“Surrogacy is the new frontline in the trafficking and commodification of women and newborn children,” warned former Chief Justice of the Family Court, John Pascoe.
Judge Pascoe’s role in the Family Court required him to daily consider the best interests of children caught up in a range of difficult family situations, so a statement like this should grab the attention of anyone interested in the rights of children.
This includes our NSW politicians, who will debate Alex Greenwich’s so-called “equality bill” in a fortnight’s time. It seeks to liberalise our surrogacy laws to make international commercial surrogacy arrangements legal.
Judge Pascoe took aim at international surrogacy in particular. “The international commercial surrogacy market can be, and is being, used by people ill-suited to be parents, driven by cash with no oversight by any regulating body, and likely to expose vulnerable women and children to terrible abuse,” he said, claiming that it was morally reprehensible for rich countries to allow poor women overseas to be exploited in a way that was not permitted for women in their own countries.
His comments were made in September 2014, just weeks after the Baby Gammy scandal broke. Baby Gammy, you may recall, was born to Pattaramon Chanbua, a 21-year-old Thai woman who was commissioned as a surrogate by Australian parents, David and Wendy Farnell. Gammy was a twin to another baby girl, Pipah. Gammy was diagnosed with Down Syndrome in utero. After his birth, the Farnells returned to Australia with Pipah, leaving Gammy in Thailand in the care of the surrogate mother and her husband.
At the time, it was alleged that the Farnells had wanted Gammy to be aborted and, when the surrogate mother refused, they refused to take him home. The Farnells always denied this, saying instead that the surrogate mother insisted on keeping Gammy and threatened to keep both children if they did not agree. Years later, the West Australian Family Court formally found that the Parnells did not abandon Gammy as alleged.
However, as shocking as the initial allegations about abandonment were, they were not the most troublesome part of this story. It was revealed that David Farnell had been convicted of 22 child sex offences against three young girls between five and 12 years of age at the time of Farnell’s offending. Farnell spent two years in prison as a result. In light of this revelation, the Thai surrogate mother took the couple to court, arguing that Pipah should be returned to Thailand to live with her.
Chief Justice Thackray of the Family Court of Western Australia decided it was in Pipah’s best interests to stay in Australia and live with the Farnells but took the extraordinary step of ordering that Pipah was not to be left alone with her father, David Farnell. The court also required that someone in Pipah’s “safety network” had to read her a book every three months to explain, in child’s terms, her father’s offending and why her relationship with her dad would be different to that of other kids.
In his decision on the case, Chief Justice Thackray took aim at commercial surrogacy, saying the case “serves to highlight the dilemmas that arise when the reproductive capacities of women are turned into saleable commodities … when middlemen rush to profit from the demand of a market in which the comparatively rich benefit from the preparedness of the poor to provide a service that the rich either cannot or will not perform.”
The horrible situation for young Pipah—separated from her birth mother and twin brother, only to endure court-ordered estrangement from a father who was deemed a possible risk to her—was only made possible because Western Australia, unlike NSW, does not prohibit international commercial international arrangements.
The only thing standing in the way of these types of cases happening in NSW is the current strength of our surrogacy laws. Both the Greenwich “equality bill” and the current government-ordered review being conducted by the Department of Communities and Justice are looking to weaken them.
Don’t let them. Please take two minutes to sign this petition.