The Person as Gift, Not Commodity: Surrogacy, Desire, and Human Dignity in the French Presidential Race

In May 2026, former French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced his candidacy for the 2027 presidential election and placed the legalization of surrogacy at the center of his platform. According to reporting by Bryan Lawrence Gonsalves in EWTN News (June 29, 2026), Attal has openly linked the policy proposal to his personal desire to have children with his partner, European Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné, through surrogacy.[^1] The move placed him in direct conflict with President Emmanuel Macron, who has described surrogacy legalization as a 'red line.' With Macron constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term, the succession contest has acquired an unusually sharp bioethical edge.[^1]

What followed illuminated something about the current state of European public reasoning on reproduction. A cross-party coalition of elected officials — including former French justice and health ministers — published a joint op-ed opposing what they called 'making women's bodies available to satisfy the desires of others.' The initiative was led by Aurore Bergé, minister for gender equality and a member of Attal's own party.[^1] The same coalition rejected the framing of surrogacy as a demographic remedy, arguing instead that declining birth rates should be addressed through family support policies and genuine adoption reform.[^1]

Matthieu Le Tourneur, a French jurist affiliated with Juristes pour l'Enfance, told EWTN News that such a public intervention from high-profile, cross-partisan politicians would have been unlikely only a few years earlier — evidence, in his reading, of a shifting sociopolitical climate.[^1] He noted that while some polling suggests a narrow majority of French citizens support legalization in principle, support weakens when same-sex couples are involved, and that overall opinion may be trending away from permissiveness on the question.[^1]

The political story matters. But the deeper question it raises is psychological: what account of the human person, and of human desire, is presupposed by surrogacy arrangements — and what does that account cost?

Desire and its objects

There is a distinction that Catholic anthropology, following Thomas Aquinas, has long maintained between what a person wants and what a person needs in order to flourish. Desire is not self-validating. It is real, often powerful, and sometimes oriented toward genuine goods — but it requires ordering by reason and, in the Catholic account, by grace. When desire is treated as its own justification, the question of whether satisfying it is good collapses into the simpler question of whether satisfying it is possible.

Attal's framing of surrogacy policy as an extension of personal desire is a precise example of that collapse. The proposal does not argue that surrogacy serves the common good in some objective sense; it argues that his desire to have children is legitimate and that the law should not stand in its way. That is a coherent position within a liberal framework that takes preference satisfaction as the primary criterion of policy. It is not a coherent position within any framework that takes seriously the question of whether the means of satisfying a desire can itself be harmful — to the woman gestating the child, to the child, or to the broader culture.

Jacques Maritain's distinction between individuality and personality is useful here. In Maritain's account, individuality refers to the material, particular dimension of a person — what makes one body different from another. Personality refers to the spiritual dimension — what orients a person toward universal goods, including truth, beauty, and love.[^2] A policy regime that treats the reproductive body as a separable service — something that can be contracted for, delivered, and returned — operates entirely at the level of individuality. It treats the gestating woman as a collection of biological capacities rather than as a person whose bodily experience is inseparable from her identity. That is not merely an ethical error. It is an anthropological one.

The child who did not ask to be wanted

The psychological literature on identity formation in children born through third-party reproductive arrangements is still developing, but its direction is consistent. Donor-conceived and surrogacy-born individuals who have begun to speak publicly about their experiences frequently report a specific form of disorientation: the awareness that their existence was preceded by a transaction, that they were, in some meaningful sense, the fulfillment of an adult's desire rather than a gift received. This is not a claim that such children cannot flourish — many do. It is a claim that the narrative of origin matters to identity, and that a narrative structured around commercial or contractual transfer creates a specific kind of psychological work that children should not have to perform.

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in their integrative Catholic anthropology, describe the human person as constitutively relational — not merely social by preference but social by nature, formed in and through relationships that precede conscious choice.[^3] The earliest of those relationships is gestational. The surrogate's body is not a neutral incubator; it is the first relational environment a human being inhabits. When that environment is structured by a contract that anticipates separation, something in the relational foundation of personhood is disturbed. The clinical consequences may not be measurable in infancy, but they do not disappear.

The cross-party French coalition's language about 'making women's bodies available to satisfy the desires of others' is not rhetorical flourish. It names a real dynamic: the surrogate's bodily experience — her physical transformation, her hormonal and emotional relationship with the pregnancy, her potential grief at separation — is instrumentalized in the service of someone else's fulfillment. The feminist tradition has long argued this point. The Catholic tradition arrives at the same conclusion through a different route: not primarily through the lens of women's oppression, though that concern is real, but through the lens of the body's inherent dignity as the locus of personhood.

