Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We hear the allegation that domestically we are not allowing exploitation but internationally we are. This is to presuppose women in Ireland can have informed consent and make the decision to enter into a surrogacy agreement but somehow women abroad cannot do so. I want to label this for what it is. It is making an assumption that somehow if people do not live in Ireland they do not have the capacity to make these legal choices around their own bodily autonomy as well as the legal definition of consent. I would appreciate the witnesses dispelling this. I want to reiterate what Senator Ruane very eloquently said. In this there is also a failure to recognise the women who would happily have carried their own babies to full term rather than stand by and watch another woman having to do it for them. In many instances it is their biological baby that another woman is carrying. We need to get this on record because somehow it is being conflated here. The surrogate - or surrogate mother because there is still an attitude in some certain quarters of Ireland if we drop the word "mother" - is not the biological mother of the child she is giving birth to. This needs to be underlined. This is a child that is the biological child of at least one of the intended parents.

Everybody enters into a surrogacy agreement in the knowledge that it is a temporary arrangement. It does not mean that the surrogate mother is not somebody who is held in extraordinarily high esteem by the intended parents. She is so held for the entirety of the life of the child and those parents in a very grateful manner. She is not nothing to them. Lest anybody attempt to put this out there, there is no intended parents who have that attitude to the surrogate mother. I need to clarify this because of some of the inflammatory statements being made in this committee.

In Ireland we have medical infertility and we have social infertility. Coming back to my previous questions, I am concerned about commercial surrogacy.

If we say "No" to commercial surrogacy, we may be excluding same-sex parents from the ability to avail of surrogacy because they must go to the United States or to Canada. We must be very careful about the definition. We had a constitutional convention that dealt with marriage equality. Within that convention we also dealt with the right to parentage and same-sex couples being parents. Interestingly, 79% of the delegates voted for marriage equality and 81% of them voted that same-sex parents were entitled to parentage. Obviously, in many instances this is for gay fathers, and surrogacy is the only route to parentage for them, so it is very important that we have that.

In a way, I am correcting things that have been said and also reiterating things that have been said, especially by Senator Ruane. I welcome Ms Gamble's comment that AHR is the place for surrogacy, not adoption or otherwise, and that it is the right context for it. That was very important and puts the context aptly and correctly. I do not have a question. I want to make sure that the right things are on the record here.