[Australia] - Australian Gay Surrogacy Ban Shelved: Why It Had To Fail - Brian Manning (Circle Surrogacy)

The following is a comment from Brian Manning from Circle Surrogacy on the Queensland Surrogacy ban.

[Source: Circle Surrogacy]

Queensland’s Liberal National Party has shelved its plans to ban surrogacy for gay couples and single people, according to the Brisbane Times. The Attorney-General had announced the party’s intention to restrict the practice to married heterosexual couples in the Australian state last June. Like most Australian states and territories, Queensland allows only altruistic surrogate mothers.

But the LNP no longer plans to introduce the restrictions. There is no mention of the party’s plans to address surrogacy in the party’s most recent agenda.

Apparently not everyone in the ruling party had been in favor of or even aware of the plans before the Attorney-General announced them. ‘‘It was a brain snap, some of us could not believe what was happening,’’ a member of the caucus said.


So why the reversal?

Less than a year later, the plans have been shelved. Why?

People worldwide are learning that families come in all forms — and that having caring parents is what’s important, not necessarily having one mom and one dad.

Lower houses in the United Kingdom and France passed marriage equality bills this February that are on their way through the legislative process. In the United States, as the Supreme Court considers whether the federal government can discriminate against married gay couples through the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a recent poll shows that 58% of Americans now believe that it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to get married.

And children raised by same-sex couples fare just as well as their counterparts raised by opposite-sex couples. A new study from the University of Cambridge showed that “children adopted by gay or lesbian couples are just as likely to thrive as those adopted by heterosexual couples.”

Banning gay couples from pursuing surrogacy is homophobia.

It’s that simple. Where surrogacy is legal for some, it should be legal for all. It’s unfortunate that the Liberal National Party announced its homophobic plans in the first place. But the plans were doomed to fail from the start.

[Source: Circle Surrogacy]