Ms Natalie Gamble:

I do not think the Greek model works very well on the ground at all. It is one of those places where a person needs a court process before he or she can even see. It is just too onerous to work in practice. The models that work best, and it is slightly different in different states, are the US models whereby everybody has screening, legal advice, counselling, psychological evaluation and enters into an agreement. The law will recognise intention, therefore, it will recognise the people who intend to be the legal parents as being the legal parents. There is then some degree of oversight, however, that those kinds of safeguarding checks and so on have happened pre-conception, whether that is a judicial process during the pregnancy, or, as in the state of Illinois, it is an administrative process where a person simply has to file papers with the local department of health. Having some oversight to make sure the steps happen around the agreement and make sure everything is done properly at that stage, which then enables everyone's intention to be ratified and honoured at the point of birth, is the most efficient and effective way of ensuring ethical surrogacy. Those are the models that stand out to me having seen it work in many different places.

In answer to the Chairman's question about not leaving children behind that have already been born, and Dr. Horsey mentioned this earlier, we have dealt with this quite a few times under UK law. The parental orders came into UK law in 1994 and at the time, people had to be a heterosexual married couple to apply. The law has since been expanded in stages. In 2010, same sex couples and partners who were living together but not married became eligible to apply for a parental order. The new law that was coming in said that if a person either had a child who had been born within the last six months or had a child of any age for the first six months of that law coming into force, he or she could make an application. The same thing happened in 2019 when they expanded it to single parents. Whatever system Ireland decides to go for, whether that is automatic or administrative recognition or a judicial process or whatever, allowing some form of opt-in for a period of time for the parents who have until this point been excluded is a very easy way of fixing that retrospectively.