Professor Conor O'Mahony:

The first point is the recommendations in my report provide a level of protection for foreign surrogate mothers. The Government's proposal of leaving international surrogacy completely unregulated provides foreign surrogate mothers with no protection whatsoever.

As to how you could go about this, again, there is a range of ways to approach it. You could mirror exactly the protections provided in the domestic framework proposed in the Bill in respect of the laws governing international surrogacy arrangements. There is no reason in principle why you could not make them completely equivalent. The risk associated with that approach is if it is too prescriptive it may have the result of excluding a significant number of international surrogacy arrangements from the scope of the legislation, which ends up creating a separate problem, namely, you then have couples going abroad, bringing children back to Ireland and then finding themselves in the same difficulty we currently see them in, which is like a limbo or twilight zone. For that reason, looking at the issue from the perspective of the child and again the principle of non-discrimination whereby the child should not be discriminated against based on the circumstances of his or her birth, my view was given the international nature of it it would be preferable to set minimum standards that must be met in every case but then also allowing for a degree of flexibility to recognise different jurisdictions will do things slightly differently.

It is to try to avoid a situation where there are too many children born through international surrogacy finding themselves excluded from the legislation simply because it is too prescriptive. That was the position I arrived at in the report but, as I say, one could, in principle, completely equalise those sets of protections. What should not be done and what is no answer to the concerns about protection for the surrogate mother is to provide no protection whatsoever, and that is where we find ourselves if we leave international surrogacy completely unregulated.