New legislation which will deliberately sever the natural ties between children and their biological parents is being proposed by Justice Minister Alan Shatter.

It will also permit the creation of deliberately ‘motherless’ or ‘fatherless’ children, that is children who will not have the care of either a mother or a father as the case may be.  

In addition, the Bill is set to allow ‘non-commercial’ surrogacy, the use of donor egg and sperm and adoption by same-sex couples and cohabiting heterosexual couples.

The heads of the Bill are due to be published next month and will allow create a new category of parent in law, the so-called ‘intentional parent’.

The Bill will be called the Family Relationships and Children Bill 2013.

A briefing note prepared by Minister Shatter suggests the legislation may be even more radical than the proposals made by the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction (CAHR) in 2005.

The Commission recommended legislation to permit donor conception, surrogacy and same-sex adoption.

However it said that the children of sperm and egg donor should be allowed to gain access to information allowing them to trace their biological mother or father.

In the briefing note there is no indication that anonymity will be prohibited. In Britain thanks to a case taken by Joanna Rose, who was conceived via a sperm donor, anonymity is banned as it is in a growing number of countries as ‘donor-conceived’ people demand to know who their natural parents are.

According to the briefing note, under the proposed rules for assigning parentage in cases of Assisted Human Reproduction, intention, rather than biology is to be the key guide in establishing legal parenthood.

Thus, the note says “[w]here the genetic link is to the intending father, the parents are the birth mother and the genetic father”.

However, where the genetic link is to the intending mother, “the parents are the birth mother and her consenting spouse, civil partner or cohabiting partner”.

Furthermore, ”where there is no genetic link to either intending parent, the parents are the birth mother and her consenting spouse, civil partner or cohabiting partner.”

The law is also intended to allow for the adoption of children by same-sex civil partners and to allow civil partners, step-parents, those cohabiting with the biological or adoptive parent to apply for guardianship of a child.

It will also allow husbands to become joint guardians of children in relationships where they are not the biological father of the child and it is set to change the law so that a non-marital father is a guardian of his child if he cohabits with the child’s mother for at least a year before the child’s birth and the cohabitation ends (if applicable) less than 10 months before the child’s birth.

The proposed law, the Family Relationships and Children Bill 2013, comes as the Government seeks to prepare the ground for its same-sex marriage referendum in 2015.