The NSW Women’s Action Alliance (NSWWAA) has put in a submission to the NSW government for the Government’s review of the Surrogacy Act 2010 and the Status of Children Act 1996.
This review has come in response to an inquiry into an omnibus bill that seeks to amend twenty different laws all at once in NSW, and includes the removal of bans on commercial surrogacy for NSW residents and allowing courts more discretion to grant parentage orders. NSWWAA wishes to foreground our opposition to the proposed amendments. We are not alone in our dismay at these proposals, with a survey on the matter showing that allowing the purchase of children in commercial arrangements outside of NSW would go against the vast majority of what NSW residents want, with 79.93% opposed.
Surrogacy is a sensitive topic that calls for understanding, compassion, and humility in regard to the very personal desire for a family. It also requires an honest and open acknowledgement of surrogacy as a practice that systemically exploits women and children at the population level, and one that inflicts very real harms on women and children at the individual level.
We acknowledge the sadness that can come with not being able to have children, and that this applies to both females and males. But these individual griefs must not outweigh society’s imperative to prevent women and children from being exploited as commodities, as tradable; as such, surrogacy should not be allowed as an option for family formation. We note and appreciate the problems, complexities, and complications that have arisen on account of current laws that permit surrogacy, but we also suggest that these problems disappear when surrogacy is banned, and not allowed as an option.
We note also that the NSW Government in its consultation summary states explicitly that it is committed to consulting with LGBTIQA+ family organisations and advocacy groups on the complexities of family formation through surrogacy arrangements. We hope that the Government also sees women as stakeholders in this debate. In this submission, NSWWAA advocates for the right of women to be treated as a class requiring protection from reproductive exploitation on account of our sex being the one with the capacity to bear children.
Read our full submission, below.
