Professor Nóirín Hayes:

With reference to surrogate birth certificates, I was really trying to illustrate the way in which we used language. I was simply saying that if a situation arose where a surrogacy certificate would be issued for a child, in my view, we should call it a birth certificate. We should limit the extent to which children are made different by the processes or procedures we use. It is true across the entire process.

I will respond to the research evidence about children. It is true that, historically, research in this field has tended to depend on parental reports initially. However, more recent and contemporary research has engaged directly with children. By necessity, it has been with children who know that they were conceived in this way, as that is the route of access. There are other efforts being made to access the broader population, but it is very difficult to envisage how that might be done. Professor Susan Golombok's work is frequently referred to because it stands up to scrutiny. As Professor Madden points out, the evidence on child outcomes and mother-child and broader parent-child engagement has been, broadly, comparable for surrogacy children, donor children and children conceived normally. There are systematic reviews where aggregate data have been brought together and generally the evidence of harm or distress is not emerging.