Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The amendment would ensure only married couples could jointly be the parents of a child born through donor-assisted human reproduction. It would specifically exclude cohabiting couples or civil partners from joint legal parentage of a child. This would go much further than establishing a hierarchy of family types because it would set out that the only family we would be prepared to recognise in respect of donor-conceived children was the constitutionally-recognised marital family. That would run utterly against the spirit of the Bill, which is intended to protect and support a range of family types and their children.