Sir, – Breda O'Brien's claim that the Children and Family Relationships Bill 2015 is being pushed through by the Government fails to take account of the lengthy gestation period (no pun intended) that the legislation has had before being debated by the Houses of the Oireachtas ("Democratic disaster as Government pushes through family Bill", Opinion and Analysis, February 28th) . I know this because I was one of the legal experts invited to Leinster House almost a year ago, on April 9th, 2014, to engage in pre-legislative scrutiny of the general scheme of the Bill with the members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality. The advice given by myself and the other medical and legal experts that day during a lengthy consultation helped to identify problems and recommend changes to the legislation to prevent unforeseen consequences for children.
The version of the Bill that the Oireachtas hopes to pass within weeks can most likely be passed in that time because it is the final, legally watertight version of the Bill that has been modified to reflect the child-centred changes recommended by the experts a year ago. The Bill also adheres to best practice worldwide in the context of donor-assisted human reproduction and certainly cannot be seen as a haphazard attempt at legislating for families.
Ms O’Brien states that the Government does not care whether one is raised by one’s own biological parents or “two men or two women who may or may not be related to you”. Adopted children nationwide are being raised by men and women unrelated to them, so Ms O’Brien’s preference for biological parents and her statement is disrespectful to all adoptive parents. Further, whether a child is raised by two men or two women who are related or unrelated to the child, an ever-increasing body of evidence shows that same-sex parenting is not detrimental to child welfare.
Ms O’Brien’s assertion that “the person who gives you half your identity is apparently not your parent just because the Government says so” is simply untrue and unfair because the reason a donor is not treated as the parent of a child conceived via their donated egg or sperm is precisely because the donor intends to donate her or his genetic material to enable a loving, committed couple who would not otherwise be able to have a family to conceive a child. Indeed, to donate is to give something away for a worthy or charitable cause.
Ms O’Brien states that “in the case of egg-and-sperm donation, two mothers can be registered as the only legal parents, effectively eradicating the concept of genetic parent”. This is untrue. Where a lesbian couple conceives a child via insemination of donor sperm, the child will have a genetic link to whichever member of the couple is inseminated with the sperm and ultimately gives birth to it, so there is no eradication of the concept of genetic parentage because the birth mother will always be the mother. Further, it is not uncommon for a lesbian couple to use the egg of the woman who will not be carrying the child so that, in a sense they can both be genetically related to the child.
The introduction of the Children and Family Relationships Bill 2015 will be no democratic disaster; it will be the result of painstaking work by our legislators and their advisers that has been ongoing since Alan Shatter first introduced the general scheme of the Bill in January 2014. – Yours, etc,
Dr BRIAN TOBIN,
Lecturer in Law,
School of Law,
NUI Galway.