In the Netherlands recently, a severely disabled child just under 2 years old was euthanized. Euthanasia is legal in that country: Originally, when the law was first passed in 2002, you had to be able to give consent to be euthanized, but since 2024 even those who cannot give consent — such as this child — can legally have the procedure consented to by their guardians and physicians.
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The doctor who did the killing viewed it as “a kind of emancipation of the child.” The grotesquely named Netherlands’ Review Committee on Late-term Abortions and Termination of Life of Neonates and Children aged under 12 concurred with the doctor’s actions.
Pope Leo XIV had something to say on the matter. At Lourdes, that site of holy healing, the pope expressed that “The human person is ‘worthy’ simply by virtue of existing and of being destined for eternity. Our dignity cannot be measured or debated.”
He went on to say, “I know that for some of you, because of particular illnesses and, at times, terrible pain, your horizon may appear dark, uncertain and without hope. But no human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity. On the contrary, it is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral.”
He added: “Dear brothers and sisters who are sick, I want to tell you that you are not a burden. You are the beating heart of our humanity.”
The two worldviews on display here, by Dutch physicians on the one hand and Pope Leo on the other, could not be more incommensurable. It is as if they were living on different planets.
Compassion for the Dutch physicians meant ending a condition of suffering without possibility of improvement. Compassion for Pope Leo meant a recognition of the sacred dignity of an individual human life, a dignity not erased when that life is afflicted. For Pope Leo, causing an individual to lose their life because they are suffering could never be called compassion — rather, it is a mockery of the very meaning of the word.
In our day, the idea of compassion has increasingly been used to justify crossing ethical red lines. The Hippocratic Oath used to instruct physicians to “first, do no harm,” but now doing harm is rationalized as compassionate. Once we cross those red lines, of course, we wind up moving far beyond them.
For example, Canada’s euthanasia law has been expanded, and then expanded, and then expanded even more. At first, one had to be of sound mind, at least age 18 and about to die in order to qualify. Then it was expanded to those who weren’t about to die, but felt life was unbearable. Next year, in 2027, it may be expanded to those who are mentally ill, even though the meaning of consent under mental illness is unclear. And a growing consensus now advocates that medically assisted dying be made available to “mature minors.”
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Moreover, just this year, a new Canadian paper argued for death by vivisection in order to allow for more efficient harvesting of organs to be donated. It is fascinating to see how swiftly every last scruple falls once the first principle, “do no harm,” has been violated.
We see this same dynamic in the push to expand access to surrogacy. Pope Leo has condemned surrogacy, asserting that “By transforming gestation into a negotiable service, this violates the dignity both of the child, who is reduced to a ‘product,’ and of the mother, exploiting her body and the generative process, and distorting the original relational calling of the family.”
As with euthanasia, Pope Leo is indicating that surrogacy presents a similar case of “false compassion.” Just as we might feel sad at the physical affliction of another and think (wrongly) that our compassion dictates we should kill them, in surrogacy we might feel sad at the fact of an individual’s infertility, and think (wrongly) that our compassion dictates we should exploit women in order to sell them a child.
Surrogacy is so ethically fraught an enterprise that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls has stated forthrightly, “The practice of surrogacy is characterized by exploitation and violence against women and children, including girls. It reinforces patriarchal norms by commodifying and objectifying women’s bodies and exposing surrogate mothers and children to serious human rights violations.”
Unlike adoption, surrogacy involves the preplanned selling of a child for money, as well as the preplanned severance of the mother-child bond that is the foundation of our humanity. Surrogacy puts the rights of the purchasers above the rights of the child and the rights of the mother who bore the child. Indeed, the purpose of surrogacy is to erase that mother entirely.
While other states, for example in Europe, have banned the practice entirely, or treated surrogacy exactly like an adoption where the purchasers must be vetted and the birthing mother has the right to change her mind after the birth, the United States has entirely failed its obligations under international human-rights law to safeguard the rights of the child and safeguard the human rights of women in the matter of surrogacy. There is little to no regulation of this violative practice; even sex offenders can buy a child made to order.
It is frankly appalling that the CEO of Grindr and Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., are lobbying to expand access to the baby trafficking that is surrogacy, and to make it impossible for a birthing woman to safeguard her rights. In contrast, the Special Rapporteur urges an abolitionist model, where surrogacy is banned completely as a severe human-rights violation. No one is owed a child as a right.
While empathy and compassion are virtues, they are virtues only within the bounds set by moral reasoning. When those bounds are cast aside, we inevitably find ourselves in very deep, very dark waters we traverse at our individual and collective peril.
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