It is a step too far to obliterate the rights of a biological mother

THERE are two distinct tracks in the Family and Child Relationship Bill which will be debated next week in the Dáil. They are going in two different directions, writes Victoria White.

The first track is about extending guardianship rights to significant people in a child’s life, whether they be an unmarried biological father and partner or a grandmother or a mother’s female partner. The Bill also allows a same-sex couple to adopt as a couple rather than pretending one of them is adopting as a single person.

This is all about recognising reality rather than changing it. The Government and every advocacy agency has been told to spin the legislation as providing for “modern” families because Irish people like to think of themselves as modern and friendly to diversity. But I don’t believe today’s families are really much more diverse than families ever were, particularly in working-class communities. My own grandmother was really the child of her supposed elder sister though her guardians were her grandparents. Her biological father was an “X” on her birth certificate.

Who celebrated the “diversity” of all those families in the West of Ireland whose fathers were entirely absent making a living for most of their children’s lives? What about the families of those thousands of Irishmen who were fighting in the First World War a century ago? They were diverse alright and became a hell of a lot more so if dad didn’t come back.

Allowing same sex couples to adopt is new, though of course gay people have parented other peoples’ children since the dawn of time, often with the help of a partner. But same sex couples will not have any “right” to adopt a child, even if the Referendum passes and they are married because no-one has the “right” to adopt a child. They only have the right to be considered.

The Adoption Board will still have the right to make a tailor-made choice of parents for each individual child who has suffered the cataclysm of the loss of birth parents. In the case of Irish adoptions, this is now a tiny number: of 113 adoptive children in 2013, 89 were adopted by family members.

So far, so good. But on the second track of the proposed Bill I stumble. This is about how we create new realities with Assisted Human Reproduction, as is Minister Varadkar’s proposed Bill on surrogacy.

These bills attempt to establish that biological parents need not be biological parents. The legislation on gamete donation explicitly states that a donor “is not, by reason only of the donation, a parent of the child born as a result.”

It is as if we think you can avoid being a parent if you don’t intend it. As if you can do the business saying, “This will not be my child, this will not be my child” and the child from the resulting sperm is magically not your child. The magic then extends to a man who is living with the woman who receives your donation. He becomes the child’s father, “If he consented to be a parent of a child born as a result of assisted human reproduction and did not withdraw that consent before the child’s conception.” The change to the Bill which bans anonymous gamete donation is welcome. I expect all adoptive children to gain the same right to their birth certificates at the age of 18 forthwith. A donor can still plead against the release of this information saying it may affect the safety or well-being of the donor or the child and the word “well-being” is wide-open to interpretation.

However, that is not my only issue with gamete donation. My problem is that I don’t think a person — or even half a person — should be sold. You can’t sell a person’s heart or liver. Why should you be able to sell sperm? I know you’ll say the donation is “altruistic” but who, except a prankster or a screwball would donate gametes for nothing? And who wants to think of this transaction as their origin — parenthood which is not parenthood because we don’t wish it to be?

Be careful what you wish for. We are in the world of Alice in Wonderland and we go ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ when we look at the question of surrogacy. It was wise of the Government to hive this off for consideration in the Autumn, in the context of the Same Sex Marriage Referendum because for me it is a step too far to obliterate the rights of a biological mother in favour of the mother who gives birth, as the Supreme Court did recently in this country.

The new legislation will put down in black and white that “the parents of a child are his or her birth mother and biological father unless the child has been adopted.” But a child’s biological parents are and will always be his or her biological parents.

They will not always be the best people to bring up that child. That is why we have adoption and fostering.

The intense physical impact and intimacy between a child and his or her birth mother should establish rights but they should not trump those of the biological mother. It is because of this confusion as well as the possible psychological impact of losing the child, to which mothers in our own forced adoption cases can testify, that surrogacy should be banned here, as it is in those outposts of tradition, Germany, France and Austria.

The other reason it should be banned is that it can be yet another way to exploit a poor woman’s body. The proposed ban on “commercial” surrogacy here is welcome, but “expenses” of stg£15,000 to stg£18,000 for nine months’ work sure sound like a job if you’re stuck for cash.

T

he real issue here is our need to own children rather than share them.

I know that it is easy to say that as a mother of biological children and I remember the compulsion to be a mother which gripped me in my late twenties. However I do not think people in the grip of this compulsion — and the service providers waiting to profit from it — are the cool heads needed to debate this legislation.

What we need is an entirely different view of children as our collective responsibility. Children born by gamete donation should be adopted by their non-biological parents and those adoptive parents should have our total respect. Fostering should be encouraged. The childless and the “with child” should open their doors to each other.

How ironic that in the week this Bill was approved by Cabinet, there were protests outside the Dáil gates by childcare workers on slave wages and lone parents pushed out to work when their children are seven with no childcare provision.

There is nothing particularly “modern” about the number of children in our society who desperately need care. We shouldn’t pass a law to rewrite children’s biological history before we give it to them.

You can’t sell a person’s heart or liver. Why should you be able to sell sperm?

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