• Resources

    Empower yourself with knowledge on this issue!

    Doctors, lawyers, ethicists and others argue against surrogacy and same-sex parenting

    SOURCE DOCUMENTS

    • Find the Queensland Surrogacy Bill 2009 here, and the Explanatory Notes here.

    • Read the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child here

    ANALYSIS

    SEE and HEAR some our experts on the issue on our MULTIMEDIA page

    1. Read critiques of surrogacy and same-sex parenting by member-groups of the Family Council of Queensland, who support the campaign KidsRightsCount:

    • Alan Baker, Family Council President, writes in the Courier Mail

    The best interests of children are paramount and supersede any perceived ”right” same-sex couples may claim to parent children. Read more

    • Ray Campbell, Director Queensland Bioethics Centre, Family Council vice-president, critiques the Bill

    The present legislation seeks to redefine parenthood from being a biological reality to being a legal construct.  It turns parenting into some kind of contract.  Enshrined in law such a position undermines all families, not just those brought into being through surrogacy. Read more

    • Family Voice Australia on the harms of surrogacy and same-sex parenting

    There are inherent and unavoidable harms from surrogacy, especially to the child who is the subject of the arrangement, but also to other children, to birth mothers and fathers. These harms are sufficiently serious to warrant a public policy which deters surrogacy. Read more

    • Australian Family Association on the ‘black hole of children’s rights’

    In light of the harm which surrogacy causes to children, and the serious breaches of children’s rights which surrogacy entails, a government whose policy merely regulates surrogacy, and even facilitates it, is complicit in the harm caused and the breaches committed. Read more

    • Australian Christian Lobby on holding MPs accountable

    While it is probably not possible to stop the decriminalisation of altruistic surrogacy for heterosexual couples, the Government’s determination to allow surrogacy for homosexual couples will breach the fundamental right of every child to at least begin life with a mother AND father. Read more

    • Dr David van Gend, GP and Queensland secretary of the World Federation of Doctors who Respect Human Life, on the need to say no to same-sex parenting

    Nothing less is at stake than that an innocent child, first opening her eyes in this world, should see the faces of those two people, her own mother and father, who together gave her life, not the faces of two men who will be her technologically-contrived, State-decreed “parents”. Read more

    2. Read critiques of the Surrogacy Bill 2009 by other Australian doctors, ethicists and academics:

    • Dr Rob Pollnitz, paediatrician, on surrogacy and the needs of a child

    I believe that legalising surrogacy carries the risk of creating another “stolen generation”, like those children of adoption and artificial insemination who feel a deep unmet need to know their lost biological parents and possible siblings. Read more

    • Professor Margaret Somerville AM, ethicist, on surrogacy being intrinsically wrong

    My own view is that surrogacy is not ethically acceptable in principle, and that even if that were not the case its risks and harms, especially to children, to surrogate mothers, and to important societal values far outweigh any benefits or potential benefits, no matter how desperately people want to found a family and use a surrogate mother to do so, and how strong our compassion for them is. Read more

    • More from Professor Somerville, on ‘Brave New Babies’

    I propose that the most fundamental human right of all is a child’s right to be born from natural biological origins… It is one matter for children not to know their genetic identity as a result of unintended circumstances. It is quite another matter to deliberately destroy children’s links to their biological parents, and especially for society to be complicit in this destruction. Read more

    • Professor Tom Frame on “The Ethics of defying Nature’s plan for parenting”

    In terms of altruistic surrogacy, in addition to the pain women feel at having to relinquish a child they have carried, the close proximity of the surrogate to the commissioning couple can make for very complicated and sometime difficult relationships. We need to remember that for a period of nine months the surrogate was the child’s mother and that the in utero bond is a strong one that is neither easily nor readily severed. Read more

    • Women’s Forum Australia submission against surrogacy

    While acknowledging the serious distress experienced by infertile people and the generosity that motivates people involved in surrogacy arrangements, WFA believes that the law should nevertheless discourage altruistic surrogacy. Read more

    3. Read international writers on the inherent wrong of surrogacy and / or the harms of same-sex parenting

    • Dale Leary on “Science, myths, and same-sex parenting”

    Of course, when AID and surrogacy are used to create babies for same-sex couples, these children not being “rescued” from anything. Instead they are being intentionally conceived to be placed in suboptimal situations.  Read more

    • Dr George A. Rekers, Professor of Neuropsychiatry, documents the greater risks for children in a homosexual household

    It is in the best interests of foster children to be placed in foster homes where the adult or adults are exclusively heterosexual because such homes are safe from the kinds of unique stresses and relatively more harmful level of adult psychological disorder inherent to households with a homosexual adult. Read more