Dr. Mary Wingfield:

The pre-birth, post-birth assignment of legal parentage is obviously a very controversial thing. Different international bodies and lawyers have different opinions on it. As a doctor dealing with people, I feel the whole idea of surrogacy is that the intending parents are going to be the legal parents and the surrogate is not going to be the legal parent and I think most lay-people would feel that as well. In the vast majority of surrogacy arrangement, and again it comes back to the importance of counselling, that is what happens. There is a small number where there may be conflict. As a speaker in the previous session said, there will always be situations where things will have to go to court. There possibly will be cases in the future where there is a dispute. My feeling about the legislation and the way it is drafted at the moment is that it is all drafted so that the intention of the whole procedure is that the intending parents will be the legal parents but the legislation is drafted in the opposite way, so that the surrogate – even though that is not the intention of anyone involved – will be the legal parent and that it is then up to the intending parents to apply for parentage. If there is a dispute, they have to go to court over that dispute. I am not a lawyer and I am maybe being simplistic. In terms of directing it the other way, so the intending parents are the legal parents from birth, if the surrogate had an issue, there would be a mechanism for her to apply to the courts and contest it. It just seems illogical that the whole intention is that the intending parents are the legal parents but the law is saying the opposite. It just does not make sense to me.

From a medical point of view, surrogacy pregnancies are similar to donor egg pregnancies because the woman who is pregnant is not carrying her own egg. She has the intending mother’s egg. We know that donor egg pregnancies are a little more complicated. There is a higher incidence of high blood pressure, bleeding problems and of being delivered prematurely. I was talking to some paediatric colleagues in the last few days about this. There is a higher incidence of those babies ending up in intensive care in hospitals and decisions having to be made about their care.

Some of them are very healthy and go home straight away. However, during that critical time it seems wrong that the intending parents who are going to be the legal parents do not have the right to make decisions about that child's care. That is my feeling, and, as I said in my paper, the feeling of 85% of the GPs, obstetricians and other people working in IVF, split 80 or 90 in each group, was that it should be assigned at birth.

The draft legislation provides that the surrogate can agree for the child to reside with the intending parents from birth, but it does not say what happens if she refuses to do that. Again, things such as early bonding and skin-to-skin contact with the baby are very important, and there are medical reasons that it is very important for children from the very earliest stage of their development to bond with their parents. That is particularly so in the case of surrogacy where the intending mother has not been pregnant and has not been feeling the baby move, and her partner has not been feeling the baby move. It is really important for bonding, for them and for the baby, that they get their baby as soon as possible and that it is their baby as soon as possible.

What was the other question?