Dr. Lydia Bracken:

We cannot control the laws of another country and we should not attempt to say we can. What we can do is control the recognition or the establishment of legal parentage at home. In doing so we can base our recognition of it on an equivalence of ethical standards. That encourages any intending parents who are setting out on their surrogacy journey to first check to ensure everything they are doing will adhere to that ethical framework. The AHR authority will have a role in that as well by disseminating information about what an ethical surrogacy looks like so anyone who is even contemplating taking on the surrogacy journey would know in advance what ethical standards need to be adhered to. There would also need to be legal advice put in place before any surrogacy is entered into so the intending parents can know what needs to be adhered to in order for the recognition to be granted once the child comes home again.

On the ethical standards, I do not think we can require that the ethical standards here be identical to those in place in another country but we can ensure an equivalence of ethical standards and in doing so, as I mentioned in my opening statement, we need to rely on a human rights framework for that, namely, something that prioritises the human rights of all participants in the surrogacy. For the surrogate, we need to ensure there is free and informed consent, that there are balanced power dynamics between a surrogate and the intending parents and that there are protections for the right to bodily integrity. We need to ensure protection for the rights of the child and then also for the intending parents. If a gamete donor has been used there must be protection for his or her rights as well. By having, as I proposed, a post-birth judicial process that allows for those ethical standards to be checked and for the best interests of the child to be determined, then we can ensure any surrogacy undertaken by an Irish citizen will meet agreed ethical standards as we have set them in Ireland.