Does surrogacy for single people and gays/lesbians violate children's rights?

[ShyGuyInChicago]

The parliament of the Australian state of Queensland passing a law permitting surrogacy In February 2010. Groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby and the Australian Family Association claim that surrogacy denies a child the right to mother and father.

The Surrogacy Bill 2009 (PDF 623KB) currently before the Queensland Parliament should have been about altruistic surrogacy as a “last resort” for an infertile couple. But no, under that respectable cloak this Bill smuggles in a radical proposal to deprive children of their birthright - their fundamental right to enter the world, as most of us did, with both a mother and a father.

By what authority does any government permit adults to deny a child her most profound emotional need: to have both a Mum and a Dad in her life?

This Bill allows all Queensland adults aged over 25 (including a single man or woman, or same-sex couples) to obtain a child “of their own” using reproductive technology like IVF and a surrogate womb. The birth certificate will be legally falsified to declare the single adult, or the same-sex couple, to be the baby’s true “parents”.

Under this Bill, two men are allowed to bring a baby girl into the world with the full intention of denying that child even the possibility of a mother in her life. Likewise, this Bill will help a single infertile woman to obtain a surrogate baby boy for herself, condemning that baby to live without even the possibility of a father.

That is wrong. We know as surely as we know anything that a baby needs a Mum and a Dad. Certainly, there are tragedies where a child cannot have both parents - through the death or desertion of a partner - but we would never wish that sadness on a child. This oppressive Bill sets out intentionally to inflict the loss of a parent on a surrogate child.

Australian ethicist Professor Margaret Somerville condemns this deliberate destruction of the child’s biological identity:

It is one matter for children not to know their genetic identity as a result of unintended circumstances. It is quite another matter to deliberately destroy children’s links to their biological parents, and especially for society to be complicit in this destruction.

A group of young adults deprived, as babies, of the possibility of knowing a father (through anonymous artificial insemination) have come together as Tangled Webs Inc. They speak with authority (PDF 92KB) for the next generation of children - the next stolen generation - who will be deprived of what they call, very poignantly, a “whole mother”:

A child’s best interests are served when it is conceived and gestated by; born to and nurtured by, one mother. To fragment maternal roles through ova donation/gestational surrogacy is to deny a child its entitlement to a whole mother.

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The UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child (PDF 164KB) affirms that a child must not, “save in the most exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother”, and yet this Bill will do exactly that, in a premeditated way. A little girl must live without a mother, purely to satisfy the desire of two men to have a baby of their own. What then of the rights of the child?

The Surrogacy Bill 2009 despises those rights; it is an assault on the heart and mind of a little child, and any MP who votes for it is complicit in that assault.

A few of us GPs, lawyers, ethicists and others have been sufficiently provoked by this assertion of adult “choice” over childhood “need”, to mount a campaign against it, at www.KidsRightsCount.org.au. At the time of writing, it appears likely that the government Bill will prevail, but that the Opposition may commit, in government, to repealing the provisions that allow a child to be conceived with the prior intention of denying that child a mother, or a father - i.e. single and same-sex surrogacy.

The Queensland opposition had tabled its own Bill to separate the question of same-sex surrogacy from the question of surrogacy for an infertile couple, but Premier Anna Bligh has rejected their position, and says that all adults - even single adults and same-sex couples - have the same right as a married couple to “the opportunity to be a parent”. Her attitude trashes marriage, and tramples on the genuine right of a child to have both a mother and father; I can only hope she does not understand the harm she is doing.

As to the nature of this harm, evidence from social science is of only secondary importance. Certainly the best-designed studies confirm the obvious - that a child does best in every objective respect when raised by his or her own parents, or in the nearest equivalent context of an adopting mother and father. In the light of this research, the American College of Pediatricians in 2004 concluded:

The environment in which children are reared is absolutely critical to their development. Given the current body of research, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by reproductive manipulation. This position is rooted in the best available science.

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However, nobody needs to resort to "the best available science" to defend the obvious insight that a little child needs both a mother and a father. The judgment of anyone who cannot see this as a self-evident fact of life, as the most primal and necessary condition of a child’s wellbeing, is suspect.

