DÁIL PASSES BILL WHICH FACILITATES INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL SURROGACY

The Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Bill 2022, which establishes a regulatory framework for the establishment of a regulatory agency to oversee AHR in the state was passed without a vote in the Dáil yesterday. 

It includes measures which limits surrogacy within the state to couples in which the child will have a “genetic link to at least one intending parent,” and that there is no commercial transaction involved.  

However, the Bill also gives legal recognition to children who were born to surrogate mothers outside of the state and provides a framework for the licensing of commercial agencies engaged in international surrogacy. That recognition and the facilitating of such arrangements, all of which are commercial, in the future is in fact the main burden of the legislation.  The proportion of non-commercial arrangements within Ireland is likely to be a much smaller proportion.

It is notable that very few of the media reports on the passing of the legislation referred to the commercial aspects of international surrogacy, nor to any of the considerable criticisms of the practise. 

That avoidance of the monetary aspects is made easier by the fact that the only reference to the commercial nexus is covered by “reasonable expenses.”

Surrogacy involves women in other countries whose motivation is based on their relative and indeed actual poverty in comparison to the people who basically buy the child from the mother. 

The birth mother is engaged by the agencies who for the first time will now have legal status within the Irish state to conduct their business without need to the pretence of “altruistic” motives on the part of the mother or the agency. 

The failure to amend to legislation to presumably make it easier for two men acquire a child through surrogacy was condemned by Irish Gay Dads but not all gay people were demanding such a concession nor supported the overall thrust of the Bill which has been criticised for extending the opportunity for people to contract commercial transactions outside of the state.

The lack of engagement and indeed the fact that the Bill was approved yesterday with no vote called and no attempt to amend it at Report Stage might indeed be described as “shameful.”  It is not the first time that legislation with major implications for the citizens of this state, and indeed in the case of surrogacy of women and children in other jurisdictions, has been passed with a similar lack of scrutiny. 

That was evident all along in regard to the surrogacy Bill which under the rubric of “reasonable expenses” in effect provides for the legalisation of commercial surrogacy in everything other than name – something that is not permitted in most other European states.  

This is most likely regarded by our political establishment as yet another notch ticked on the progressive stick.

The parameters of the debate and the Bill were set by the Oireachtas Committee – on which Senator Sharon Keoghan was the only critical voice – particularly where it recommended in 2022 that “reasonable expenses” include loss of income by the surrogate mother for up to one year.  Clearly a commercial contract between the agency/client and the mother in all but name. Critics pointed out that this would be equivalent in countries such as Ukraine to what agencies pay the surrogates where that is legal in Ukraine and elsewhere. 

Ironically, for all the backslapping of our “progressives” many states are actually tightening up on surrogacy with proposals in some European states that international surrogacy be made a criminal offence. In their haste to shake off more of the shackles of Irish backwardness, the clones of Anglo liberals here are once again late to the party and oblivious to the lessons learned in the countries which they ape. 

As I noted here in November 2022 surrogacy was already a significant economic sector in Ukraine before the war as was indicated by the fact that there were 60 IVF clinics, 500 fertility specialists and 200 embryologists. 

The Russian invasion was regarded by the international agencies as a potential threat to their income flow and there have been rather strange situations, including in Ireland as I mentioned, where the surrogate mother as a refugee ended up living with the couple who were waiting to buy the child she bore.

Under what possible banner of “progress” and “equality” and all the other meaningless twaddle much beloved of our liberal establishment is such a thing not reminiscent of not just unequal but servile relationships between human beings supposedly consigned to the dustbin of history by “progress”?