Selfhood, sacrifice, and the limits of contract

There is a version of the surrogacy argument that appeals not to commerce but to altruism: a woman freely chooses to carry a child for another person, out of love or generosity. This is a more sympathetic framing, and it deserves a more careful response than simple rejection.

The problem is not that generosity is suspect. The problem is that contract and gift are structurally different, and that surrogacy — even in its so-called altruistic forms — cannot fully escape contractual logic. The arrangement requires that the woman's attachment to the child she carries be treated as something to be managed, minimized, or overcome. It requires that she exit the relationship at a predetermined moment, regardless of what she experiences during gestation. It requires that her bodily integrity and her emotional life be subordinated to an agreement made before the pregnancy existed.

This is not a description of gift. It is a description of a particular kind of sacrifice — one that is demanded by another's desire rather than freely chosen in response to genuine need. The distinction matters clinically. Research on moral injury, a concept developed in trauma psychology to describe the harm done when a person acts against deeply held moral convictions, suggests that the experience of surrogates who feel coerced — economically, socially, or emotionally — into arrangements they later regret shares structural features with other forms of moral injury. The body's participation in the transaction does not leave the self untouched.

Adoption and the logic of welcome

The French coalition's insistence that declining birth rates be addressed through adoption reform rather than surrogacy is not merely a policy preference. It reflects a different underlying logic: one in which the child is not produced to satisfy an adult's desire but welcomed in response to an existing need.

Adoption, at its best, begins with the child's situation rather than the adult's wish. The question is not 'how can I have a child?' but 'this child needs a family — can I become one?' That reorientation is not trivial. It is the difference between treating a child as the object of adult desire and treating a child as a person whose welfare is prior to any adult's preferences.

This does not mean adoption is without complications, or that the desire to parent is in itself disordered. The desire to love and raise a child is a genuine human good. The question is whether that desire is pursued in a way that honors the full dignity of everyone involved — including the child who does not yet exist and the woman whose body would be required to bring that child into being.

What European policy cannot afford to ignore

Le Tourneur's observation that the French debate has European regulatory consequences is worth taking seriously.[^1] A France that legalizes surrogacy shifts the center of gravity in a continent already divided on the question. The United Kingdom permits altruistic surrogacy; commercial surrogacy remains illegal across most of the EU. Regulatory divergence creates pressure — for cross-border arrangements, for legal tourism, and eventually for harmonization in whichever direction political momentum favors.

Ratzinger, writing on Europe's spiritual foundations, argued that human dignity and the structure of the family are not peripheral to European identity but constitutive of it — and that their defense requires not merely legal prohibition but the continual formation of a corresponding moral conscience.[^4] That argument applies with particular force to bioethical questions, where the gap between legal permissibility and genuine human flourishing can be wide and slow to close.

The cross-party character of French resistance to Attal's proposal is precisely the kind of moral conscience formation Ratzinger described: not a confessional bloc defending sectarian positions, but a convergence of people from different traditions who share a conviction that the body is not raw material. That convergence is fragile. It requires the kind of sustained intellectual engagement that political cycles rarely support.

For those working in Catholic mental health and formation, the French debate is not background noise. The wellbeing of persons is shaped by the cultural arrangements within which they live. When those arrangements are built on the premise that adult desire is self-justifying, the clinical consequences accumulate quietly — in surrogates who grieve, in children who must construct identities around transactions they did not choose, in adults who discover that fulfilling a desire is not the same as finding what they were actually looking for.

The question France is debating is, finally, a question about what children are. If they are goods to be acquired, policy follows accordingly. If they are persons to be welcomed, the entire logic of surrogacy — its contracts, its separations, its treatment of the gestating body as a service — becomes not merely problematic but incoherent. That is the argument the French opposition has been making across party lines. It is also the argument that a Catholic anthropology of the person, at its most rigorous, has always been making.

The desire to have a child is a genuine human good. The question is whether any means are justified in satisfying it.

References

[^1]: Bryan Lawrence Gonsalves, 'French election politics bring surrogacy back into Europe's spotlight,' EWTN News, June 29, 2026. [^2]: Donald DeMarco, 'The Christian Personalism of Jacques Maritain,' drawing on Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), p. 65. [^3]: Paul Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020), ch. 4 (on the unity of body and soul and the constitutively relational person). [^4]: Joseph Ratzinger, 'Europa, sus fundamentos espirituales,' Seminarios, no. 177 (2005), on human dignity, the family, and the formation of moral conscience as conditions for a genuinely human Europe.