What do Christians think of surrogate mothers?
Using a surrogate mother to bear children for a childless couple is as old as Abraham and Sarah in Genesis chapter 16. Sarah could not bear children, so she gave her servant, Hagar, to Abraham so she could have his children. This was a common practice at the time, since a childless woman was shamed by her friends and family. This story is the closest the Bible comes to what we call “traditional surrogacy” today, where the mother is impregnated with the sperm of a man—often one whose wife is incapable of producing eggs—usually by means of artificial insemination. Also practiced today is “gestational surrogacy” which involves transplantation of an already conceived embryo containing the sperm and egg from a couple. In this case, her role is simply that of a carrier, which was not the case with Hagar. We learn from Hagar’s story that using a surrogate parent has the possibility to cause pain, heartache, and confusion. One problem that arose with Hagar is that she did not want to give her
