Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 3171 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

They continue:

(2) Adoption is a service for children, not for adults wishing to acquire the care of a child.

I support that view. They go on:

(3) Adoption is only one of a range of substitute care services.

That is certainly the case. As I said, I do not understand why we have not used the Adoption Act in this case, and that is one matter that I think needs to be explored a great deal further. In discussion with Dr Stafford-Bell in the Legal Affairs Committee on the question of surrogacy, from the notes I have of our discussion I understood very clearly that we would be looking at an amendment to the Adoption Act to cover babies born under his program, not some completely separate set of legislation.

We also need to look at why we have not used the Family Law Act to deal with children born out of these surrogacy arrangements. It is entirely possible under the Family Law Act to make custody and guardianship orders, including permanent custody and guardianship orders. Again, I need to see why that has been considered an unsuitable course of action to take. I accept that the Family Law Act is a Commonwealth Act, not an ACT Act. Nevertheless, it is an Act that has been tried and tested over many years now, and I believe that it could have been a preferable course of action to take.

There are other issues, both practical and philosophical, beneath the surface of this issue that we could debate at length, and I am sure that the Community Law Reform Committee will want to look at some of them. One that concerns me is that the Bill Mrs Carnell has introduced appears, contrary to all other practice, to confer rights on the donors of gametes - I shall call them gametes, but they are in fact any sort of anatomical specimens - rights that do not exist in other circumstances, and I think this is worth exploring as well. People who donate blood do not expect to have any rights over the person who receives their blood; people who donate bone marrow do so from purely altruistic impulses, as do people who donate a kidney. You do not expect to have any control over the life of the person to whom you have made the donation. But, in the case of a surrogacy arrangement, the donation to a surrogate of the sperm and ova and what have you by its very nature does impose rights on the donors, and I find that a strange set of circumstances.

I also do not believe that it can be said in every case that this is a purely altruistic arrangement. By allowing non-commercial surrogacy, it may well be that we are simply turning a blind eye to what could be a quite commercial relationship, and there is no way of our knowing whether that is the case. In relation to donation of other organs and bodily fluids and so on, it has long been the tradition in Australia that there should be no payment, nor should there ever be any sale or commercial transaction in those organs. I think the surrogacy arrangement we are looking at here sails very close to the wind in terms of a commercial transaction. There is a principle there that needs to be explored much more thoroughly than I am equipped to do and much more thoroughly than perhaps we have the time to do.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .