Dr. Kirsty Horsey:

I was muted because the primary school near me had screaming kids outside.

I wish to add a couple of comments on that. In the research I am doing currently I have been doing interviews with gay fathers through surrogacy. They have been at pains in many cases to stress that they do not have it as bad as women who cannot have children, who have gone through 15 rounds of IVF or who have had cancer. When we press them on it, we find that they have had their own hardships. They have had discrimination and they have people making comments to them in the street or in the park and the like. It is a different type of difficulty that they are overcoming, rather than one of a medical last resort nature. The gay fathers are not doing it lightly either. They are coming into it having to have their eyes wide open about what it is going to mean to people around them and how they are going to be treated.

I have come across couples of gay fathers who have come from Ireland and who have worked with a surrogate who is being treated in England. That is not going overseas for a commercial arrangement. It is a nipping over the Irish Sea type of thing. That is something that can happen. If one is paying for private IVF it does not matter necessarily where one starts off with that. When the surrogate gives birth in the UK that is covered by the NHS. It then tips into the legal parenthood thing afterwards.

I wish to mention something else. This is not going to be included, as far as I understand it, in the new Irish legislation. In the UK, surrogates can use their own egg, and the parental order process is the same for that. Most surrogates I have spoken to who have done that consider themselves both an egg donor and a surrogate. They see themselves in a way whereby they are doing two things in one. One of them even said to me that she could have done the two things separately, she could have donated her eggs, walked away from the clinic and then come back six months later and used that as an embryo transferred in surrogacy, but why add to the expense? I know that is not proposed in Ireland, but even where that does happen surrogates are still able to make informed decisions about what they do with their own body. Otherwise, we would not let people donate eggs in the first place.