Baby Gammy

Even the Vatican has weighed in on the tragic story of a baby with Down Syndrome who was born to a surrogate mother but was abandoned by his parents who took the child's healthy twin, but left him behind.

The Daily Mail is reporting on the case of baby Gammy and his twin sister who were born in December via a surrogate mother to an Australian couple named David and Wendy Farnell.

The Farnells, who currently live in Bunbury, West Australia, met through a mail-order bride service in 2003 after Farnell was released from prison where he was serving time for sexually molesting three girls under the age of 13. The couple knew each other for eight months before they were married in Jianjiang, China in October of 2004.

Last year, the Farnells hired a surrogate mother from Thailand, Pattaramon Janbua, and paid her $16,000 to carry their child.  Janbua gave birth to twins in December, 2013. One twin, a girl, was born healthy; the other, a boy, had Down Syndrome.

According to Janbua, the couple opted to take the girl home to Australia but left the boy, named Gammy, behind.  Janbua is now raising him as her own. After learning that the boy's father is a convicted sex offender, she now wants her daughter back too.

When news of this heartless action by the parents became public last week, it sparked international outrage. The Farnells quickly tried to put out the firestorm. At first, they denied knowing about Gammy and said they thought they only had daughter. They since changed their story to say Gammy was not expected to live so they took their daughter home to escape the imminent collapse of the Thai government.

No one is buying it, including the Western Australia Department of Child Protection and Family Support who is now investigating the case.

"The apparent callousness of the parents taking Gammy's twin sister but not him, the possibility that the commissioning father is a convicted sex offender – the situation is absurdly awful," writes Ben Conroy for the Iona Institute, an organization that promotes marriage and religion.

"It's naive to the point of irresponsibility for us to be surprised when this [surrogacy] leads to tragedy – but even when it doesn't, even when everything seems hunky-dory, in legalizing surrogacy we will still have embraced and endorsed a worldview in which motherhood can and should be split, and one in which children can and should be brought into existence through artificial means to meet the needs of adults."

The Vatican agrees that this attitude, which turns children into commodities, can only lead to disasters such as the one being faced today by six month-old Gammy.

"We should not be surprised that if parents have ordered a baby renting a woman's womb they will reject a child that is not healthy and perfect," said a strongly worded commentary about the case which appeared in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"If a child becomes a product to buy, it is obvious that as with any acquisition it must be to the purchaser’s liking. People have no cause to be 'indignant' that the couple refused a child that was 'imperfect'. In realty there is little to be indignant about - if you accept the logic of a child as a product this is the obvious consequence."

Even though surrogacy is sometimes hailed as the only way childless couples can conceive, these and other serious issues surrounding the process should tell us that surrogacy is simply a step too far.

"  . . . (N)ot every need that can be met should," he writes, "and when doing so would require us to split motherhood, rent wombs, and commidify children, we should as a society conclude that leaving this one unmet is a price worth paying."

Click here to read what the children of surrogates have to say about the practice.

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