a surrogate by a couple who lives in California. In her surrogacy contract, there was a clause that said the biological parents had the right to demand an abortion if they wanted to. McKenna did raise that concern with the liaison agency and they told her it was extremely rare.
Everything was going fine with the pregnancy and McKenna’s relationship with the parents until the 20-week ultrasound, which showed that the baby had a heart defect, one that could be solved with a surgery after birth. The success rate of one particular hospital that McKenna found in Texas was 100 percent. The biological parents were concerned with the baby’s standard of life and demanded McKenna go through a late term abortion where the baby is injected with a drug that stops its heart and then is dismembered and extracted from the womb.
McKenna refused the abortion and the biological parents sued her. She even offered to move to Texas, where she would give birth and the baby could have the surgery, and live with a friend to alleviate costs for the biological parents. They rejected the offer. The baby is due September 2, 2026 and both parties are involved in lawsuits.
Another Couple Demanded a Late Term Abortion
In another lawsuit filed this year, an Ontario couple is suing their surrogate for a reported amount of $600,000 after she refused to abort their baby because of a cleft lip. She was 22 weeks pregnant at the time.
The same-sex couple ultimately agreed to keep the baby, who was born healthy, but decided to sue the surrogate mother two years after the birth for “emotional distress.”
The couple retains custody of the little boy.
In Canada, the surrogate is only reimbursed for expenses, which the couple did not want to pay because their agreed-upon birth plan was changed.
“This is the result of an industry that buys and sells babies, that commercializes the fertility of women, and that ends the lives of innocent babies by the millions every year,” said Abby Johnson, CEO and Founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries. “It is a beautiful and natural desire to want to have children, to carry children, and to have the ability to fulfill the dream of having a family. But children are not guaranteed to anyone and the fertility industry has exploited women in the name of the so-called right to have a child.”
In the United States, The Preventing Forced Abortions Act of 2026 has been introduced to prohibit “federal courts from enforcing provisions in surrogacy contracts that require a surrogate mother to obtain an abortion. The bill would also prevent intended parents from withholding agreed-upon compensation when a surrogate mother refuses a request to abort the child she is carrying.”
The bill was introduced by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) in July 2026.