Sir, – I refer to your letter “Bill does not address the known dangers and exploitative practices of commercial surrogacy arrangements” (Letters, May 29th). The Bill in question is the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill, 2022. It sets out a legal framework for the licensing and oversight of clinics providing reproductive and fertility treatments in Ireland; it provides a regulatory framework for donor-assisted human reproduction and establishes a regulatory framework for domestic and international surrogacy ensuring the rights and protections for surrogates, children and intending parents.
The framework establishes a pre-conception authorisation process for anyone, single or couples, who plans to grow their families via surrogacy. It sets out very clear conditions for that authorisation to be granted, a key one being that the surrogacy cannot have a commercial element.
Normal people chose surrogacy, both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. In the case of opposite-sex couples by the time they make the decision for surrogacy as a means of having their family, they, usually the woman, have endured and survived serious health issues rendering them unable to carry their own baby. The surrogate who carries their baby is a very respected and valued person in their lives. Surrogacy is a means of trying to fulfil their inherent human desire to have a baby. Similarly with same-sex couples, their journey to grow their families is fraught with all of the same risks of miscarriage, loss and disappointment.
The Government has made a policy decision, enshrined in the legislation, to ban a commercial element in any permissible surrogacies for fear of the risk of exploitation. However, it is a false equivalence to say that every surrogacy with a commercial element is by definition exploitative. Ethical surrogacies have and do take place where a woman is financially compensated. Sweeping statements about surrogacies with a commercial element stigmatise the children born of those arrangements, demonise their intending parents and disrespect the surrogates by presuming that the women who carried those babies lacked capacity and agency.
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Everyone advocating for surrogacy legislation recognises the possibility of exploitation. The best way to ensure that exploitation does not occur, and that no Irish-based family unwittingly engages in a surrogacy pregnancy where a surrogate is coerced or exploited, is to legislate for all of their protections. This is provided for in the Irish legislation: the surrogate must have counselling, independent legal advice, must give her full and free consent to the intending parents applying to become the parents of that child and she does so after the birth of the baby.
The Irish process set out in the legislation implements the internationally recognised Verona Principles, which enshrine an ethical and human rights-based framework for surrogacy.
We will be the first to legislate implementing these principles, and only weeks ago Denmark announced its intention to do likewise. Its completion in the Dáil is very welcome and a whole community in our country is anxiously awaiting its passage through the Seanad and on to the President for signature. – Yours, etc,
Senator MARY SEERY KEARNEY,
(Mother via surrogacy),
Fine Gael,
Leinster House,
Dublin 2.
Sir, – Surrogacy, altruistic or commercial, is exploitative of women and children. A rather one-sided political process has led to its inclusion in the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill 2022.
There is very real health risk involved in pregnancy and childbirth. In every maternity ward in the country, women continue to suffer unforeseen complications from their pregnancies, sometimes leading to very serious health outcomes, some of which are irreparable. I write as a healthy woman who almost died in childbirth, so I can speak first-hand about the horror of a threat to a woman’s life resulting from childbirth complications and the paralysing terror that is involved. These are extraordinary risks that women necessarily take to birth their own babies.
Do we really want to live in a world where women are asked to take these same risks for anyone other than their own children?
There is no doubt that the inability to bear children can cause tremendous heartbreak and it is only right that we would want to do what we can to help people in this situation, but such care should never be exploitative of others, nor should it ever risk the health and life of a woman. – Yours, etc,
ANNE WEADICK,
Galway.