Creating incentives for the intended parents to do the right thing: - Approaches to safeguarding the human rights of the stakeholders in surrogacy arrangements

In this talk, I will present suggestions and invite to discussions of in which way governmental initiatives in the intended parents’ home countries can contribute to safeguarding the human rights of all the stakeholders in transnational surrogacy arrangements. The idea is to create incentives for the intended parents to choose to engage with surrogacy arrangements abroad that has a high standard for ensuring the rights of the child and the gestational carrier.

Examples of incentives can be tax deductions or subsidies when a surrogacy arrangement is in compliance. (A country like Denmark provides subsidies for the cost, which the adoptive parents have in a transnational adoption process. The suggestion is to extend such rules to surrogacy.) In this way, intended parents can have direct incentives to opt for surrogacy arrangement that observe the requirements for eligibility. Requirements, which can apply from the very beginning of a surrogacy-arrangement, pre-IVF treatment.

The background for considerations of such incentive strategies is that with surrogacy merely post-birth governmental involvement easily fall short. There is little flexibility for applying post-birth recognition mechanism, i.e. – in cases of non-compliance with standards for safe-guarding the rights of the child or the surrogate – denying legal recognition or protection, as such refusals can be in conflict with the best interest of the child principle. An issue which has been accounted for, e.g. in the Verona Principles.

Incentive strategies might therefore be a contribution to balancing the protection of the individual child born through surrogacy with the welfare of those children in general.