Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 19 December 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

General Scheme of Assisted Human Reproduction Bill 2017: Discussion (Resumed)

9:00 am

Professor Deirdre Madden:

The balancing issue of that in the Irish context is the constitutional rights of parents to be the moral educators of their children and to decide how to bring them up and when to tell them. When the Children and Family Relationships Act was being drafted, in trying to balance those two competing rights, the legislators considered that having the right attach at adulthood was preferable to not having it at all.