A new report for Government recommends “exceptionally liberal” legal recognition of domestic surrogacy arrangements, despite the “exploitative” nature of the practice, a Catholic bioethicist has said.
The report by the Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, Prof. Conor O’Mahony, was released April 7 and calls for the introduction of domestic surrogacy.
Surrogacy is where a woman agrees to carry, and gives birth to, a child on behalf of other intending parents, and relinquishes care of the child and all rights of parentage and parental responsibility to them.
Although the report says any legalisation would be heavily regulated, bioethicist David Mullins said it “fails to take account of the seriousness of the international situation”.
“Internationally, the majority of the moves have been toward banning it because once you introduce it, it’s very hard to regulate,” Mr Mullins said.
“It’s hard to save people from exploitation because cultural acceptability creeps in. That’s what will happen here and yet the report is calling for exceptionally liberal regulations.”
Currently, only nine of 43 European countries acknowledge surrogacy arrangements, while 24 ban it outright. There are no regulations in place in Ireland for domestic or international surrogacy.
The report calls for acceptance of the reality of surrogacy, but Mr Mullins said that internationally this is not the case as “it’s not a solution, it ends up being a completely exploitative practice”.
“We have a supreme arrogance about us where we seem to think that we and we alone will be able to introduce sufficient safeguards that will protect vulnerable women, that will protect the genetic link, that will protect families – without looking to every other jurisdiction where efforts have been made and failed spectacularly and caused a lot of pain,” Mr Mullins concluded.
Mr Mullins said it is important to tackle the lack of legislation, but surrogacy is “ultimately a commercialisation of the sale of children”.
