A seminar to promote surrogacy has been held in Dublin, organised by the Family Lawyers Association.
The meeting discussed some of the legal difficulties with surrogacy which involves women agreeing to have children on behalf of third parties, a practice condemned by some critics as exploitative and for deliberately separating a child from its birth mother.
One of the main organisers behind the meeting, solicitor Marion Campbell claims that she has received more than 20 queries in relation to surrogate births have been made to solicitor in the past six months, according to a report in today’s Irish Times.
Ms Campbell criticised the fact that under Irish law at present the name of the surrogate mother – the birth mother – still appears on the birth cert
A meeting was also held on Tuesday night for prospective parents attracted about 50 people, the majority of whom were heterosexual couples, but including some gay people, she said.
Ms Campbell said that going through the surrogacy process was both legally challenging and expensive. Most of those looking at surrogacy were “considering surrogate options either here, in Ukraine, India or the US,” she said.
“Here it would usually be a sister or close relative. But the problem is the birth mother’s name goes on the birth certificate. If the surrogate is married, her husband is legally the father.
“You would then have to go down the road of getting the birth certificate amended. As family lawyers we would all have had cases where the husband was not the biological father, and you would have DNA tests and amended the birth certificate. But we never had a case where a birth mother was changed to reflect the true situation.”
Where a child was born to a surrogate in another jurisdiction there were problems getting the child back into the country, and problems with its passport, she added. She said it was very difficult and hugely expensive to sort all this out.
“An approach would have to be made to the High Court, and there would probably be an appeal to the Supreme Court. The Attorney General would have to be joined, along with the registrar of births, marriages and deaths.
“The only people who could afford it would be those who were legally aided, or with huge resources.
A paper published by The Iona Institute last year called Making Babies [LINK] by Breda O’Brien, highlights a number of the problems with surrogacy.
It says surrogacy “should be made illegal” because it is “inherently exploitative and unfair to the child”.
Dr Gerard Byrne, consultant child psychiatrist, told the seminar there was no research on the effects of surrogacy on the child.
However, he claimed research showed that contracting parents in surrogacies showed greater warmth and greater enjoyment of parenthood than did natural-conception parents.
The fathers were more satisfied with their parental roles, and it seemed that surrogacy resulted in a more positive experience of parenting than conception by natural methods.
A possible explanation was that such children were extremely wanted children, who were being raised by highly committed and loving parents, he said.