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Ireland to legalize surrogacy
A bill allowing surrogacy has just passed both houses in the Oireachtas, Ireland’s Parliament, and only awaits the President’s signature before it becomes law.
The legalisation of surrogacy means that gay and heterosexual couples and single men and women will be able to commission women to bear children, both in Ireland and overseas. Commercial surrogacy will be banned – but women in Ireland can be compensated with a year’s loss of earnings and with household help, a package which has a very commercial ring to it.
The Bill also regulates international surrogacy. Intending parents from Ireland will be allowed to seek surrogate mothers who reside in an approved list of countries.
Supporters of the legislation are jubilant. “This will finally secure children born via surrogacy’s lifelong relationship with their parents,” said Senator Mary Seery Kearney, a surrogacy campaigner whose daughter was born from surrogacy.
But critics maintain that it is betraying Ireland’s children. As one politician, Eric Nelligan, complained on X (Twitter): “In 1960s Ireland vulnerable women had their babies taken while desperate couples paid money for this; children didn’t know their heritage and past. In 2024 Ireland brought into law a system that allows rich people buy children from marginalised impoverished women. We are regressing as a society.”
Mr Nelligan is on the money. If you want to see how exploitative contemporary surrogacy can be, Irish voters ought to check out the surrogacy scene in New York, where commercial surrogacy was legalised in 2021.
Nothing illustrates this better than a website set up by Clem & Flo, two French gay men living in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan. They are “looking to grow our family” and want to hire a womb.
The website extolls Clem & Flo’s virtues, as if potential surrogates were looking for a perfect boyfriend rather than a paycheck. Clem is opening a French restaurant and Flo is a consultant in the healthcare industry They are stable yet adventurous, fun-loving, healthy, honest, open, trusting and so much more. They have been together for nine years and married for five.
But now it’s time for them to make a family: “We are excited about welcoming a child into our home. Our commitment to each other and our shared values are the foundation of our family. We will give our child the same values of love, respect, and kindness that have guided us throughout our lives.”
The subtext of this ode to themselves is that gay marriage is normal, healthy, and virtuous. They want a baby and they deserve to have a baby. The baby, however, does not deserve to have a mother.
Another odd couple in the New York area who have already found a surrogate mother is Rev. Keith Voets and Rev. Kevin Morris, two Episcopalian priests who have a two-year-old son. No mention of a mother for the Reverends’ child, either.
One strongly suspects that gay couples like these gentlemen need a child to validate and normalise their relationship. The problem – or one of the many problems -- is that the mother is erased from their child’s life. And not just erased, but treated as a temporarily enslaved person.

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Clem & Flo appear in a different light on Facebook where they set out their conditions for a surrogate. The very first demand they make is that she must be “Open to termination in case carrier’s health is at risk or baby has severe defects putting their quality of life at risk (down’s, etc.).”
These lovely fun-loving guys want the woman to abort the child if they deem it defective. What kind of man would snuff out the life of an innocent Down syndrome child? What kind of father would treat his own child like this? Fatherhood is about unconditional love. Intending-parenthood is about ordering a perfect product and trashing it if it doesn’t live up to expectations.
Clem & Flo’s “love, respect, and kindness” is a sham.
To their chagrin, the Irish are going to discover that deliberately depriving a child of a loving, committed, nurturing mother leads to some very dark places. To lots of couples like Clem & Flo and Keith & Kevin. To treating women as chattels. To treating children as commodities. To corrupting the meaning of motherhood. To exploiting desperate women. To eugenics.
As Josephine Bartosch wrote recently in Unherd: “future generations will look back on the period of legalised surrogacy with horror as we now do the brutal homes where unmarried mothers had their infants ripped from their care”.
What’s happened to Ireland? Any ideas? Tell us in the comments box below.
Michael Cook is editor of Mercator.
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Damian Grant commented 2024-07-02 22:31:05 +1000I think that the vast majority of the Irish people are being terribly ‘lead’ by a woke political elite who are hell-bent on destroying Irish culture, customs and traditions. As with the recent referendem, I’d dearly love to see this measure go to a national vote. On top of everything else, this will be the ‘final straw’ that augurs in the death-knell for any remnant of a stable Irish society in future. Shocking!
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