Ms Ellen Embury:

I cannot speak to what a surrogate would feel like in terms of making her journey differently so I will refer to the really incredible women we have heard from this morning. With respect to the birth certificate, I would turn that around. There is nothing secret about a surrogacy journey. Perhaps it could be mandated that children are entitled to know whose womb they grew in. Think about the intended mother who is so desperately afraid that the surrogate is going to have a link with her child, who is terrified that perhaps the surrogate is going to attempt to keep the child, which does not happen in practice in Canada. To say that, by virtue of having gestated a child, you are entitled to be named a parent on the birth certificate is very demeaning to the intending parents. There are other ways of managing it because, ultimately in Canada, what I do when a baby is born on Saturday, the baby never appears on the birth certificate in Alberta, but I have a court order by Monday that says the surrogate is not a legal parent. There is simply no point in having her on the birth certificate.