Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am coming to the end of my point. I am not here to go on longer than I have to but I will answer in full each charge that has been made. It is the Minister who dishonours women’s rights when, in the legislation, he refuses to acknowledge that a child should never be deprived of a mother. That is exactly what happens here. In surrogacy, children are deprived of their birth mother and where single men or same-sex male couples are allowed to commission a child, the Minister is deliberately depriving a child of ever having a mother in their life. That is a scandal and it will not stand to his good reputation when we or others look back on history.

The final issue the Minister raised was that he is proud to champion the fact that a transgender person may become a parent through surrogacy. I will confine my concerns about that to the issue of where a single transgender person, a male with gender dysphoria who has a preferred gender of female under the 2015 legislation, brings a child into the world using their own sperm and then presents themselves to the world as that child’s mother. What planet are people on if they think that is acceptable? Here again, the Minister is not respecting women’s rights. If he really respected women's rights, he would not allow a situation where a male person is the sole commissioning parent of a child to be born through surrogacy, does so using his own male gamete, and then presents himself as the child’s mother. That is not fair on the child or on the transgender individual, the person with gender dysphoria. Here again, however, the Minister does all this in the name of equality. This is colour by numbers at this stage. The Minister is taking bits of previous legislation that were ill-advised in themselves and we are now coming to the ever more chaotic conclusions of those bits of previous legislation. I cannot persuade the Minister today to see how wrongheaded he is. I can only put on the record that he is no champion of women’s rights with this legislation, if ever he was.