There are some positive aspects to the Children and Family Relationships Bill. It provides improved guardianship rights for grandparents, who play a heroic role in the care and welfare of children in contemporary society. It begins the process of addressing the injustices, across a range of issues, experienced by fathers separated from their children. It deals with issues of custody and access including enforcement procedures in the context of breakdown. Each of these, and other measures, are important.
However, the Bill requires major amendments. In particular, it should retain the existing preference for motherhood and fatherhood in our laws on adoption, IVF and other forms of assisted human reproduction (AHR). It contains measures which, if enacted, would be enormously damaging to the welfare of children. The Bill:
1. Systematically removes the preference for motherhood and fatherhood in the law on adoption, IVF and AHR.
2. Severs the connection between a child and his/her natural parents when donor eggs and/ or sperm are used.
3. Facilitates the ‘commodification’of children through facilitating a ‘market’ in donor eggs/sperm.
The Bill will be deeply confusing to many people, disinclined to believe the fine rhetoric of Government on any issue these days. There is no holistic view in the Bill of the substantive meaning of ‘family’ or ‘marriage’ – or of ‘motherhood’ or ‘fatherhood’ – as understood by the great majority of people.
Not created equal
There is an intrinsic value in all loving relationships. But they are not all equivalent. The term ‘marriage’ and ‘family’ – ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’ – have very specific meanings in our laws and Constitution, and for excellent reasons. The Bill effectively extends these same terms to almost every set of arrangements among consenting adults. They are not the same, still less so in the extent to which they vindicate the needs and rights of children.
Common sense and experience highlight the importance to the child of being nurtured by his/her natural parents, where this is possible. But the Bill promotes a new mythology, based on a deep misunderstanding of ‘pluralism’. The former chief rabbi of the UK, Dr Jonathan Sacks, critiques these myths which include the notion that: “. . . all sorts of families – dual parent or single parent, stable or fractured, lasting or temporary, male-female or single sex – are the same in their effects upon a child. No future generation will understand how we convinced ourselves that we really believed these things.”
Neither, until very recently, did Fine Gael believe them.
Mothers and Fathers Matter has a common-sense child-focused perspective. It reflects what the Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar, said some years ago, when speaking on the Civil Partnership Bill 2010: “Every child has the right to a mother and father and, as much as is possible, the State should vindicate that right. That is a much more important right than that of two men or women having a family. That is the principle that should underline our laws regarding children and adoption.
“I am also uncomfortable about adoption by single people, regardless of their sexual orientation. I do not believe I as a single man should adopt a child. The child should go to parents, a mother and father, to replace what the child had before.”
The Minister’s analysis was informed and sensible. This Bill, and the upcoming referendum, are coming from a very different place – one based on ideology and political expediency.
Some 90 per cent of couples in Ireland using IVF use their own gametes. Indeed, IVF was originally directed towards couples who could not, for a variety of reasons, conceive. Laws on IVF in countries such as Italy and Germany recognise a child’s right to a mother and a father and only male-female couples, as distinct from single people and same-sex couples, can use IVF. The Bill doesn’t do limits.
It provides for donor-conceived children to find out about their natural mother and father at 18. By then, so much of the bonding and memories of the ‘wonder years’ of childhood are gone.
The Bill is inextricably bound up with the Government’s push for same-sex marriage in the upcoming referendum. There is not a TD or Senator in Leinster House, nor a voter in any part of the country, who does not see through the Government’s attempt to separate these overlapping proposals.
There will be no proper debate, no real engagement on the issues by legislators, drawing on their knowledge and their own life experience. Mothers and Fathers Matter believes that, regardless of one’s position on the Bill, it merits real reflecting upon, not ‘rubber stamping’.
Prof Ray Kinsella is an economist and chair of mothersandfathersmatter.ie