You Cannot Buy a Child. Why Surrogacy Crosses a Line

Symbolic image · Photo: CC BY 2.0

EDITORIAL · OGN OPINION · ⏱ 5 min · As of: 31 July 2026, 00:20

Let us say it right at the start, so no one has to hunt for it: commercial surrogacy, in our view, crosses a line a society should not move. A child must not be an object of purchase. A woman's body is not something to rent. Everything else is a matter of price – and that is exactly the problem.

What this is about

The trigger is a real case. In July 2026 it became known that the German CDU politician Jens Spahn and his husband Daniel Funke had become parents through a surrogate in the United States. In Germany, surrogacy has been banned since the Embryo Protection Act of 1990. The CDU rejects it, and Spahn had backed that line politically. Under pressure from his party he stepped down as leader of the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag – a resignation that even triggered a cabinet reshuffle.

What interests us here is not the private life of two men, and certainly not their right to want a family. What interests us is the practice behind the headline – one that reaches far beyond this single case.

What it means for the woman

A surrogate carries a child for nine months. She shares with it her bloodstream, her sleep, her fear and her hope – and, by contract, hands it over after birth. In the countries where this is allowed, it is almost never the wealthy who offer this service. It is women who need money. You can celebrate that as free choice. You can also call it by its name: a body is made available for payment, in one of the most vulnerable experiences a human being can have. Where need meets demand, there is no fair trade, only an imbalance of power.

What it means for the child

And the child? It comes into the world as the result of a contract. Before it is born, it is already settled who it belongs to, who pays and who gives up. We know little about what it later does to a person to learn that the woman who carried them was paid to let them go. But we should not push that question away just because the pictures of happy parents are so beautiful.

The price almost no one names

One thing is talked about strikingly rarely: the money. A surrogacy in the United States, according to consistent reporting, quickly runs into six figures. Which spells out what many do not want to hear: at the end there is an invoice, and on that invoice, quite soberly, stands a child. A society that can turn everything into a commodity should at least pause here.

The double standard in the Spahn case

The Spahn case is explosive partly because someone made private use of what he had rejected in public. That is the real reason for his resignation – not whom he loves, but the contradiction between word and deed. Those who hold public office must be measured against what they ask of others.

What is held against us

People counter us: what about couples who cannot have children? Men who want a family? A woman's right to decide over her own body? These questions are serious, and we take them seriously. The wish for a child is one of the deepest human beings know. But a deep wish does not create a right to fulfil it on the back of another woman and with the life of a child. Compassion for those who want must not blind us to the woman who carries and the child that is carried.

Our position

Germany decided 35 years ago not to cross this line. We do not consider that decision old-fashioned but far-sighted. Altruistic forms, genuine hardship cases, a sensible reform – all of that can and should be debated. But commercial surrogacy, the business of pregnancy and child, should not be legalised but limited. Not everything that is possible is also right. Some limits protect the weakest – here the woman who carries, and the child that was never asked.

This is the opinion of the editors. It does not have to be yours. Disagree with us – in the comments or under „Your Voice“. That is exactly what it is there for.

Editorial opinion. Facts checked (as of 31 July 2026) against reporting on the German Embryo Protection Act and on the Jens Spahn surrogacy affair. Symbolic image · Photo: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. We show no photos of the people involved.