The Italian Supreme Court has decided that a couple who used a surrogate mother in Ukraine to have a child should not be allowed to raise the child. The child will be placed for adoption instead. The case shows how strict some European countries are about surrogacy. Ireland should follow suit.
Italy, like France, Germany, Austria and other countries, bans surrogacy entirely whether ‘commercial’ or ‘non-commercial’. They refuse to be forced into changing their laws by the fact that some couples deliberately circumvent national laws by going abroad to use a surrogate and then present the court back home with the fait accompli of a baby.
Here in Ireland there is no law around surrogacy at present, leaving a vacuum. The Government looks set to ban commercial surrogacy but has left it up in the air as to exactly what will happen if a couple come back from abroad with a baby via a surrogate.
The couple in the Italian case had been refused permission to adopt three times because they are in their fifties. The husband in the case is not the genetic father of the child in question nor is his wife.fe. (We reported yesterday the wife was the genetic mother. This is incorrect).
The Italian Supreme Court could have taken the view that under the circumstances it would be better for the child to be left with the couple. But it knew that this would set a precedent and this precedent would be against the interests of children because surrogacy in itself is against the interests of children.
If the court did not take a tough line, then the law would be made a mockery of by couples being allowed to circumvent by effectively blackmailing courts into recognising them as the legal parents of the children they had acquired through surrogacy.
Here in Ireland we seem more inclined to use the ‘best interests of children’ test to cave into recognising surrogacy in some form, which only goes to show how subjective the concept of ‘best interests’ is.
But the objective fact remains that surrogacy frequently splits motherhood into two women, the birth mother and the genetic mother, it automatically makes a baby the object of a contract, and the potential for exploitation of the women who offer their wombs to commissioning adults is huge.
Meanwhile, we have the story from Britain of a gay couple who are using three women to have babies for them. These women, so far as I can tell, are fully the mothers of the three children. We are supposed to smile at this and think how wonderful it is, but what we are smiling at is a law that allows women to have babies for the express purpose of handing them over to other people like ‘gifts’. We should be appalled.
PS Some people seem to think that any means science gives us of producing a baby should be permitted and that the baby is its own justification for the procedure used. Very well, should people be allowed to have clones of themselves as their offspring when science gets to the point of successfully cloning human beings, or would this be a violation of the rights of the child?