Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Senator Seery Kearney has raised a very fair and important question. She makes her point eloquently as always. While I disagree with her, we are getting to the important core of this. This was something about which I meant to speak in my response. The Senator said we assume every mother is perfect. She suggested there was an assumption in our amendments that every mother is perfect, etc. She then talked about circumstances in which no one is to blame. Sometimes, there very much is someone to blame when motherhood or fatherhood is imperfect. I do not deny for a minute there can be suboptimal parenting. In fact, one could say, by definition, all human experience is suboptimal because we all fall and fail to be our best selves at times. However, do we then say everything is relative? Do we then say that nothing may be insisted on as essential? That is the big failure here.

It is not just a philosophical view that says children do better when they are brought up by a mother and a father. For example, there are all sorts of social evidence on marriage, educational outcomes, attitudes to law, involvement in criminality and drug taking. A lot of social science points to the advantages children have in certain family situations. We cannot be in denial about reality and what is truthful. Therefore, it is not just the expression of philosophical opinions which may or may not be right. There is an evidence base for a lot of what most people believe is ideal or preferable for children. There is evidence that children do better when they are brought up in two-parent families. There is evidence that fathers' absence from children's lives can be problematic and can be associated with social problems and so forth. Ask any family lawyer or any judge in the children's courts. There is a lot we can say that is true or probably true.

The idea that we can completely relativise maleness and femaleness is at the heart of gender ideology and queer theory, the idea that it does not matter if you are a man or a woman and or male or female; there is no real difference. This idea was at the heart of the recent referendums, as well. There was a clear mission to relativise fatherhood and motherhood and to play down the significance of those concepts, ideas and basic necessities. Nature speaks more loudly than any of these ideological propositions and what nature, backed up by evidence, shows is that it is good for children to be brought up by a father and a mother and, where possible, their own father and mother.

Even if social science did not point to the benefits for children in this regard, there is also the fact that a child has certain rights. Children have a right not to be deliberately deprived of their genetic parent in their lives. They have a right. That is what makes sperm and egg donation so problematic because children are being deliberately brought into the world in a way which intentionally deprives the child of a genetic parent. It is also what makes surrogacy so problematic from the child's perspective in that children are being deprived of the right to know the birth mother who has nurtured them for nine months. Who here is willing to say there is no bonding of any significance between a birth mother and her child during the time in the womb and that they are absolutely certain there are no future traumas involved either for the mother or for the child as a result of that sundry? Who here could take the book or, if you are a secularist, make your affirmation to say it absolutely does not matter? In the field of epigenetics, we know the birth mother and her biology can contribute to certain future realities for the child, even if she is not the genetic parent of the child. Science is telling us so much which I suspect the proponents of this Bill would rather not hear.

No one is claiming a father cannot be a good father if he is bringing up a child on his own or indeed a mother cannot be a good mother if she is bringing up her child alone. However, that does not mean that children should be deliberately deprived in advance of ever having a father in their lives or of ever having a mother in their lives. That is to put adults' aspirations first by relativising the goods of fatherhood and motherhood. It is a selfish thing to propose because it does not put the child's best interests first. It says that at least the child can be glad he or she is alive. I will agree to that. It is better a child is alive than dead, but are we really saying it does not matter in what circumstances or subject to what disadvantages, disability or genetic pre-interventions a child is brought into this world? Is the child just supposed to be glad to be brought into the world? We know that is wrong in the context of non-consensual sexual relationships. We cannot justify the bringing into being of a child in that regard, although we can certainly never justify the killing of the child in that context either.

The contradictions are all on the side of the proponents of this Bill because they do not have a record in defending the child's best interests from the moment they are conceived. Our position is to defend a child's best interest right from the get-go of their lives and to say that even before a child is brought into being, they should not be intentionally disadvantaged in the way we have described. Of course, we have pointed to the abuses of women which are intrinsic to the whole process, particularly in the context of international surrogacy.