This article examines the new Model Act on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), which was approved by the American Bar Association in February, 2008.
This proposed Model Act is the work of the American Bar Association Section of Family Law's Committee on Reproductive and Genetic Technology. It has been approved by the Section Council. The sections dealing with parentage are intended, as much as possible, to be consistent with and to track the corresponding provisions of the Uniform Parentage Act of 2000, as amended in 2002.
These explanatory notes relate to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 which received Royal Assent on 13 November 2008. They have been prepared by the Department of Health in order to assist the reader of the Act. They do not form part of the Act and have not been endorsed by Parliament.
Legislative restrictions on the sale of organs, gametes and surrogacy services are often seen as having no basis other than mere prejudice or taboo. This paper argues instead that they can be read as instances of a broader decommodification of healthcare provision established in Britain with the creation of the NHS in 1948. Restrictions on the marketisation of medicine were justified by Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, and by Richard Titmuss, one of its chief academic defenders, in distinctly utopian terms. On this vision, the NHS would function as a utopian enclave prefiguring an idealised non-capitalist future. This commonsense of post-war medicine was fatally destabilised by fiscal crisis and social critique in the 1970s. Influential comme
This paper is a critical analysis of the regulation of surrogate motherhood in Greece; I will discuss the way that a consensus reached in the legislative committee among liberal and conservative jurists on the matter of compensation of surrogate mothers was undermined by intra-party populism in the Greek parliament which banned it to avoid commodification; inevitably the law fell into disuse leading to a new law which allowed government-defined compensation, not the one agreed by the parties; the regulation of surrogate motherhood in Greece is a typical example of the deleterious effects of the combination of legal formalism and legal moralism in contemporary Greece.
A hospital mix-up last January forced would-be mom Carolyn Savage and her husband Sean to make a heartrending decision. Ten days after the Savages went to a fertility clinic to have embryos transferred in hopes of conceiving, they got a devastating phone call. Savage had successfully gotten pregnant, but the baby wasn't hers—the embryo belonged to Detroit-based couple Paul and Shannon Morell. The Savages were stricken. "It was such a nightmare and, in a way, I felt violated," Carolyn Savage told CNN last week. Yet what had the potential to be a scarring and devastating turn of events ended up forging an incredible, if unlikely, bond between two families. Savage decided not to abort the fetus, and to give the biological parents the baby.
A Parental Order transfers parenthood from the surrogate (and her husband or partner if she has one) to the couple who commission the surrogacy arrangement. Parental Orders are currently available to married couples only. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 enables same sex couples and unmarried couples as well as married couples to apply for a Parental Order. Regulations are necessary to set out the processes for the court to grant Parental Orders. This consultation is on the Draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Parental Orders) Regulations. They replace the Parental Orders (Human Fertilisation and Embryology) Regulations 1994 and the Parental Orders (Human Fertilisation and Embryology) (Scotland) Regulations 1994. They will bring the processes for granting Parental Orders more closely into line with updated adoption legislation.
A parental order is made by the family courts and reassigns parenthood after surrogacy, extinguishing the responsibility of the surrogate parents and transferring it to the commissioning couple. The process takes place post-birth: the application must be made within the first six months of the child's life (though the surrogate's consent is ineffective until after the first six weeks) and typically takes many months to be processed by the courts. At present, only married couples can apply, but as from 6 April 2010, unmarried and same sex couples will also be eligible. The Department of Health (DH) is currently consulting on new draft regulations which prescribe the detail of this court process, and which will replace existing regulations that have been in place since 1994. The consultation closes on 23 November.
As of 2008, surrogacy is legal and openly practised in various places; Japan, however, has no regulations or laws regarding surrogacy. This paper reports the situation of surrogacy in Japan and in five other regions (the USA, the UK, Taiwan, Korea and France) to clarify the pros and cons of prohibiting surrogacy, along with the problems and issues relating to surrogacy compensation.
OTTAWA — A Supreme Court ruling placing much of Canada's burgeoning fertility industry under provincial control leaves an enormous gap in the regulation of artificial procreation and exposes women who use the technologies and the children born from them to potential harm, critics say. A sharply divided court struck down key federal powers to regulate assisted human reproduction Wednesday, concluding that several parts of a new law fall under provincial jurisdiction over health care. The ruling effectively stops a federal move toward national standards and guts Assisted Human Reproduction Canada — an embattled federal agency that was struck four years ago to monitor how assisted procreation is carried out at more than two dozen fertility clinics across the country.
A serving High Court judge has told the BBC that he is approving commercial surrogacy agreements made by British couples abroad. Laws in the UK are designed to try to prevent such arrangements, but Mr Justice Hedley said his paramount concern was the welfare of the child. The most recent case the judge approved was last month, involving a baby born to a surrogate in the Ukraine. The judge said he was "extremely anxious" about the current situation. In Britain, the judge said, the only payment allowed to a surrogate mother was one of "reasonable expenses". However, he has agreed to give retrospective approval for commercial surrogacy on at least four occasions.
With surrogacy costing up to $70,000 in the US compared to only $12,000 in India, many Western women are outsourcing pregnancy abroad. It's a multi-million dollar industry that sees rural Indians receive the equivalent of 10 years' salary. Over the course of nine months, we follow the lives of two women, who in each other seek solutions to the problems of poverty and infertility, and explore whether it's a relationship that is exploitative or mutually beneficial.
The high cost of surrogacy in Europe and the US means many Western women are outsourcing pregnancy abroad. Carolina, from Ireland, travelled to India to pay Sonal to carry her baby. The World Service's Your World followed the two women as they came to terms with the emotional costs of the surrogacy.