Immoral use of artificial insemination, surrogacy

I have read and reflected on the thoughts of Church of Ireland Bishop Burrows of Ossory supporting the Government’s marriage referendum proposals. I see four moral principles as key to analysing the referendum choice:

1. Every child has a right to both know, and also to be reared by, their own mother and father.

2. To freely deprive any child of either of those basic rights is to inflict a grave wrong on them.

3. Nobody has any moral right to either sell, abandon or donate either their own child, or their own eggs or sperm to anybody else.

4. While marriage, as clearly understood in the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is based on the union of a man and a woman, violates none of those three fundamental principles, each of those are violated if a same-sex union is treated as identical to the universal model of marriage, and thus enabled to acquire children the only way they can — by surrogacy or AID (artificial insemination by donor).

Since I consider both surrogacy and AID as morally objectionable, as I have outlined, I consider that to further increase the incidence of them, which is guaranteed by same-sex marriage, is equally objectionable, and that is my sole reason for voting no.

Tom Carew

Ranelagh

Dublin 6