Ms Georgina Roberts:

I am happy to answer that. I am aware of Sarah Dingle. I spoke alongside Sarah and a variety of other donor-conceived individuals at the United Nations. From a personal perspective, I found that experience eye-opening. I was the only person on that panel born through surrogacy, and I want to make that clear. I believe that donor conception and surrogacy have very different issues and, while they are closely related, we cannot treat them as the same thing. They simply are not. Granted, some surrogate-born children are conceived through donors but, on the whole, surrogacy is a separate entity.

My eyes were opened in this event in the United Nations by the stories of those who spoke alongside me who were donor-conceived because I had never really spoken to people who had had such difficulties with their origins. It really broadened my experiences of interacting with different people who had had a very different experience from the experience we all have had. It was very clear in that interaction that they feel intense hurt and pain, and sometimes betrayal, from the way they have been conceived. At no point does any of us wish to undermine their feelings about that, but that is not necessarily reflective of how people feel in surrogacy. As I said earlier, surrogacy generally is much more open and many of the issues I came across within that community speaking at the United Nations were about not having access to information, not being told about their origins, not being able to get in touch with birth parents should they wish to and feeling commodified because of the way sperm donation was done in various countries. Again, it was not in the UK, so we have to bear in mind that these were different countries with different rules.

In terms of profiteering, I do not feel that surrogacy is about profiteering. Clearly, altruistic and commercial surrogacy have different issues, but international surrogacy can still be altruistic. There is no profiteering in altruistic agreements because it is a woman somewhere on the planet wanting to help build another family. What is allowed in the UK law is reasonable expenses. It is absolutely right that surrogates should be supported and provided with reasonable expenses and should not bear any costs in the pregnancy. They should be looked after by all parties. Personally, I do not perceive that as profiteering. We have to take some of the comments from the United Nations talks that were publicised and look at them in detail. All I can say about the comments that were made and publicised with donor-conceived and surrogacy people is that the panel consisted of ten to 15 donor-conceived individuals who had very difficult experiences and me born through surrogacy. I am not saying our experiences represent those of everybody, but that the comments that were made there do not necessarily represent surrogacy. They mainly represent the views of those donor-conceived and I happened to be there and, therefore, they were put in the media as donor-conceived and surrogacy. I want to put that out.