A preschool teacher at a private Catholic school in New Jersey was recently placed on leave for her role as a gestational surrogate for a couple struggling to conceive.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” explains Jadira Bonilla, now 25 weeks pregnant. She had carried another child while working at a different Catholic school without issue, but says she was met with suspicion and judgment when she told her principal at St. Mary School in Vineland about her role as a surrogate. “The very first words that came out of his mouth were, ‘You’re renting your uterus?’” she recalls.
Now, she’s on leave while the school investigates whether surrogacy is a fireable offense. “I’m not committing a crime,” says Bonilla. "And I’m being punished as if I was, it’s hurtful.
A Teacher’s Choice
Bonilla says she was inspired into surrogacy after reading an article about a couple struggling with infertility. She got in touch with a local surrogacy agency, and a few years later she delivered a baby boy for another couple.
Now pregnant with that couple’s second child, Bonilla finds herself suspended for a “possible violation” of her contract.
According to school principal Steven P. Hogan, Bonilla is a “valued teacher” who “we hope will one day again teach in our school with the full understanding and acknowledgment of our faith which guides our educational principles.”
Nevertheless, he says that offering her uterus to a struggling couple could be in direct violation of Catholic doctrine on in vitro fertilization.
Bonilla, however, sees no moral conflict. "In my heart, I don’t see it any different than someone who needs a pacemaker or a prosthetic leg,” she stated. “It’s a form of science, so I don’t see the harm behind it.”
For Bonilla, acting as a surrogate is the ultimate fulfillment of the Catholic principles she holds dearest – compassion, empathy, caring for others.
The Catholic Church doesn’t exactly see things that way.
The Catholic View on Surrogacy
Catholic doctrine does not approve of surrogacy.
In 2024, Pope Francis decried the practice as “deplorable”, describing it as “a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
Francis also called for a global ban on the practice, which he had previously called “uterus for rent” – a derision often used by surrogacy opponents. “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract,” the pontiff stated. “Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally.”
Doctrine vs. Duty
Despite the school’s claim of contract violation, Bonilla argues surrogacy is not explicitly prohibited in the school’s handbook. She says she repeatedly asked for written evidence that her actions violated her contract, but neither the school nor the local diocese could provide it.
If she is fired, Bonilla fears the message it sends to countless families turning to IVF and surrogacy for help starting a family. “If they’re going to penalize me, then they’re going to have to penalize every female employee that has done IVF to conceive their own children, because it’s the same thing. They go hand in hand,” she insists.
Bonilla’s case highlights a growing tension between personal conviction and religious doctrine, between compassion for those struggling with infertility and the Catholic Church’s strict moral stance against IVF.
Should teachers in private, faith-based schools be held to the same standards of doctrine as clergy, or do they deserve the freedom to make personal medical choices without fear of losing their livelihood?
Is the school justified in defending Catholic principles, or is this an overreach into a woman’s private life?
24 comments
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Walter Abington
Karma runs over dogma. Dogma is always a matter of personal interpretation and usually wrong. Karma is what it is.
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Martin Thomas Wozniak
How can conceiving your own child and conceiving a a child with another womans egg that will be raised by the other woman, be considered the same thing ? Right or wrong, is that fallacy the best argument you can come up with ? I am certain that there are many other non-catholic women that do this. If Catholicism is your chosen religion, perhaps you should follow their teachings.
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Samantha Walker
The fact that a person is fired for an act of service to others is outrageous. Yes, people do pay for surrogacy. The amounts vary- some only pay a small stipend during the pregnancy, plus some of the cost of living and all medical needs. Others pay a massive amount. However, this is not baby trading or having babies to sell them- this is a husband and wife wanting to have a child of their own and have medical issues preventing them. Her act of service is an act of love. If there is a stance from the Catholic Church on this within doctrine- it should not be an all encompassing and sweeping discount of this gift. Then it would have to make statements on organ donation and other forms of medical life giving. Without wise council and discovering the situation I think it wrong to make something 100% wrong all the time. It is dangerous as well.
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Merle A Clark
How much money is involved ?
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Ari Joseph Bertine
I have never been Catholic or known a devout Catholic well enough to ask nosy religious questions, so I honestly don't know if they use the same Bible as the rest of Christianity. But the King James version doesn't have anything in it against surrogacy. Can't imagine why it would. Seems like a compassionate thing to do for people.
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Roy S. Thorpe
The old stone casters will tell everyone how to live! And they have plenty of sins! The doctrine of LOVE should always prevail!
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Mary P
I don't know how any faith could find fault with this. Surrogacy is ultimately a most kind and selfless act. There are many ways for infertile couples to conceive, but this is the only way a biological child of a couple can be born when the biological mother has issues carrying a child to viability (which is real). A church that has such rigid rules and refuses to see the goodness in this act is a church that will continue to lose followers.
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Douglas Robert Spindler
Why is the Catholic church complaining about this when they don't have an issue with women who forced by priests/church members to become a surrogate after being rapped.
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Matthew Mastrogiovanni
The Patriarchy is about controlling women, not about restraining men.
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Merle A Clark
Please read your Bible
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Matthew Mastrogiovanni
I've read it many times. What's your point?
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James Riggle-Johnson
If her contract specifically forbids being a surrogate, then the school might have grounds. But I’d be shocked if such a clause exists — and if it doesn’t, then putting her on leave is just the Church flexing its authority where it doesn’t belong. I hope she sues.
Regarding the Church’s stance, helping another couple experience the joy of having a child should be viewed as a blessing, not condemned. Science has provided people who otherwise couldn’t have children with a chance to become loving parents. And if one believes that God guides our lives, then wouldn’t that same God have led scientists to discoveries like IVF? It's interesting how they don’t complain about science when it extends someone’s life.
