One of Australia's highest judicial officers says commercial surrogacy should be legalized here. The latest case involves twins born to a surrogate mother in India. “We have laws in some of the states and territories in Australia which make it illegal to enter into commercial surrogacy overseas and yet parents do that knowing it's in breach of the law”, says judicial officer.
Parents come back into Australia with the children, the Australian Government gives them visas and then they seek orders from the Family Court, all knowing that they've breached the law and at the moment those laws are not being enforced and, as Judge Pascoe said, I think that's a very message to give. It puts the courts in a difficult position. It's a bad message to give to society. If we have laws then we ought to enforce them. If we're not going to have laws, let them be repealed.
If the Family Court has to deal with cases when the children are already here and brought here and it has to make an order which is in the best interests of the child and that will usually be that the children should remain with the parents who've brought them here. But it's in the knowledge that laws are being broken and it's often in the knowledge that there are questionable practices happening in the other country.
One of my great concerns about surrogacy is the breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child for children who are born in arrangements whereby they do not know about one half of their genetic material. They don't know who their biological mother is in most cases and in some of these cases where a child might be born in India or Thailand for example, eggs are provided and acquired from the Ukraine or other places that eggs are available from freely, so there is absolutely no chance that those children will ever know who their biological mother was. And I think as Australians, we're being quite reckless about children's futures because we know from experience that children who are adopted want to know their biological parents when they become adults. We also know more recently that children who are the children of sperm donors want to know who their fathers are and we are not creating a number of children who, it seems to me in about 20 years time are going to want to know about their mothers, their birth mothers, and there is absolutely no chance that they will ever know anything about them.
There's an international convention on adoption and that's meant that there are a lot more checks and balances as far as adopting children is concerned, as it should be, but it means usually that there are not babies available anymore for adoption because by the time the checks and balances have gone through, the children are perhaps 18 months or two years old. And we know that people want babies and at the same time we have a growth in technology and the ability to acquire surrogate children and I think the two things have meant that people will make use of technology if it's available.
So we're faced with this and we have to find ways of dealing with it and I think one of the ways is to regulate it within Australia so it would be available in Australia and it can be controlled properly. ((Chief Justice of the Family Court Diana Bryant)).
Parents come back into Australia with the children, the Australian Government gives them visas and then they seek orders from the Family Court, all knowing that they've breached the law and at the moment those laws are not being enforced and, as Judge Pascoe said, I think that's a very message to give. It puts the courts in a difficult position. It's a bad message to give to society. If we have laws then we ought to enforce them. If we're not going to have laws, let them be repealed.
If the Family Court has to deal with cases when the children are already here and brought here and it has to make an order which is in the best interests of the child and that will usually be that the children should remain with the parents who've brought them here. But it's in the knowledge that laws are being broken and it's often in the knowledge that there are questionable practices happening in the other country.
One of my great concerns about surrogacy is the breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child for children who are born in arrangements whereby they do not know about one half of their genetic material. They don't know who their biological mother is in most cases and in some of these cases where a child might be born in India or Thailand for example, eggs are provided and acquired from the Ukraine or other places that eggs are available from freely, so there is absolutely no chance that those children will ever know who their biological mother was. And I think as Australians, we're being quite reckless about children's futures because we know from experience that children who are adopted want to know their biological parents when they become adults. We also know more recently that children who are the children of sperm donors want to know who their fathers are and we are not creating a number of children who, it seems to me in about 20 years time are going to want to know about their mothers, their birth mothers, and there is absolutely no chance that they will ever know anything about them.
There's an international convention on adoption and that's meant that there are a lot more checks and balances as far as adopting children is concerned, as it should be, but it means usually that there are not babies available anymore for adoption because by the time the checks and balances have gone through, the children are perhaps 18 months or two years old. And we know that people want babies and at the same time we have a growth in technology and the ability to acquire surrogate children and I think the two things have meant that people will make use of technology if it's available.
So we're faced with this and we have to find ways of dealing with it and I think one of the ways is to regulate it within Australia so it would be available in Australia and it can be controlled properly. ((Chief Justice of the Family Court Diana Bryant)).
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