The government knows - because we have told them - that the denial of a child’s right to have both a mother and father through open-slather surrogacy is an issue upon which groups like the Family Council of Queensland, of which I am a committee member, will go to the barricades.

Yet there points of agreement with the Government on aspects of our laws on surrogacy that should be amended. In an interview (7MB, QuickTime) I had with the Attorney-General, Cameron Dick, on ABC radio, he argued that this Bill is necessary to remove the current penalty of imprisonment for couples who obtain a surrogate child. We agree that it is not in the interests of an innocent child for his carers to be imprisoned, and so we support that change, but not through this Bill: change can be achieved by amending existing surrogacy laws.

Likewise the only other two valid motives in this Bill are to give a surrogate child the same certainty as other children regarding inheritance rights - but this can be achieved by amending the Succession Act - and to give legal certainty of guardianship - but that is provided for already through Family Court parentage orders.

There is no necessity for the Surrogacy Bill 2009. There is a grave necessity - and duty - to reject Bills like this around the country that would, through normalising same-sex and single surrogacy, intentionally and wantonly deprive a child of her birthright and her most profound psychological need: to have both a mother and a father.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10049

Such groups have as said in the article have likened surrogacy to the Stolen Generation where Aboriginal children with white blood were taken from their families to be assimilated into white society. I thought that was notable. Do you agree?

[Amnesiac]

I hate the Australian Family Association, and nobody else likes them either.

There are thousands of children without parents or with only one parent, and they worry about this? When other children are actually suffering?

[Fiending_the_freedom]

Gay parents deserve a chance to be parents too.
Thats my opinion.
In fact I want to become an adoption counselor specializing in gay couples adoption.

[Jess]

exactly. there are so many children without any parents or only one, so there's nothing wrong with gay parents adopting.

[Kaius]

A persons sexuality has nothing to do with their parenting skills. Gay couples deserve the right to parent a child. Having children is a natural thing for all humans, whether straight, bisexual, gay or lesbian.

[The Batman]

You can't choose your parents.

[ShyGuyInChicago]

I found this.

http://www.kidsrightscount.org.au/faqs/#10

3. What harm could surrogacy cause to the child?

Surrogacy may result in harm to the child whom the birth-mother relinquishes, breaching a natural bond and potentially leading to identity problems in the child.

Children born as a result of a surrogacy contract are likely to share the “identity bewilderment” experienced by children born as a result of donor insemination. Recent accounts written by adults who were conceived as a result of donor insemination describe the profound problems of identity and belonging they experienced both as children and as adults.1 Some of these problems were related to secrecy – not being told the truth about their origins but intuiting that they were different. However, problems also persisted after the truth was revealed or discovered, including a longing to know the absent genetic parent.

Issues of identity, belonging and wantedness are likely to be important for children conceived as a result of a surrogacy contract. They may yearn to know, “Who am I? How could my mother give me away?”

In a submission to the New South Wales Legislative Council Inquiry into Altruistic Surrogacy in 2008 by Tangled Webs Inc., this group of donor-conceived persons argue, on the basis of their lived experience, that:

A child’s best interests are served when it is conceived and gestated by; born to and nurtured by, one mother. To fragment maternal roles through ova donation/gestational surrogacy is to deny a child its entitlement to a whole mother.

These voices should be sufficient to dissuade the Queensland Government from proceeding with the Surrogacy Bill 2009 because they most clearly represent the interests of those children who may be born as a result of the bill.

It must be kept in mind that the Bill would impose this fragmentation of parenthood on the child as a result of an intentional plan formed before the conception of the child, not unavoidably encountered through the exigencies of dealing, after the fact, with a crisis pregnancy.

Other harms to the child that could follow under the Bill include the possible risk of rejection by one or both parties due to disability or other unwanted characteristics. The very fact of “commissioning” a child tends to reduce the child to an object rather than a person in his or her own right. The Bill reaffirms the right of the gestational mother to “manage her pregnancy”.

This includes the possibility of terminating the pregnancy by abortion. Regardless of the limited nature of legal abortion in Queensland, nothing would prevent the birth mother travelling to Victoria or elsewhere where there are no restrictions on abortion. A gestational mother who was a party to a surrogacy agreement could abort the pregnancy in the event of a prenatal diagnosis of disability or imperfection or the non-preferred sex with or without the consent or urging of the intending parent or parents, although she could not be required to do so. A child born with a disability could be rejected by both the commissioning parents and by the birth mother, with no-one willing to take parental responsibility for the child.

