One of the country’s leading children’s rights advocates has said that children conceived through donor sperm or 
eggs should have the right to access information about their biological parents.
Speaking to the Irish Times about the need for regulating the fertility industry, Geoffrey Shannon (pictured), the Government’s special rapporteur on child protection said that use of anonymous donor sperm or eggs in IVF clinics meant that hundreds of children may never be able to trace their genetic parents or have access to important genetic information.
At present, the fertility industry is largely unregulated. The Government-appointed Commission for Assisted Human Reproduction (CAHR) recommended in 2005 a series of recommendations, among which was the right of donor-conceived children to be able to access information about their biological parents.
Mr Shannon also addressed the issue of surrogacy, saying that the lack of any regulation means children being born by surrogacy are likely to continue to end up stateless or unable to obtain passports.
“There are huge vulnerabilities in not knowing your status in a country. Unless we set this out clearly, then it simply can’t be in the best interests of any child and is a breach of virtually every international instrument that I know,” Mr Shannon said.
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.
At present, Irish law states that the birth mother is the legal parent of a child conceived through surrogacy. This is the case even if the woman contracting the arrangement with the surrogate mother has donated the egg, and is the biological mother.
Mr Shannon’s remarks come after it emerged last week that the Government was considering surrogacy legislation in the wake of a Circut Court ruling that the parents of a child conceived by surrogacy were not recognised as the legal parents of the child.
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.
Speaking about the Circut Court case which denied the legal parentage to a couple where their child had been conceived through surrogacy, Mr Gilmore said that the Government was in the middle of looking at legislation on surrogacy.
However he said 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.
In 2005, the CAHR recommended that in surrogacy arrangements, the commissioning parents be deemed to be the legal parents. However, one of the members of the commission, Christine O’Rourke, expressed dissent about this recommendation, saying that “the risks of exploitation and commodifcation” accompanying surrogacy outweighed its benefits.
Ms O’Rourke, Advisory Counsel to the Attorney General at the time, expressing her dissent in the CAHR’s report, recommended instead that surrogacy be prohibited.
She said that there was “a broad cultural consensus that a woman who has just given birth may be uniquely vulnerable and the removal of her baby against her will is repugnant, unless she poses a threat of immediate harm to the child”.
She added: “This social norm is reflected in Article 10(2) of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which obliges Contracting States to accord special protection to women who have just given birth.”
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.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that Irish IVF clinics plan to offer genetic screening of embryos next year which would give parents the chance to stop children being born with inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
The move is likely to spark controversy among ethical campaigners who fear it could eventually lead to embryos being screened for minor deficiencies or even sex selection.
At least three clinics, two in Dublin and one in Cork, are planning to obtain permission from the Irish Medicines Board to begin offering the procedure from 2012 onwards.
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which involves testing embryos for conditions such as Huntington’s disease, haemophilia and cystic fibrosis, is increasingly being used across Europe.
It involves taking a single cell from a three-day-old embryo and testing it for disease, while allowing the remaining cells to grow before being placed for implantation in the womb.
The clinics in the Republic plan to send these cell samples to specialist facilities in Britain for testing.
While there are no laws which govern assisted human reproduction in Ireland, there is an EU directive over the use and storage of tissue used in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other procedures.
The Irish Medicines Board is obliged to approve any procedures in line with this.