AAWAA will be presenting at a major national conference on surrogacy, speaking on a panel that includes Ms Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Ahead of the Melbourne event, to be held on Friday 21 and Saturday 22 August, we are publishing our responses to supplementary questions asked of us by the NSW Legislative Council Select Committee in April and making the case for why women’s rights advocates must be consulted as stakeholders in surrogacy law reform.
When Parliament or law reform commissions examine surrogacy, they are encouraged to think in the language of ‘balance’: intended parents, clinics, lawyers, counsellors, and women who carry pregnancies are all presented as stakeholders whose interests must be managed within a difficult but legitimate field of ‘fertility support’. But that framing already releases too much. It assumes that surrogacy is a normal policy domain to be legislated and administered, rather than a threshold question about whether the State should recognise and help construct a practice that uses one woman’s reproductive capacity for the planned relinquishment and transfer of a child.
That is one reason women’s advocacy organisations should not be treated as just one voice among many. Where the questions are about women’s exploitation, commodification and sex-based protections and rights, as well as the legal construction of reproductive markets, women’s organisations are not simply expressing a preference. We are key stakeholders who bring a form of structural analysis that is often missing when public debate is dominated by individual stories, service-provider interests, or the language of access, optimisation, and ‘lived experience’.
In NSWWAA’s supplementary responses to the NSW Select Committee on Fertility Support and Assisted Reproductive Treatment, that distinction became especially clear. We argued that Parliament should not see itself as the steward of a reproductive market, because such markets are not natural facts. They exist only because the law permits them, structures them, and gives them legal meaning through rules around parentage, contracts, payments, brokerage, and recognition. That means Parliament is not merely managing competing interests inside an existing system. It is deciding whether this kind of system should exist at all.
Once that is understood, the role of women’s advocacy bodies appears differently, also. A group such as AAWAA, NSWWAA’s peak body, is not simply attending as one more interested party. We are raising fundamental questions about who bears the health risks of surrogacy, whose body is being used, how parenthood is legally rearranged, how ‘altruistic’ language can obscure coercion or dependency, and what happens when the State starts to normalise pregnancy as a service for others. Those are not incidental concerns: they adhere to the nature of the practice itself.
There is also a second issue here, and it is a democratic one. Women’s organisations are often required to prove that we are formal, serious, and properly constituted before our evidence is treated with the same weight routinely granted to industry, institutional or individual actors. In the supplementary questions to our hearing appearance, NSWWAA was asked directly about its governance arrangements. The answer made clear that NSWWAA is part of a federated national body with a board of directors, formal membership, constitutional rules, officeholder roles, and an organisational model designed for accountability and durable national advocacy. It is also already engaged across State, federal and international forums, including major consultations and expert processes.
That matters not because governance is a side point, but because it reveals whose authority is presumed and whose must constantly be demonstrated. When women’s advocacy bodies are treated as marginal, informal, or merely ideological, public institutions risk excluding precisely the voices most likely to ask the prior questions: what kind of practice is this, who is made vulnerable by it, and what obligations does the State owe to women and children?
AAWAA has made a similar point in other policy settings. A recent example can be seen in our Tasmanian mental health submissions, where we argued that sex-based women’s organisations should be included in advisory, roundtable, implementation and review processes, and warned that some consultation structures selectively include only those organisations whose positions fit prevailing frameworks. As we can see, that concern is not confined to surrogacy; it is part of a wider pattern in which women’s analysis is welcomed only when it does not disturb the assumptions already built into policy.
Surrogacy law reform is not just a debate about one practice. It is also a test of whether Parliament is willing to hear from women’s organisations as serious institutional actors with a distinct form of expertise. If the inquiry treats women’s advocacy bodies as just another stakeholder to be balanced against market participants, it will miss the point. The deeper issue is not how to manage a reproductive market more smoothly, but whether the law should be building such a market at all.