by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Parliament has legislated itself into a corner when it comes to promoting marriage. The union that creates children and gives them the best start, tied to their married mother and father, is the one no minister dares promote, for fear of being called discriminatory. The silence is thirteen years old, and children are paying for it.
On Monday 7 September, Parliament debates e-petition 763161, which asks that the commissioning adults in a surrogacy arrangement be recognised as a child’s legal parents from birth. More than 112,000 signatures forced the debate. C4M opposes this petition – see what it asks.
It was started by a male couple whose adopted child was born through surrogacy. Their own words are: “we became dads the moment we held her”. The woman who carried and bore that little girl appears exactly once in the petition – as the legal obstacle. “But under current law”, it complains, “the surrogate is automatically recognised as the legal mother”. That recognition is what they are asking Parliament to remove. The girl was created to be raised with no mother – on purpose, not by tragedy – and the petition now asks Parliament to finish the job by erasing the mother from the birth record itself, before the child’s first breath.
In 2008 Parliament took the child’s “need for a father” out of the welfare test – the law now asks only for “supportive parenting” – and a child’s birth certificate has been able to record two women, and no father, from birth ever since. The father was written out first. The debate on Monday is the mother’s turn. Make the commissioning couple the legal parents from birth and it is their names the register takes. A child’s birth certificate would then show two fathers, at most one of them her own blood, and no mother at all.