Seanad debates

Thursday, 26 March 2015

Children and Family Relationships Bill 2015: Committee Stage

 

10:30 am

Photo of John CrownJohn Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

This is a different issue entirely. There is a risk that couples who embark on the process of donor assisted reproduction break up. This might be amicable but it is inevitable that some relationships will end badly. It is a feature of our legal system that bitter marital break-ups lead to very protracted court cases and custody of children has, on occasions, been used almost as a weapon in the family courts. I cannot see how custody over embryos would escape the same unpleasantness occasionally.

The Bill as it stands allows one party, the intending mother, the right to veto the use of an embryo even where the other party has a genetic link to the embryo and the intending mother does not. This could happen where a female partner has had her egg fertilised using a donor's sperm or where the male in a couple uses his sperm and the egg has been donated by a third party. Given the law of large numbers it will inevitably occur that one party to the relationship will ultimately have a veto over whether the other party to what will be, by then, a broken relationship leaves a genetic legacy. These amendments seek to put in place a legal framework which confers some right to the genetic progenitor of an embryo where the relationship has collapsed in a conflicted way. Furthermore, there is no requirement for anyone to notify the other intending parent, if there is one, where the intending mother has revoked consent for the assisted human reproduction procedure to occur.

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