Sharon Keogan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Good morning to Ms de Boer-Buquicchio. I thank her for coming here. Much of the discussion of this committee has treated commercial international surrogacy as a fait accompli; that it does and will occur and we must legislate around it. I must say the Verona principles paint a stark picture of the closeness of the practice of commercial international surrogacy with the sale of children. Out of the three criteria for categorisation of the sale of children, this form of surrogacy always contains two criteria and only does not contain the third criterion due to the legal contract hair-splitting. Paying for gestation with the shared understanding of subsequent transfer is paying for transfer by other means.

Ms de Boer-Buquicchio proposed a legal solution in her 2018 report to question how we make this not be the selling of children by leaving the transfer of the child entirely up to the surrogate mother. Surrogate mothers who intend to continue to take clients in the future will need to be true to their word or else it would be bad for business but people doing it as a once-off then have no obligation to fulfil their end of the agreement and the people availing of the surrogacy service have no recourse under law. Is this really a satisfactory state of legal affairs? If the solution to this abolishes the distinction between commercial international surrogacy and the sale of the child, where does that leave us?