Ms Selina Bonnie:

The most important way of doing it is to ensure there are ethical and equality criteria underpinning it. There is a responsibility on the regulatory authority that is established to ensure the process is built on ethics and equality criteria and that there is not this immediate presumption of inability just because of a person's life circumstances. It comes back to equality criteria and ethics and recognising there is an unconscious bias - with some people it is a conscious bias - against people who may not be perceived to be the norm. We need to mitigate against that. As regards judging the future welfare of the child, as the Senator stated, none of us can tell the future. When I tried to access IVF for the first time, the doctor wanted a guarantee that I would not have a disabled child. Who can give such a guarantee?

That was a very clear, conscious bias he had against the idea of a disabled woman becoming a mother. We need to speak to these biases, acknowledge they exist and then use our ethical and equality criteria and legislation to ensure people who make the decisions will be governed by an ethical framework.