"Despicable," Pope Francis called it recently during his annual address to the world’s ambassadors to the Vatican, urging for a global ban "to prohibit this practice universally." What is this atrocious act, this thing that a year before he'd also called "inhuman and increasingly widespread?" It's surrogacy, or the practice in which someone with a uterus agrees to gestate and deliver a baby on the behalf of other parents.

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For those familiar with Catholic dogma, it's not exactly a bombshell that the head of the church should affirm opposition to this particular reproductive advancement. (The Vatican also nixes in vitro fertilization.) But the harsh words, in which the pontiff warned against turning a fetus into "an object of trafficking," struck like a fresh slap.

“There are people all over the world who have lovingly built families through surrogacy," Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, told USA Today in January, "and may feel the pope has discounted their family and the way they’ve chosen to build it."

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Once a more shadowy process, surrogacy has gained greater visibility in the past several years, thanks to high profile families who've opted for surrogacy, like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka and Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, who in 2020 lost their son Jack in the 20th week of gestation. "Our hearts, and our home, are officially full," Teigen wrote last year after welcoming baby Wren, thanks to their "incredible, loving, compassionate" surrogate.

"We don't consider it unethical to pay firefighters or soldiers. Surrogates are also using their bodies to help others."

There are two types of surrogacy — gestational, in which both the egg and sperm come from donors (who may or may not be the intended parents) or traditional, in which the surrogate's eggs are used. The Journal Fertility and Sterility estimates that "Between 1999 and 2013, there were 30,927 surrogate pregnancies in the United States," a number that has risen significantly in the decade since. A........

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