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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2732 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

ethical dilemmas that are created by legislating in response to emotional arguments rather than basing the legislation on empirical data or response to a reasoned community debate.

As the Legislative Assembly is being asked to consider this bill in the absence of both, I sought advice from bioethics institutes on the issues involved. That advice confirms to some extent what we already know-that we are in uncharted waters and, to some extent, running before the wind, to an unknown destination.

The advice I have received, not all of which I necessarily accept, Mr Speaker, has been summarised as follows.

Surrogacy arrangements create dilemmas that would not have existed in the same form before IVF technology, some of which is morally problematic in its own right, became available. Resolution of the surrogacy dilemmas therefore cannot be reached without attention to the moral legitimacy of the combining of egg and sperm outside the human body.

Passage of this bill establishing a procedure for the granting of "parentage orders" would be to grant moral, as well as legal, legitimacy to surrogacy arrangements in principle.

Granting moral and legal legitimacy to surrogacy arrangements in this way makes it apparent that personal choice overrides the moral principles guiding some of these deep and valuable human activities.

The bill proposed by the Chief Minister rests upon several assumptions, and one of these is that individuals are fully aware of the central issues arising from their decisions and are able to make free choices. The question of free choice in the most straightforward of cases is, of course, always problematic.

The anguish felt by the genetic parents at not being the legal parents of the resulting child is only one of the potential problems arising from surrogacy arrangements. Remedying this one aspect by law will leave unattended other more complex issues which cannot be dealt with by law.

A formal legal avenue for parentage orders to be issued to the genetic parents over the birth parents, even though agreed to by all adults involved, diminishes the meaning of in-utero development and the relationship between mother and developing child. The deliberate separation between nature and nurture cannot be without consequence.

That, Mr Speaker, is a summary of advice that I received. As I said at the outset, I do not necessarily accept the thrust of some of this summary, but it is a summary of the issues as presented to me and it does highlight the range of issues that have not been fully or appropriately considered in the ACT or in this Assembly in the context of debates that we have previously had about surrogacy and the surrogacy laws that apply here. So I mention that range of issues as encompassing the sorts of issues that I do not believe have been fully explored.

In addition to that advice, I note that the ethical guidelines on assisted reproductive technology issued by the National Health and Medical Research Council in 1996 state:

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