The Australian Law Reform Commission has completed a review of the nation’s patchwork of state laws on surrogacy. It will be tabled in Parliament in November. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
The most controversial issue is whether or not commercial surrogacy should be legalised – that is, whether Australian women should be compensated for bearing other people’s babies. Currently, both gay and straight couples typically engage women overseas in countries such as the United States, Colombia, Ukraine, Kenya, or Georgia.
This often involves legal complications because the child is not automatically an Australian citizen. Proponents say the process would be much simpler and safer if commercial surrogacy were permitted here.
One of the world’s leading opponents of commercial surrogacy is Olivia Maurel, a product of the first generation of children born after IVF enabled a worldwide $US14 billion surrogacy industry. She was born to an American surrogate mother engaged by a French couple.
Ms Maurel, a 34-year-old married mother of three living in southern France, is the executive director and spokesperson of The Casablanca Declaration Association, an international coalition of opponents of surrogacy.
She is campaigning for the complete abolition of surrogacy.
She contends in her book, In Search of My Mother: The Poignant Testimony of a Woman Born through Surrogacy, “Fifty million people are currently still enslaved, worldwide. Does this mean we should bring back laws regulating slavery? No. Never. Even if abolition remains imperfect, it is still our aim. And the same goes for surrogacy.”
Ms Maurel said she was grateful to her legal parents for her privileged upbringing, but children need something more.
“A child also needs truth, identity, a coherent understanding of where she comes from and, I believe, the right not to have fundamental relationships decided for her by contract before she is even born,” she said.
In the process of preparing its review of surrogacy, the ALRC received several submissions from young teenagers. They all said that the best thing about surrogacy was that “I exist”.
“I am glad I exist, too! But saying ‘I exist’ does not prove that surrogacy is right,” Ms Maurel said.
“When I criticise surrogacy, I am not saying that children born through surrogacy should not exist. I am saying that adults should not have the right to organise in advance a pregnancy, the separation of a child from the woman who carried him, and his transfer to other adults.”
FULL STORY
Don’t regulate surrogacy. Abolish it, says daughter of surrogate mother (By Michael Cook, The Catholic Weekly)
