Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

In page 13, to delete lines 6 to 8 and substitute the following:“(2) A child born as a result of a DAHR procedure shall have two parents.”.

It is clear to me that at the end of this process the Government will not have accepted a single reasoned amendment to blunt the radical agenda behind the legislation. This goes to show that it has no interest in protecting the right of a child to a father and a mother or even to two parents having a genetic link with the child they are raising. The legislation means that Ireland will now declare that it makes no difference whether a child's biological parents raise him or her or whether two men or two women who may or may not be related do so by design. We have moved well beyond regulation for children who have been conceived through this process. We are providing a mechanism to allow this to happen with increasing regularity in the future.

Far from it being, to use Senator Averil Power’s words last Friday, a case of prejudice against different families, this process in the Seanad has shown that only a few are willing to stand up for children’s rights to their full when they include the core essential right not to be deprived of the possibility of having a father and a mother, the child's own father and mother in particular. Anything that excludes, or contemplates excluding, this possibility for a child by design is necessarily an attack on children’s rights. The Bill has allowed and will allow an industry to set the terms around the ethics of the creation of human life. It centres only on the desires and aspirations of adults, however understandable and, in some cases, noble these desires and aspirations are; nonetheless by centring only on the desires of adults, be they people who want to have children or the international in vitro fertilisation, IVF, industry, it falls short of what children are entitled to expect from the Government and the Legislature.

The legislation proceeds on the basis that there is a right to a child. There is no such right. As a society, we collectively ought to restrict scientific practices where they are harmful or damaging to the welfare of vulnerable people. There are few groups in society more vulnerable than children. The Government has not shown that children will not be harmed by elements of this legislation. Any reference from the Government or supporters of the legislation to the protection of children, whether children’s voices being heard in court proceedings, is a minimalist understanding of what a child is entitled to expect.

There is a growing on-line community of people in the United Kingdom conceived through DAHR who speak about their innate desire, which their situation could not satisfy for the real parent, for the father or the mother, known or unknown, who is not there. I have mentioned Dr. Joanna Rose, a woman who was conceived using sperm that her genetic father had sold, who has given eloquent testimony about the sense of loss of people who were conceived in this way. She is regularly told she should be grateful and that she has no right to express any sense of loss, but, as matters stand, excluding the possibility of new legislation and, as I put it to the Minister last week, if the referendum on marriage equality fails, it will be incumbent on her to revisit this legislation because it and its anti-child aspects will have to be at the core of the referendum debate. Unless there is new legislation, the man who donated the sperm to create somebody such as Joanna Rose could have hundreds of offspring. We spoke about a person potentially never knowing his or her half-sisters and brothers. Not only is this a chilling potential reality to inflict on a child, but has the Government contemplated in any way the potential public health implications? This is what can happen when we regard life as something that can be created without reference to family, kinship, blood ties, history or any of those things that give us identity or a place in the world. Dr. Rose, for example, and the children who will be created or brought into existence under this new law, may never know their genetic siblings. They may never know their genetic parents, considering the paltry penalties, if any, that the Minister has put in place to deal with clinics which default on their record-keeping obligations. It is remarkable that a man who fathers a child on a one-night stand can be rightly pursued through the courts for maintenance payments whereas here a gentleman may have tens, if not hundreds, of offspring without the slightest regard for his moral or legal duty towards them. On the contrary, this law severs all such duties from him.

As I stated further in my Second Stage speech, we should have a Bill dealing with donor-assisted human reproduction issues. Indeed, the Minister has consistently referred to forthcoming legislation from the Minister for Health. Why, then, are we rushing this law through without such rules first being established in law? The reason is, of course, that this Bill is tied to the referendum. It is about normalising access to reproductive technology to new groups of adults or, in some cases, single adults before we have even set out the wider ground rules.

Every section of the Bill deserves to be rejected precisely because it is so reckless around children's rights and dignity and it is so manipulative in its timescale, in its political conception and in its delivery in these Houses.