Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 108:

In page 51, to delete lines 35 and 36 and substitute the following:

“(2) (a) A surrogacy agreement is not a permitted surrogacy if the surrogate mother has, before entering into such agreement, been a surrogate mother upon more than one occasion, and where on at least two such occasions a pregnancy was achieved.

(b) In paragraph (a), “surrogate mother” includes, in addition to a surrogate mother as defined in section 2, a woman who, before the commencement of this subsection, has entered into an agreement with the intending parents concerned (or, in the case of a single intending parent, that intending parent) under which she has agreed to attempt to become pregnant, whether or not by the use of her own egg, and, if successful, to transfer the parentage of any child born as a result of the pregnancy to the intending parents (or, in the case of a single intending parent, that intending parent).”.

This amendment partly relates to the area of decision making that Deputy Shortall has just referred to. Amendment No. 108 seeks to add more detail to the provision in the Bill as initiated, which puts the number of occasions a woman can act as a surrogate mother at two - specifically, the maximum number of relevant pregnancies is also two - and that surrogate arrangements participated in prior to the commencement of the new surrogacy provisions should also be taken into consideration.