Congress Might Consider a Ban on Surrogate Parenting, Gore Says

The Vatican’s sweeping indictment of sophisticated birth technologies and the Baby M custody battle highlight the need for laws to regulate new fertility methods, experts and theologians said Sunday.

But they said the Vatican document, which asks governments to outlaw sperm and embryo banks and surrogate motherhood and denounces many other scientific procedures, goes beyond what would be desirable or possible in the United States.

“The odds are very low” that Congress would ban in vitro fertilization, sperm banking, surrogate motherhood and other techniques condemned by the Vatican, said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), vice chairman of the congressional Biomedical Ethics Board, who appeared on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

But Gore said Congress might consider a ban on surrogate parenting and, failing that, a grace period in which surrogate mothers could change their minds and keep the child.

Father Richard A. McCormick, a Christian ethics professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the Vatican document fails to “see a sensitivity” to what is required for a law to “pass through what I call the filter of feasibility . . . . Is it enforceable? Is there a sufficient consensus to support the law?”

Bishop James W. Malone, past president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, who appeared with Gore and McCormick, said the Vatican is “reading the signs of the times,” but he added that among Catholics “selective acceptance . . . has become more apparent in recent times.”

Susan M. Wolf, a medical ethicist who appeared on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” said: “The Baby M case cries out for legislation. We don’t want multiple repeats of that.” She said there is a need for “quality control” and “proper precautions” in cases of artificial insemination by a donor.