Doug PollardUS Gaybys Boom Down Under (LINK)
July 1st 2008 22:05
Pic: Freeimages
Between six and eight couples are heading to LA each month to sign up for a baby with The Fertility Institutes, which specialises in making the parenting wishes of gay men come true.
That makes Australia one of their biggest customers, along with the UK.
Paid surrogacy is illegal here. Only altruistic surrogacy, in which the woman carrying the child is not paid, is legal in Australia, and not in every state and territory.
The federal government has no plans to amend the laws to give same-sex couples equal access to fertility treatments or parenting rights. It's a hot-button issue.
A recent bill to extend equal rights to retirement benefits to same-sex partners was shuttled off to a Senate enquiry because some members of the opposition thought its non-discriminatory terminology might open the door to gay marriage, fertility treatment and adoption.
Leader Brendan Nelson said that while the party supported gay couples getting, 'not one cent more and not one cent less' in entitlements than heterosexual couples, his party would oppose anything that led to gay marriage, gay IVF (in vitro fertilisation) and gay adoption.
The Australian Christian Lobby, which has the ear of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is extremely vigilant in opposing anything that could possibly be interpreted as recognising gay relationships as equal to marriage, and vehemently opposed to gay parenting.
The notion of 'buying babies' is distasteful to many: no-one likes to see people treated as commodities, and this privatisation of parenthood could only happen in a country like America, where God and the Dollar are the twin ruling deities.
Paid surrogacy is also distasteful because the very high cost shuts out many gay men who would otherwise also make fine parents.
Parenting ability is not linked to sexuality..Heterosexuals can - and do - have babies with little thought or difficulty.
Australia has recently had a number of high profile cases where women on welfare seem - at least according to the tabloids - to have had babies because the government pays them a bonus to do so. But they lacked the means or ability to care for them, with tragic consequences.
These gay men - at least the couples I know personally - are all high achievers with well-paying jobs, and give their children a great upbringing, education, and a ton of love. Can that be wrong?
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Comment by Josie
Waxing Political
Unique Parent
Comment by Doug Pollard
Rainbow Reporter
De facto couples are treated the same as married couples in both state and federal law.
Federal laws, including taxation, retirement benefits (about 100 laws in total) do not recognise same-sex couples at all, but the federal government has pledged to change that.
The federal Marriage Act was amended by the previous Howard government to define marriage as 'between one man and one woman exclusively, for life' so as to prevent same-sex couples who had married in Canada from using the courts to gain recognition for their marriages in Australia.
The Rudd government is committed to 'equal treatment' of gay and lesbian couples, but will not allow anything that, in their own words 'mimics marriage'.
Both major political parties are opposed to gay marriage, and gay access to fertility treatment and adoption.
Again, the law at state level varies, e.g., some states recognising the non-birth parent and some not, some allowing lesbian couples access to IVF etc. etc.
Paid surrogacy is illegal everywhere here, regardless of your sexuality. The tabloids write about 'rent-a-womb' schemes.
The overall effect is that only very determined and/or wealthy gay and lesbian couples can have children, and the legal status of those children remains uncertain. However, as anyone who has been to Pride marches and the like is recent years can attest, gay parents now form a growing segment of the gay community.
Comment by Josie
Waxing Political
Unique Parent
Its a true shame that gay parents can't adopt. I've seen so many good ones myself. I geuss some of that old "gay parents will have gay kids or harm children" myth is still standing with some. Not to plug myself, but I actually just wrote the other day about gay adoption: "Some point to studies that show that children raised by a married mother and father do better than children raised without one or the other. The flaw in using those studies is that they only discuss a situation where a parent is absent. In the case of same-sex families, there are two parents present. More recent studies have shown that there is no difference (better or worse) between kids raised by two heterosexual parents and kids raised by two homosexual parents. To strike down the super-assumptions that alot of older people have- no, they are no more likely to be gay and no more likely to be molested."
Lets hope progress moves quickly for all those deserving parents to be!