Times change, and humanity changes with it. The Catholic Church should, too. Calling surrogacy “renting a uterus,” as one Pope once did, and claiming it demeans women, is an insult to women everywhere. Did God whisper that to him, or was it just another case of self-appointed moral superiority? Once again, religion is reaching past its bounds.
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Patricia Ann Gross
A lot of Catholic organizations will require people in positions of power (executives, especially, but teachers wouldn't surprse me) are required to sign an oath to abide by the doctrine of the church, so if it isn't covered in her contract, it probably can be argued on the basis of church doctrine.
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Joseph Grieco
You may be surprised at the number of limitations the Church puts on lay employees at their facilities. This isn't like the 50s and 60s when there were enough Sisters and Brothers of the various religious orders to provide the faculty of their schools. The High School I attended started out as a co-institutional academy (separate boys and girls school in the same facility with limited co-ed classes in upper division language and other courses), predominantly taught by the Sisters of Mercy and the Brothers of the Holy Cross, with maybe 10% Lay teachers. At the beginning of my junior year, we went from being co-institutional to co-ed. At the end of that year, the Brothers of the Holy Cross were withdrawn and the Diocese was forced to hire Lay faculty to replace them. All that was over 50 years ago. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a member of a religious order as a teacher in a Catholic school. Why? Because folks aren't taking vocational vows like they used to. In an effort to exert some level of control, the contracts these teachers agree to contain some clauses that would be laughed out of a public school setting. Especially what are considered "Morals Clauses", such as single women being surrogates for couples who cannot carry a baby to term. This kind of thing also prevents Freemasons from holding teaching positions in them, too! Knights of Columbus or Elks? OK. Masons or Oddfellows? Nope.
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Matthew Mastrogiovanni
One of the earliest lessons, that I remember my mother teaching was, "Mind your own business", A woman can get pregnant, and give the child up for adoption to an agency, but not to a specific couple? How is the Catholic church not declared a hate group?
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Bishop William Dusenberry, DD
A ULC saint, is quoted as having said, “Any female who remains a Catholic, after she reaches the so-called “age of reason” (when she learns that her church denies her the right to be a priest, bishop, cardinal, or pope — or an abortion, after she, while still a pre-teen, to obtain an abortion, after she was raped by her daddy) is a self-loathing female.
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Rev. BH
Well said, up to the "self-loathing" part. Maybe "indoctrinated" would be a kinder word.
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ServantOfJudgement
And so it's true when an atheist rapes his daughter she is a self loathing female to remain an atheist. Better said, fully indoctrinated into the void of self worship and nothingness.
When men design their own moral compass, cutting babies from the womb becomes ethical and good. Men who design their own moral compass are fully prepared and willing to bathe in the horrors of humanity in clear conscience.
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Patricia Ann Gross
SOJ,
People (men included) seldom say that abortion is "ethical" or "good." It is a choice, and some choices have no up-side. For example, if you were diagnosed with testicular cancer and had to make the choice to lose your ability to procreate by removing them or dying a slow and painful death, what would you choose? What is the up-side? Can you honestly state that everyone you know would make the same choice? Same question for any woman desparate to have her own child who is facing a life-threatening condition that requires a hystorectomy. Better question, I knew a man who once worked for me telling me that his father had prostate cancer and had to have it removed which would make him impotent for the rest of his life. This man told me he would rather die than not be able to have sex again (this was obviously before the ED treatments were developed). The man's father chose to live and have his prostate removed, but the son would have made a different choice.
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Tom Herman
Always amazing how some people make proclamations with life or death when the choice does not affect them. To say such, then be faced with the reality are two very different things.
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Rev. BH
Intrusion and control is becoming the norm. Nobody's business is everybody's business.
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Mike
What a shameful attitude. Life should be celebrated, especially new human life.
I do have one caveat, though. It is about fertility clinics. When I was a struggling med student, I made some sperm "donations" to a fertility clinic in Chicago, IL. I put the word in quotes because I got paid for them at 60 bucks a whack (pun intended). I gave the gift of life to two childless parents that I know of. They were both boys and are now beautiful men. One got in touch with me through Ancestry.com, and my daughter Ami found the other one when she tested her and her son's (my grandson Max) DNA via 23andMe. This was in 2019, over 30 years after the donations. I haven't met either one in person yet but I plan on doing that soon.
Very recently, I discovered that most fertility clinics actually take a part of your sperm sample and deep freeze it. I have no problem with that except I want to be notified when I become a father again. In some instances, they also use your swimmers to impregnate donated eggs which end up in the freezer, too. That is my beef and where I concur with the Vatican. In other words, my own children are doing a Walt Disney against my will! For all I know, I may end up with more descendants than Genghis Khan.
There are two happy coincidences to this story. The first is that my real name is "Norbert" and one of my sons has the same name. Coincidence or tribute? It's a rare name so I'm going with tribute.
The second is that Norbert and Ian (my other invitro son) grew up in a near-north suburb of Chicago and were best friends starting in Kindergarten! I tear up every time I talk about it.
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Rick Saunders
For the couple, who desperately desire to expand their family with love, Ms. Bonilla most likely is "Saint-like". While she shares her compassion and love for life. Emotionally, this solemn act is a blessing. The Catholic Church, however, is an old "organization" which has changed slightly through the years, but being mired in dogma restricts its change. I pray that Pope Leo will lead to some positive change, I'd eat pizza with him.
No good deed goes unpunished.