- The Iona Institute - https://ionainstitute.ie -

Surrogacy Bill attacks child’s right to a mother and father

There is a Bill currently before in the Queensland State Parliament that will allow adults over the age of 25, including a single man or woman or same-sex couple to obtain ‘a child of their own’ using a combination of IVF and a surrogate mother.

Opponents say the new law will permit adults, with the blessing of the State, to deliberately deny a child either a mother or a father.

Queensland currently bans so-called ‘altruistic surrogacy’, that is, having a child on behalf of someone else. Such surrogacy must, of necessity, use donor sperm. In some cases, a donor egg can be used as well.

Dr. David van Gend, spokesperson for the Family Council of Queensland, along with its president, Alan Baker, said the Bill is a violation of a person’s right to enter into the world with a mother and a father.

“This Bill should have been about altruistic surrogacy as a ‘last resort’ for an infertile couple,” they said. “But no, under that respectable cloak this Bill smuggles in an oppressive proposal to deprive children of their birthright — their fundamental right to enter the world, as all of us did, with both a mother and a father. By what authority does any government permit adults to deny a child her primal right and most profound emotional need: to have both a Mum and a Dad in her life?”

Queensland is the only Australian state where ‘altruistic surrogacy’ is against the law and the Family Council of Queensland says the current situation is more in keeping with the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child which says that only in the most exceptional circumstances should a child be separated from his or her mother. “And yet this bill will do exactly that, in a premeditated way,” say van Gend and Baker. “For example, a little girl or boy shall live without a mother, simply to satisfy the desire of two men to have a baby of their own”.

“There is a grave necessity, and duty, to reject a Bill that would, through normalizing same-sex and single surrogacy, intentionally and wantonly deprive a child of her birthright and her most profound psychological need: to have both a mother and a father.”

This is just another example of the trend in modern Western ‘liberal’ societies to deliberately replace the right of a child to be raised by both his or her biological parents, where possible, with the so-called right of an adult to fulfill a desire to have a child.

Clearly the trend, like this proposed Bill, puts adults need above the right of children to know and to be raised by both their natural parents.

The Queensland Bill is being strongly opposed by nearly all Christian denominations, as well as the Jewish and Muslim communities.