Pope Francis recently made the news for his call for a global ban on “surrogate motherhood,” or the process of women selling their womb and carrying a baby for someone else.

During a Jan. 8 speech to ambassadors, Pope Francis said, “The path to peace calls for respect for life, for every human life, starting with the life of the unborn child in the mother’s womb, which cannot be suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking.”

“In this regard, I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs,” the pope said, according to the Vatican translation. “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract. Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally.”

“At every moment of its existence, human life must be preserved and defended; yet I note with regret, especially in the West, the continued spread of a culture of death, which in the name of a false compassion discards children, the elderly and the sick,” the leader of the Catholic Church said.

The condemnation from Pope Francis is part of a larger resistance to the practice, including from former surrogates and children conceived through surrogacy. It comes while Michigan legislators consider relaxing restrictions on surrogacy. The state prohibits compensation for surrogacy.

Surrogacy, paid or not, is a moral issue that must be addressed with a ban.

Surrogacy has raised concerns due to the potential for exploitation, as women are paid either to have their egg artificially fertilized by the payer’s seed or to carry an embryo conceived by another couple. In either case, the woman is renting out her body to be used by someone else. Even unpaid surrogacy is problematic because it separates the natural way of creating children from pregnancy.

There are other moral concerns raised as well, such as when a baby is diagnosed with a condition and the couple wants an abortion, or when the pregnancy could cause health problems for the woman carrying the child. Some surrogacy “contracts” include clauses that allow the paying couples to force the woman to abort some babies if there are twins or triples, for example, as reported by The Atlantic.

Put another way, surrogacy enables eugenics. It can start with a couple selecting the traits they want in a baby and aborting unwanted multiples.

When a baby is diagnosed with medical conditions, the couple might try to coerce and bribe the surrogate mother to abort the baby, as happened with Crystal Kelley. In that famous case, a couple even went so far as to hire an attorney to force Kelley, thankfully without success, to abort the baby she was carrying.

Rita Kron, with Surrogacy International, also tried to guilt Kelley into aborting the baby. Kron helped facilitate the arrangement through her company.

“She painted a picture of a life of a person who had a child with special needs,” Kelley related to CNN about Kron’s comments. “She told me how it would be painful, it would be taxing, it would be strenuous and stressful. She told me it would financially drain me, that my children would suffer because of it.”

A civilized society does not treat babies as commodities and does not allow companies to profit from the sale of children. Infertility struggles are real, and when a married husband and wife want to have kids but cannot, it is tragic. But the solution cannot be another tragedy: to treat children as products.