Harm may arise if more than one baby were to be conceived when only one baby was desired. In 2001 a UK surrogate mother carrying twins sued a Californian couple who disavowed the contract when she refused to abort one of her unborn babies. Then again, the surrogate mother might take action to end the life of one or more of the unborn twins against the wishes of the intending parents.

A persuasive case against permitting surrogacy was published in the progressive French journal Liberation by Myriam Szejer, a child psychiatrist and Jean-Pierre Winter, a psychoanalyst.

The importance of epigenetics on the physical and psychological development of the fetus is known, as well as the emotional bond between the pregnant woman and the child she is carrying and the deleterious effects of the separation mother and baby at birth… In the case of surrogacy this separation is legally programmed and not the result of a tragedy of life, as in adoption.

We should oppose a practice of which the child is the victim and which opposes the interest of the mother against that of the child, and even of other players. We need to be concerned about the future of all the players in surrogacy: the mother, the baby, but also the husband of the surrogate mother or her own children. The whole family is affected by this act, as would society be as a result of the transformation of the laws on filiation that would derive from it.”

From: “Who Am I? Experiences of Donor Conception” Idreos Education Trust, 2006.

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4. What harm could surrogacy cause to the birth-mother?

The surrogacy agreements that would be facilitated by the Surrogacy Bill 2009 would reduce a woman’s experience of gestational motherhood to a contractual service. This depersonalising of the natural human experience of pregnancy may prove harmful to the birth mother, her family (including her husband and her children) and to the child she is carrying.

In January 1987 the New York Times reported on some of the problems emerging in relation to surrogacy.

A new study on 30 women who had babies as surrogates, for example, found that three of the women were so distraught after giving up the babies that they needed therapeutic counselling. Such psychological counselling is now the exception rather than the rule, a situation some researchers criticise. But interviews with the three women before and during the pregnancy produced no obvious indications that difficulties lay ahead.

‘We cannot predict with any certainty how a surrogate mother will do psychologically, or whether she will decide to keep the child,’ said Philip Parker, the Detroit psychiatrist who has interviewed almost 500 women who sought to become surrogate mothers.

This suggests that the counselling required by the Surrogacy Bill 2009 before a surrogacy arrangement is entered into would not be sufficient to guarantee that birth mothers may not be adversely affected by the surrogacy process.

The formation of a profound bond between mother and child is a natural process that is stimulated, in part, by the hormone oxytocin associated with birth and breast feeding. Surrogacy involves making a decision when the woman is not subject to such influences – before the conception of the child – and then being required by a legal contract to carry out this decision when she is subject to these natural emotions. It is unjust to women to seek to bind them in advance to a decision which may cause them unforeseen but profound distress when it is time to act on it.

This concern applies equally to commercial and altruistic surrogacy and is not eliminated by retaining a birth mother’s right to withhold consent to the transfer of parentage after the birth. Even in this case the very existence of the surrogacy arrangement creates perhaps irresistible pressure to complete the arrangement even if – as proposed in the Bill – the formal right to decline to relinquish the child is retained.

In the case of altruistic surrogacy, the problem may be exacerbated if the birth mother is going to continue to have any close contact with the child, as would be the case with a relative or close friend acting as surrogate mother. This is likely to increase the bond between the birth mother and the child and create confusion and distress for all parties.

On the other hand, the unenforceability of surrogacy contracts in the Queensland Bill mean that the intending parents can change their minds and walk away, leaving the surrogate mother responsible for a baby she did not want to keep.

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5. What harm could surrogacy cause to other children?

Surrogacy also could cause harm to other children of the birth mother. Existing children of the woman acting as a surrogate mother may well form a relationship with the new child in the surrogate mother’s womb. These children may then suffer grief on learning that the unborn baby is to be given away and may fear that they also may be given away.

Surrogacy undermines the status of children in general by allowing the very existence and life of the child to be the object of a contract – whether enforceable or not – between parties. The notion that a child’s parentage can be determined by a contract, rather than by birth or an adoption procedure in which the best interests of the child are paramount, is subversive of the child’s right to identity and security.