Ms Ranae von Meding:

I feel very deeply what the Senator said about those of us who share our stories feeling the need to prove ourselves as good people.

We are good people, but at the end of the day whether we are good people is not the issue. It is the fact that our children are being denied the protection of both of their parents. While Ms Delargy and I may not have the experience of having had a child through surrogacy, we both have the lived and real experience of knowing our children do not have the protection of both their parents.

In terms of the Children and Family Relationships Act, we are often asked, given that there is a framework now in place, why somebody would choose to go outside that framework. This relates to the draft AHR Bill also because some might say there is a proposed framework and ask why somebody would go outside that. In the context of the Children and Family Relationships Act, there are three reasons - circumstance, cost and choice. In the case of circumstance, there could be a couple who live abroad, had their children abroad and they are fully recognised as a family in that jurisdiction regardless of how they conceived, be it through surrogacy or donor-assisted conception. Once they come back to Ireland those rights are taken away and they are no longer viewed as a family. In my situation, our circumstance meant that we could not access the fertility treatment we needed in Ireland, so we went abroad and we had our children. We fought for a long time and, thankfully, we were retrospectively recognised as a family. We only got our children's birth certificates a couple of weeks ago and that was a very special day. I cannot wait to see my friends and colleagues experience that also. However, because of that circumstance and because we went abroad, it means, bizarrely, that if we choose to use our remaining embryos that are in a different jurisdiction, they would not be granted the same retrospective recognition so we would be back in the same situation. This is just to illustrate the different circumstances in which one might find oneself and fall outside the parameters of any existing framework.

In terms of cost, members are aware that the cost of fertility treatment is massive. For some families and individuals it is just not something they can undertake. They may choose to go abroad where the prices may be cheaper or they may choose not to use a clinic at all and do a non-clinical procedure, which is not currently covered by the framework.

The final thing is choice. Most Irish individuals have choice when it comes to reproductive autonomy, conception, pregnancy and childbirth, even choosing where and how to give birth. However, for some individuals, be they LGBT+ or they have a medical condition that means they have to access surrogacy, that choice is often taken away. LGBT+ people, especially, should have the choice of whether they want to conceive through a fertility clinic or not. I will not speak on behalf of my colleague, Ms Delargy, but I know it was important for her and her family that they did not conceive through a clinical setting. Having the choice to use a known donor was incredibly important to their family, and I know many families for whom it is incredibly important, but that falls outside of any existing framework.

It is very important, as part of the broader conversation, to look at the Children and Family Relationships Act, at what is missing there and at the two-tiered structure that has been created where some same-sex female families and their children have equality now and others do not. It would be very dangerous to create that type of two-tiered system again in the assisted human reproduction Bill.