Ms Cathy Wheatley:

As parents, we also want to ensure that anybody who is carrying our children is protected and looked after. There are certain countries where there are legal frameworks in place to protect surrogates. These include the US, Canada and Ukraine. In Ukraine, where we went to have our children, our surrogate, whose name was Ivana, was afforded independent legal protection and advice, counselling, psychiatric welfare assessments and support. That was really important to us. At the end of the day, as parents, your surrogate is carrying your child and you want them to be protected in every way possible. You want all parties to be protected. As an organisation, one of the things we want goes back to Professor O'Mahony's recommendation. We want a pre-birth agreement followed by transfer of parental rights on birth. This would make sure that the amazing women who act as our surrogates still retain autonomy over their bodies, which is what every woman should have. There are ways to do that. We want to create a pregnancy partnership. We want to be able to look our children in the eye and tell them we did everything we could to protect the women who carried them and gave us the most precious gift anyone can give.