Professor Susan Golombok:

I thank the Senator for her questions. On counselling, it is possibly the parents who should be offered counselling more than the children. Certainly in the UK, parents are offered counselling before they embark on this route to parenthood. At that point, they do not even know if they will ever become parents. The conversations they have with counsellors about openness and disclosure to eventual children does not resonate with them at that point. Parents tell us that they would love to have access to counselling after a child is born.

Maybe it could be quite early in the children’s lives, at one or two years, or at the point when parents are thinking about beginning to talk to them about their conception. That would give parents much more support and confidence regarding how to proceed. It would carry through to the children because if parents could talk to their children in an easy way in which they could be understood and answer their questions in an age-appropriate manner, the whole process would be much more smooth and parents would not put it off. Some parents talk to others about wanting to be open or to have been open with their children but find the hurdle so difficult that they tend to keep putting it off. Then they feel it is far too late and that it would be too much of a bombshell to give the children the information.

Whether the children themselves might benefit from counselling is an interesting question. It is not something I have really thought about because I thought about the matter more from the point of view of the parents. My feeling is that counselling might make their situation seem more unusual or abnormal, so it might not be helpful. If the conversation happens within the family, it is probably the best way forward. It is the parents who would benefit most from counselling, and the children would benefit as a consequence.

On the question on the sample in the study, the participants were all UK families, so we cannot really say anything about children born to surrogates abroad. As far as I know, there are no studies in the world that have followed up on children of couples who have had surrogacy abroad. It is something that my colleague Dr. Vasanti Jadva has been thinking of doing but, as far as I know, that has not happened. I do not believe it has in the US either. To the extent that we believe it is important not only for children to know they were born through surrogacy but also to have information about the surrogate and, if used, the donor, we believe it is obviously much more difficult, if not impossible, for children if the surrogacy was carried out abroad. For example, my former PhD student, Dr. Nishta Lamba, studied surrogacy in India and found that families who went from the UK to India had no further contact with the surrogate after the child was born. This is potentially problematic for the children.