Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

All of these sections are important and I have a couple of questions for the Minister. This is the section that sets out, in the context of domestic surrogacy, who may be intending parents. The section provides that a surrogacy agreement may be entered into by two intending parents, jointly, or by a single intending parent and that any intending parent shall have attained the age of 21 years before the section 53 application is made. We have already touched on this. It is impossible not to. These issues are all fite fuaite. The issue is whether it is appropriate to allow for there to be a single intending parent and that suffices, and that single intending parent shall have attained the age of 21 years before the section 53 application for the approval of a surrogacy agreement can be made. With all we now know and are learning about, as I briefly mentioned on the last occasion, the maturing of human beings into adulthood, it is not a straightforward matter of once the person turns 18 he or she is an adult and all may be permitted and once the person turns 21 he or she is an adult and all may be permitted. There is a spectrum period of maturing and we know it is different between men and women, or so we are told. None of us here is expert on this issue.There is, however, a lot said these days about the development of the frontal lobe and all the rest of it. It is not my job to rehearse that, and we do not have the time anyway. However, it seems to be established that it takes men longer to mature than women, for example. The question must therefore be asked why it is that a relatively, perhaps very, well-off 21-year-old male can seek to commission a baby on his own using a surrogate mother who might be a financially disadvantaged woman. Let us say the male in question is from the southside of Dublin and from a well-off background. Subject to the regulator being satisfied there is no risk of potential harm or neglect, it might be possible for a south Dublin man of 21 years to pay a financially challenged woman from, let us say, a disadvantaged area of Dublin - we can also talk about the international surrogacy context where the financial exploitation of women is crystal clear on the basis of international evidence - to carry his baby, perhaps to pay her way through college, and he can then take that baby away from her forever at the conclusion of the arrangement. When you think about it, if it were the baby of her boyfriend, there is no way the 21-year-old male would get sole custody in an Irish court. Look at the double standards massively present there. It is hard to imagine a circumstance where a 21-year-old male, in the context of a dispute over custody, would get sole custody in a court of his genetic child, and yet this legislation proposes that the State smile upon and facilitate the bringing of a child into the world by a man as young as 21 and that that child would be forever sundered from his birth mother, forever sundered from the woman who is the genetic parent of that child. It is, to use language that I think is not overstating the case, bizarre, cruel and perverse.

The second issue that will be of massive concern for many people of goodwill is the idea, and I have sought legal advice and guidance on this, that, as this Bill stands, it allows the possibility that the genetic father of a child could be registered as that child's mother. There is nothing in the Bill to prevent that male genetic parent, including the 21-year-old man from the southside of Dublin that I posited, from being designated as the mother in any parental order or subsequent civil registration. For example, in the case of a male who has availed of the provisions of the Gender Recognition Act, but not necessarily, perhaps, and who has a preferred gender of female, it could arise that a female, having donated her egg for an embryo transfer to a surrogate, could seek to be designated as the father of the child. This is unprecedented in the law. I sought advice from the Office of the Parliamentary Legal Adviser, noting the provisions of the Gender Recognition Act and what the Bill does not say about the Civil Registration Act, and it seems to apply that a person in this situation who would have availed of the provisions of the Gender Recognition Act, though, as I say, it does not necessarily have to be in that case, a biological male who has a gender recognition cert as a female and uses their own sperm, nonetheless, in a gestational surrogacy arrangement, could, after a parental order, be registered as the mother. The OPLA states in its advice that we still have the general odd situation that the surrogate mother may have been registered as the mother, and the Bill does not have a clear provision for re-registration by changing the recorded parents.

I think the possibility of such outcomes is not accidental but is another illustration of the creeping gender agenda which the Government has been pushing for some time. We also see it in parallel in the Government's bizarre and convoluted definition of gender in its controversial hate speech legislation. If there was one thing that was clear from the resounding rejection of the recent family and care referendums, it is that people do not want the idea of mothers and what they represent being disrespected by the Government, and yet the wording of this legislation reveals, to my mind, a sinister disregard for the will of the public around the recognition of the role and importance of mothers in our society.

This is a Bill about which there has been little public discussion. A lot of stuff has been going on over the years behind the scenes. It is a well-prepared and well-crafted Bill in terms of the objectives it seeks to secure, but it passed the Dáil without a single vote being called. On this issue, and there are other issues, as we saw with the recent referendums and as we have seen to some degree with the hate speech legislation, the media has woken up, generally speaking, to the reality that there are real issues of controversy around the definition of gender in the hate speech legislation and the tests to be applied before one could be prosecuted for a criminal offence in that regard. That has led to the Government pulling in its horns on that legislation, at least for the moment, and giving a commitment not to come back without significant changes, if it is to come back at all, or at least that is my understanding. However, on this issue of surrogacy the mainstream media in this country has been the dog that has not barked, and it has largely failed to shine a light on the Government's bizarre, cruel and perverse proposals such as the ones I have just described. The reason for that is simple. It is always easier to focus on real-life human interest stories. We have celebrities who have obtained children through celibacy. Celibacy? Good lord. Surrogacy.