Breda O’Brien, teacher, Irish Times columnist and Iona Institute patron, recently debated surrogacy with Deirdre Madden of UCC on RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke programme.

She talked about the recent surrogacy scandals, and emphasised the fact that similar things can and have happened regardless of whether surrogacy is commercial or altruistic. Madden argued that banning surrogacy in Ireland would just lead people to seek it out abroad, but O’Brien said that on the contrary, legalising altruistic surrogacy would normalise the practice and drive up demand for commercial surrogacy elsewhere.

O’Brien also said that pregancy was designed to bond mothers to children, and that attempting to split motherhood would always result in tragic cases, whether it’s a birth mother who doesn’t want to give up her child or parents who abandon a baby with an intellectual disability. In response to Madden’s point that that many of these issues could be resolved through regulation, O’Brien said “you can’t regulate the human heart”.

Listen to the item here.