Leo van Doesburg

Petra De Sutter collaborates directly with a commercial surrogacy clinic in India On the 15 th of March, the Social Affairs and Health Committee (SOC) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) will convene again to vote and discuss on the Report: “Human rights and ethical issues related to surrogacy”. As we saw in a previous post on my blog, the author of this report, Mrs Petra De Sutter, a Belgian parliamentarian and the head of the Department for Reproductive Medicine at the University Hospital of Ghent (a country where surrogacy is legal) is campaigning for creating a legal framework on surrogacy for surrogacy activities she is conducting herself. De spite the fact that these facts have long ago been made public, Mrs De Sutter still remains the rapporteur for this report as an attempt to have a secret vote on the suspicion of conflict of interest failed to gather the necessary majority at SOC.  New information that was revealed in a Huffington pos...

A short review of the ethical and human rights issues related to surrogacy Introduction   On the 2 nd and the 3 rd of May the organization ‘Men having Babies’ (MHB) organized a controversial meeting in Brussels. MHB is an LGBTI (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual and Intersex) friendly organization that wants to enable gay couples to have children. Of course this is naturally impossible, so they use the services of surrogate mothers who carry the child of one of the men. Simply by browsing on their website  you can see that for a bit more than 100000 US dollars you can proceed with 'obtaining' your own child. Usually these processes take place in developing countries like India. Lately, many groups and movements (especially those that are LGBTI related) are pushing for a legal framework that allows and facilitates surrogacy. For example, the rapporteur on a report on surrogacy by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE); someone who supposedly ha...