Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

-----that the children are only being reared by their biological parents.

All sorts of thing constantly go on in society. Step-parents rear children. I have a blended family visiting the House today. Blended families work. They rear children all of the time. As such, to speak about it as being prejudicial to a child born of surrogacy is to deny the reality of what happens in the world where surrogacy is needed.

Other things have been said about the parents. The allegation made to the Minister is that he has been captured by powerful groups. Let me describe those groups. They are mammies and daddies, and daddies and daddies, who have full-time jobs, are rearing their children and may be caring for elderly or ill family members. When their children are put to bed at 9 p.m., 9.30 p.m. or 10 p.m., they get on Zoom calls with one another and discuss how they can ensure that their children have equal rights under the law, which I am glad to say we have achieved. They are the “powerful groups”. No one is funding them. They are doing all of this voluntarily in their own time. They are the intending parents, people who want and are committed to a standard of motherhood and standard of fatherhood. They are also not well-heeled southsiders. Maybe that could be applied to me, but I doubt it because I, like many other surrogate parents, have been mortgaged to the hilt. We have sold our future financial security to try to realise motherhood and fatherhood. That is what they have done and who they are. They are not some powerful group or big influential lobby. I have seen anti-surrogacy advocates sponsored by the Vatican get to the UN. All of that is paid for, but our advocacy is not. I will not even allow anyone to buy me a cup of coffee on this journey lest I be accused of benefiting from it in some way. I have not benefited at any point.

I hear talk of an evidence base. The evidence base is from the University of Cambridge, which is well known and qualified. It conducted a longitudinal study of children born via surrogacy. The university has measured them using every possible metric and compared them to children not born via surrogacy. On every possible metric, they compare favourably. They are children who were born and reared with empathy and compassion. My comments relate to intending parents, just in case the Chair was about to tell me to keep to the topic. The children are reared with compassion, understanding and the sense that, while not everything in life goes right, people should see things through and try their best to overcome whatever impediments are put before them.We have the family of Lucy Fallon and all of us have been influenced by the book, Baby Ava, written by Caroline O'Flaherty. Both of them were mothers who died. This Bill gives the opportunity to have that motherhood recognised. They were women who, like all the other women and the men who are here, have gone to the ends of the earth for a standard of parenting and to devote everything to their children, who have sold their futures, who have sold everything to try to make sure they have that opportunity for parenthood.

With regard to the inference on having a gender-specific prohibition, organisations that are advocating for same-sex couples in surrogacy, as I said last week and the week before, are disappointed and fearful that the regulatory authority may engage in prohibition by stealth. Contrary to what is being put into this debate, that is their position. They are fearful that we are pulling up a ladder and not allowing same-sex couples to become parents. I disagree with them on that. The discussion on intending parents goes on here and we talk about those people. They are real people who have hit major impediments in their lives and are trying to overcome them. We are recognising, as a state, that there is a fertility treatment out there that can be provided to those people and we want to make it is as safe as it can possibly be. That is what this legislation does.

There was much discussion and description last Thursday of my first encounter with Senator Mullen. I disagree with the characterisation of me in that but I am strong on this, of that there is no doubt. I was a lot less strong then than I am now, but that comes from having support in numbers, and Senator Ruane is especially within that.

In the course of another debate, the reference was to “these people” who undertake surrogacy. Those were the precise words that I objected to - “these people”. What are "these people"? What type of people are “these people”? Clearly, they are people who cannot be 21 years of age, they cannot be trusted and they are going to exclude motherhood as a concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. My engagement at the end was to say that maybe the Senator will speak more compassionately and with more empathy when he realises “these people” are in the room and I am one of them. That is exactly what I said because, God knows, I sat in that seat practising it for ages because I thought that the minute I said that, it was me committing to my personal family life going out into the public sphere, and it did later.The Leas-Chathaoirleach was especially kind on that evening, which was a very frightening evening.

There is a characterisation of the intending parents as selfish adults demanding our way or insisting that we have our way. That is not true. We are human beings desiring to become parents. We do not believe we have a right to be parents. We do not believe that we should absolutely be guaranteed a child. We do not. We go into this with the same odds as IVF and the odds are not always in favour of the couple or the individual who undertakes this. That is not the case. The people who go into this, these people, these intending parents, have to meet all of these criteria and have to ensure they are able to do that before they have the single chance to hold their child in their arms after experiencing devastation in many cases. That goes for same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples because they also experience miscarriages in surrogacy and disappointment and heartache along the way. Despite this idea that we have a right, we have no right. Nobody has ever asserted a right. None of these people have ever said they have a right to a child. None of them have.

Our child is called Scarlett because in all of the disappointments, I used to pull myself up off my knees and say that tomorrow is another day, just like Scarlett O'Hara in “Gone with the Wind” except without the big dresses. Tomorrow was another day. In that tomorrow, I followed Fiona and Seán, and I was there with Suzanne - we met at the DNA testing for both of our children in Delhi. Tomorrow was another day and on that tomorrow, we got to hold our child. My promise on that day was that I would dedicate the rest of my life to the service of her happiness, and that is what we do. That includes fighting hard and maybe strongly, and maybe - what were the words that were used about me? - he had to brace himself, although those were not his exact words.