Ms Maeve Delargy:

On behalf of Equality for Children, I thank the committee for the opportunity to present today. I am a member of Equality for Children, a solicitor and mother to two little girls with my wife. As an aside, I will thank my wife. I am here today while she is doing the work of looking after our children and our house. That important job is not as valued as it should be by society or, most of the time, by me. While I am a mother to two daughters, I am only a parent to one. As Ms von Meding noted, Equality for Children strongly endorses the submission from Irish Gay Dads on how to ensure that same-sex male parents are not excluded from legislation on domestic and international surrogacy. Additionally, we are here today to highlight to the fact that international surrogacy is and remains entirely unavailable to same-sex female couples in Ireland. This can be addressed in one of two ways in the upcoming legislation on assisted human reproduction. The first is by creating a pathway for parental rights to be assigned in an international surrogacy situation where there is double-donor conception and the second is by allowing an intended female parent who uses their own egg to create their child to establish parental rights through DNA evidence.

As today’s session focuses on protecting the rights and regularising the position of existing children born through international surrogacy, it would be remiss of us not to point out that hundreds of existing children of same-sex female couples across Ireland continue to be excluded from any legislation. The children who continue to live in legal limbo are: the children of same-sex male or female couples born outside of Ireland through surrogacy or donor-assisted human reproduction, children conceived by same-sex couples in a non-clinical setting, children conceived by same-sex couples using a known donor prior to May 2020 and the children of same-sex female couples conceived outside of Ireland after May 2020. We urge the committee to recommend in its report that these gaps are also addressed in the upcoming Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Bill, should it consider it appropriate to do so. I thank members. We welcome their questions.