Answer

Isn't Surrogacy Just Another Form of Adoption?

If you are looking at surrogacy, it is probably because something has already gone wrong. Infertility is a real grief, and the desire behind considering it is a good desire. Nothing here is written at you as though the wanting were the problem.

No, it is not the same as adoption, and the difference is which direction things run. Adoption responds to a separation that has already happened. Surrogacy arranges the separation in advance. The Church discourages surrogacy, while leaving the decision to a husband and wife.

Eternal Truths

The Church discourages surrogate motherhood, and says why in what follows. The General Handbook states plainly that the Church discourages surrogate motherhood, while treating it as a personal matter left to the prayerful consideration of the husband and wife. It also records that children born by surrogacy are not born in the covenant and may be sealed to parents only with First Presidency approval.

The mother who carries a child is not a container. The Family: A Proclamation to the World ties the sacred powers of procreation to a husband and wife, and describes children as entitled to be born within that bond. Gestation is part of how a child comes to a family, not a service performed alongside it.

Adoption starts from a loss that already exists. A child, for reasons nobody chose, has no parents able to raise them, and a family steps in. That is repair. The same outcome designed in advance is a different act, whatever it looks like from outside. The Church’s adoption guidance is written around finding a child who needs a family and having that child sealed to them (Adoption).

What Can Make This Confusing?

Everyone in the room means well, and that is exactly what makes it hard to see. A couple longing for a child, a woman willing to help, every adult consenting. The framing is generous and it leaves out the one participant who cannot consent, whose interests the whole arrangement is built around. And people born through surrogacy do not say one thing. Some are content. Others describe a lasting grief about the woman who carried them, and their accounts sound very like adoptees searching for birth parents.

Questions to Think About

• Whose interests is this arrangement actually organised around?
• What would I want a child of mine to be told about how they came to us?
• Have I let a good desire settle a question I have not really examined?

What You Can Do

If this is a live decision, take it to the Lord and to your bishop before you take it further, and ask specifically about the child rather than only about yourselves. Adoption and fostering are both open, and both start from a loss that already exists. The essay behind this answer walks through the doctrine and the accounts in more detail.

Jesus Christ carries grief He did not cause, including the grief of infertility, and He can lead you to a family without asking a child to pay for it.