The Wall Street Journal’s recent story on surrogacy exposed U.S.-based baby-sale agencies helping “ultra-wealthy Chinese nationals” sire small armies of offspring around the world. One video-game billionaire, Xu Bo, fathered more than 100 U.S. children. These men want to build business empires with their sons. Catholics and all people of goodwill should be outraged.

As the Journal reports, “a sophisticated international market of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services — even to pick up the newborns from hospitals — has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.”

Some Chinese executives intend to marry their daughters off to influential men. One man “purchased dozens of eggs from models, a finance Ph.D. and a musician, at costs ranging from $6,000 to $7,500 each.”

Surrogacy is illegal in China, but virtually unregulated in America. Birthright citizenship means these children will be U.S. citizens, eligible to vote, hold public office, and even run for president. That fact produces a cascade of misguided incentives and problematic outcomes. But I’m more concerned about the human side of this equation.

Xu Bo, a Chinese national, sued in U.S. court via video to assert his parental rights over children he never met, whose mothers he never met, and whose lives he would like to control remotely from China. These children of the surrogacy industry will be raised neither by their genetic mothers nor their birth mothers. It is hard to imagine that children with more than 100 half-siblings will have authentic relationships with a father who did not even appear in person at the court proceedings that would establish his parental rights.

Some time ago, our culture abandoned the bedrock Christian view of children as vulnerable, precious images of God. Society has now deteriorated to the point that children literally are products manufactured to satisfy adult desires. According to the Journal article, “the owner of one surrogacy agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.”

Did you catch that? The agency “filled an order” for children.

As Catholics, we believe every human child, however conceived, is a precious gift from God. That is why we welcome every child, including children conceived through rape and incest. That doesn’t mean we should not have laws against rape and incest. We must never regret a child conceived through IVF, surrogacy or whatever high-tech, post-human fertility procedures may come next. We still should outlaw the procedures themselves, for our own citizens as well as for foreigners taking advantage of reproductive tourism.

Perhaps you are a child of surrogacy or IVF. Maybe you feel loved and wanted and your parents are wonderful. I’m happy for you. You were lucky. But surely you can agree that a humane legal system ought to protect the unlucky and the vulnerable. Under current U.S. law, it is the people with money who are protected: They get to do anything they want. The children must simply accept whatever the adults choose to give them.

I hope you are troubled by the heartless attitudes of these billionaires. You were lucky enough to have loving parents. But calloused men like these billionaires are hiding behind you and the other smiling babies on IVF clinic brochures.

The Catholic Church elevated the world’s attitude toward the vulnerable. In the world the Church found, children were disposable at the whim of the paterfamilias. Unwanted or “imperfect” children were exposed and left to die. In the world the Church made, people began to see children as precious gifts from God.

We’re backsliding — and not just in communist China, but in the post-Christian West. Our Big Tech innovators are deeply committed to the baby-making industry. Elon Musk is the father of 14 children born using a variety of impersonal techniques. PayPal founder Peter Thiel is an investor in a chain of IVF clinics.

Every child deserves what God inscribed in our nature: a relationship with his or her biological mother and father, married to each other. We know that many children must make do with less. But one kind of tragic failure does not justify even more radical forms of separation of children from their parents.

American abolitionists felt horror when they watched children plucked away from their mothers and sold at auction at Congo Square in New Orleans. Defenders of slavery had their arguments ready: They spoke about “property rights” and “states’ rights.” But they knew, on some level, that what they defended was wrong. Human beings are not property and should not be for sale.

The natural law, inscribed on our hearts, likewise tells us that wombs aren’t motel rooms and shouldn’t be for rent. Babies aren’t commodities that some high-tech DoorDash can deliver to us for cash. Children should not be for sale. Children need relationships with their own mothers and fathers. Adults need to accept limits to their desires, no matter how much money they may have.

Buying and selling people is wrong. We could not make slavery acceptable by regulating the working conditions of the slaves. Likewise, we cannot paste enough regulatory bandages on the infertility industry to make it acceptable to buy and sell babies.

Shut it down. All of it. Including the Chinese billionaires.