Dr. Andrea Mulligan:

This is the difficulty. We are talking about surrogacy and about legalising this process. Therefore, we are all acknowledging that it is possible to separate motherhood from gestation. That is why we are here having this conversation. We are saying the surrogate is not going to be the parent. This is clear. What is difficult about the status of a mother who gives birth ordinarily is that there is a genetic and gestational link, and it is just different to fatherhood. That is not to say this law should take the position that the gestator is always a parent, because that is not necessarily the case. The reality, however, in the rare cases where gestational surrogates change their minds, is that those people are not strangers to the child. They are the people who gestated the child, and that is something. Neither this committee nor anyone else can say for definite what that means, but this difficult scenario must be accommodated in those rare cases where the surrogate has a change of mind. We should not decide that for all time and this law should not say that the genetic parents cannot get a child if there is a dispute. A rule could be made whereby the genetic parents would always be entitled to be the parents, no matter what. That is, however, outside the purview of this committee's work, because it is a domestic surrogacy question.