Dr. Mary Wingfield:

It is one of these very difficult situations. It is a big deal for any woman to carry a pregnancy. It is a big imposition on her health and how she is feeling for the nine months. She may have morning sickness and all kinds of discomforts. She may have serious medical issues as well if the pregnancy is complicated. For any woman to do that for another woman, another couple or another man is a really generous thing to do, and we cannot expect people to do it for nothing. There will be some who will. We know of many cases of sisters who will do it for another sister, but it is a very generous thing to do it for somebody who is not a relative and not even a friend.

Certainly, they must be compensated. They are going to be pregnant so they will need help with housework and will need help if they have other children running around. They will need time off to attend antenatal appointments. That is not an issue for some people, but for many, particularly people working in lower paid jobs, they sometimes have to take a holiday day to go to medical appointments, IVF clinic appointments and the like. There has to be compensation. Expenses for the counselling, legal advice and so forth are not funded by the State so they would need to be compensated for all that.

The compensation requirements specified in the AHR Bill of 2022 are very good.

The thing is then whether you can pay them extra money on top of that. I cannot see a huge problem with that, but I can see a problem if the payment is such that it encourages people from poorer communities, particularly in other countries, to do surrogacy as a way of making money because then there is exploitation. If there is a situation where it is only the poor people who cannot afford anything else who are becoming surrogates because they are doing it for money and to survive, then you are getting into the realms of exploitation. I am not sure if I am explaining that properly. I do not have an objection to people being paid a certain fee for it, but not so much that it would turn it into a business for them or a way of them surviving and living. That is not right. That happens in some countries where 16-year-olds can become a surrogate and make more by being one than they would if they went to college and got a job. They can make more than they would make in three or four years. When commercialisation promotes that kind of activity, it is wrong. It is trying to balance it.

I will use egg donation as an easier example. Egg donation is not altruistic in, for example, Spain. Somebody who donates eggs and has to go through the whole IVF procedure of taking drugs and having an egg collection gets around €1,000 for doing that, which is not excessive. It is fair enough because they are doing a good thing for that. However, it is not enough to encourage people to start doing that as a way of surviving.