Ms Jeannette Woellenstein:

The Senator has asked a very challenging question. At the very beginning the principles foresaw that it would be in the best interests of any child born through surrogacy to have the surrogate mother as the legal parent at birth. Then throughout the drafting process, and having consulted different experts and practitioners, the principles developed and were not at all prescriptive on that point. If the Senator takes a look at the principles on legal parenthood and parental responsibility, it distinguishes between different state approaches that are possible in this regard. In the case of states that determine by the operation of law at birth that a person is already a legal parent, then the question is what happens once this legal parentage should be transferred. The position the principles take right now is to take into account these different approaches and say that, whatever the approach, the child needs to have at least one legal parent at birth and after that we can talk about the transfer of legal parentage.

The principles have developed a lot, and then there is the principle on birth notification, registration and certification. This is principle 12 where we try to deal with these questions around registration and certification. As we said at the beginning, we consulted donor-conceived persons and surrogate-born persons. There were different opinions with regard to their birth certificates. Some people found it extremely important to have the name of the surrogate mother on their birth certificate, at least the original one. Others felt it was not important to them because the intending parents were their parents. We looked at where lessons were learned with regard to the integrated birth certificate, which exists for some adoptees in some states. For example, in Australia there are forms of these integrated birth certificates. It is really a birth certificate specific for adoptees and that traces the name and identity of the birth parents as well as the adoptive parents. This integrated birth certificate model was considered and is dealt with to some extent in principle 12. This principle says there should be updates of birth records, and of course birth records should always be kept up to date, but there might be a need to develop them further or have an additional certificate for surrogate-born persons. It is an encouragement to go this far but we know there are different views and positions held by the persons concerned, namely, donor-conceived persons and surrogate-born children.