A set of amendments to the Assisted Reproduction Act (人工生殖法) is listed as a priority bill for the new legislative session. The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) held its first public hearing on Tuesday to gather opinions on expanding eligibility for assisted reproduction and the legalization of surrogacy.
Currently, married heterosexual couples have access to assisted reproductive procedures such as intrauterine insemination and in vitro fertilization if one of them is diagnosed with infertility or major genetic diseases and the wife can give birth.
The draft act was proposed in 1996, with many discussions on whether surrogacy should be legalized, and was enacted in 2007, but excluded surrogacy.
With the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019, calls for amendments began to resurface. Assisted reproduction is limited to married heterosexual couples, so single women and female same-sex couples are not covered. Surrogacy is banned so, married women with uterine conditions and male same-sex couples cannot have a child unless they adopt or seek a surrogate abroad.
The ministry is drafting amendments to the act, which might include surrogacy, Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Jui-yuan (薛瑞元) said in November last year. However, he stressed that the ministry has no fixed position on the expansion of assisted reproduction eligibility and the legalization of surrogacy, but has held specialist meetings and would submit a bill to the Cabinet after holding public hearings.
Government officials, lawmakers, law and medical professionals, religious groups and representatives of children’s rights, women’s rights and same-sex couples’ rights attended the first hearing. The ministry has restated that it has no predetermined goal or schedule set for the bill. The hearing lasted two hours, with a majority of attendants in support of expanding assisted reproductive eligibility to include single women and female same-sex couples.
The most agreed upon opinion was that protecting the rights of children born through assisted reproduction must be prioritized, while the legalization of surrogacy remained highly controversial, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said.
Surrogacy is much more complicated, as it touches on ethical concerns such as the possibility of exploitation when it comes to commercial surrogacy and legal issues such as the protection of the surrogate mother, the intended parents, the child’s rights and the legal definition of parenthood, especially when it comes to genetic surrogacy.
Commercial surrogacy is legal in only a handful of places such as Israel, Georgia, Mexico, Ukraine, Russia and a few US states. Some countries also prohibit transnational surrogacy, while more than a dozen countries allow “altruistic” surrogacy with some eligibility limitations. It remains a controversial topic even in countries where it is legal and changes to the law continue to be made.
The ministry is not ruling out holding more sessions if people cannot reach a consensus, Chou said on Tuesday.
Before the act was promulgated, the Department of Health (now the MOHW) held more than 20 specialist meetings, multiple international roundtable discussions as well as surveys. Nearly two decades later, civic groups and experts still remain divided.
There is nothing wrong with gathering more opinions and being careful, but for legislation to proceed, the ministry has to draw the line somewhere.
These discussions have been going on for almost three decades. Parents must not be made to wait another decade or forced to go abroad for assisted reproduction.
The ministry must decide whether to submit its amendment bill in two phases — addressing the expansion of eligibility first and then tackling surrogacy and its supplementary measures — or to submit a comprehensive bill that encompasses both issues.
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