Ms Maud de Boer-Buquicchio:

The Senator referred to my 2018 report and accurately summed up the situations where commercial surrogacy would not be considered a sale. What is essential in this summing up is that you can conclude that the surrogate mother was only paid for gestational services and not for the transfer of the child. This means that the surrogate mother must be afforded the status of surrogate mother at birth and must be under no contractual or legal obligation to participate in the legal or physical transfer of the child. Second is the severance of the payment from the transfer, which can be achieved by ensuring that the payments are made to the surrogate mother prior to the post-birth legal or physical transfer of the child. I would add that these payments should not be reimbursable and that if the mother should choose to maintain the parentage and parental responsibility she may be legally obligated to share parentage with others, including the intending parents. That means she would not be obliged to relinquish her status by the surrogacy arrangements. These are the crucial conditions which would allow for a legal pathway to regularise and legalise surrogacy but under those conditions.