Mother’s Day can mean different things to different people. For some it is a day of happy celebration. For others — those who have lost a mother, those who have longed to become one, those whose relationships with their mothers are complicated — it can be a quietly painful day. The Church holds all of that together. And perhaps that is exactly why Mother’s Day is a good occasion to think carefully about what motherhood is, and what happens when we treat it like a commercial transaction.
Maternal surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman gestates a child for someone else and agrees in advance to relinquish that child at birth. There are two kinds of surrogacy: altruistic and commercial. Altruistic surrogacy is when a woman offers to carry a baby for someone, not for financial gain, but out of kindness, perhaps for a sister or a close friend who is not able to conceive. Commercial surrogacy refers to cases where the surrogate is compensated financially beyond merely covering her healthcare. Most countries in Europe ban commercial surrogacy. Some permit altruistic arrangements only. In the U.S., the laws differ by state, but most states are relatively permissive.
The people who hire a surrogate are not villains. Of course not. They are often couples in real pain, grieving the child they cannot seem to have. That grief deserves compassion. But compassion for those who want children does not require us to set aside hard questions about what surrogacy actually says about mothers and children compared to what we see in the Scriptures.
God Himself Chose to Have a Mother[1]
Christians have always understood motherhood as something far greater than just a biological or social process, and we see this nowhere more clearly than with the Virgin Mary. When the angel came to her, Mary did not just offer a service. In faith, she said “yes” — not to a contract, but to a vocation she could not fully see the end of. She is a model for all other mothers (and fathers) in the sense that she, more than any, understood the givenness of children. As the prophet wrote, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6).
Every child is a gift from God to be received with gratitude and awe. Of course, this is equally true of all children born of surrogacy, but is it possible that the means of bringing them into the world is an attempt to seize control of our families from the Creator? It introduces capitalists and lawyers into a sacred process intended to be seen as the joyful fruition of a loving marital embrace. Do we still then see children as gifts or as entitlements?
What Surrogacy Does
A child born through commercial surrogacy enters the world as the result of a contract. The baby may have genetic parents, a gestational mother, and a separate set of rearing parents — three different categories of parent, potentially five or six different people. So, when legal disputes arise, as they do, courts must decide who the “real” parents are. The child becomes an asset to be awarded rather than a person to be welcomed.
The women in these arrangements deserve equal concern. Surrogacy runs almost entirely on economic inequality. Generally, women who are employed as commercial surrogates are not well off. They tend to have significant financial need and a choice made under that kind of pressure is not truly a free choice. The European Parliament has called surrogacy an exploitation of the female body — strong language, but worth taking seriously.
A Pastoral Word
If you are reading this and you know the grief of infertility, please hear this as it is intended — with genuine sympathy, not judgment. The longing for a child is a real and deep human ache, and the Church should be a place where that grief is held with care.
But the Church, as our mother,[2] also has a responsibility to speak clearly about the dignity of human life — all human life, including the lives of children who cannot yet speak for themselves, and the lives of women who deserve better than a marketplace that sees their bodies as a resource. That is not a political position. It is a pastoral one.
Surrogacy asks us to accept a very different picture of motherhood — one influenced by the principles of trade rather than divine intentions, by the market rather than by mystery. That is a vision Christians have good reason to resist, not out of coldness toward those who grieve infertility, but out of a deep conviction that both women and children are worth far more than any market can say.
And here is something worth contemplating on Mother’s Day: when God chose to become a human being, he did not flash to earth like lightning. He came through a woman and was born into a family. The Incarnation tells us that human nature matters, that flesh matters, that the way we come into the world matters. We cannot treat any of that as raw material for commercial arrangements without losing something we cannot afford to lose. The Son of God took on our flesh — and in doing so, he elevated human nature itself. He sanctified the body and He sanctified birth. That bond is not incidental to the story of our salvation. It is woven into it.
[1] When we call Mary the Mother of God, the claim is not being made that she herself is somehow the origin of God’s eternal Son. In fact, that title is not so much a statement about her to begin with. It is a confession of the true humanity of the child she gave birth to: Jesus.
The Lutheran Confessions see this title Christologically: “Therefore, we believe, teach, and confess that Mary did not conceive and give birth to a child who was merely, purely, simply human, but she gave birth to the true Son of God. Therefore, she is rightly called and truly is the Mother of God.” Formula of Concord, Epitome VIII.7, in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 510.
[2] “But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” (Galatians 4:26)
God “has a unique community in the world [the Church], which is the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God….”
Martin Luther, “Large Catechism,” II.42, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 436.
© 2026, Scott Stiegemeyer. All rights reserved.
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