Increasing pressure
is being brought on the Government to recognise surrogacy arrangements
contracted overseas. In a recent court case, the parents of a child conceived by
surrogacy were not recognised as the legal parents of the child by the Circuit
Court.

Both the Leader of
the Opposition, Michéal Martin and Foreign Affairs Minister Eamon Gilmore have
weighed in on the issue.

Mr Martin has said
that the State is entitled to issue a passport on the basis of DNA evidence of
the paternity of the father.

However, Mr Gilmore
has said that only a High Court order could solve the problem, and that he
cannot exercise discretion. He said the Government would co-operate with any
appeal to the High Court by the couple.

He added that the
Government was in the middle of looking at legislation on surrogacy, but that
any such proposal would “take time”. He said the Government was at “an advanced
stage” in preparing guidelines as to how surrogacy issues should be
handled.

Surrogacy involves
gestating the baby in another woman’s womb. A number of Irish couples have used
foreign surrogacy mothers, usually from India, Ukraine and America.

Presently, in such
situations, the law recognises the birth mother as the mother for legal
purposes. This is the case even if the woman contracting the arrangement with
the surrogate mother has donated the egg, and is the biological
mother.

The parents needed to
establish parental rights in order to give consent for their child to have an
eye operation. The Department of Foreign Affairs has refused to issue the child
with a passport.

The
Government-appointed Commission for Assisted Human Reproduction recommended in
2005 that in surrogacy arrangements, the commissioning parents be deemed to be
the legal parents.

No action has been
taken by successive Governments since. Commissioning fathers must establish
paternity and apply for guardianship through the Circut
Court.

Austria, Germany and
Italy, among other countries, ban the use of donated eggs because they believe
it is wrong to split motherhood between a biological mother (that is a surrogate
mother), a genetic mother (that is the egg donor), and even a social mother
(that is someone who is neither the surrogate mother nor the genetic mother but
who raises the child).

Austrian law seeks to ensure that medically
assisted procreation takes place similarly to natural procreation, and that the
basic principle of civil law, that it is always clear who the mother is, should
be maintained by avoiding the possibility that two persons could claim to be the
biological mother.

A recent ruling by
the European Court of Human Rights held that Austria, in maintaining this
principle, was not in breach of the European Convention of Human
Rights.