Family First National Director Lyle Shelton says the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls has confirmed what Family First has argued for years, that no adult holds a right to a child, and he has condemned the Australian Law Reform Commission for failing to turn up to the Melbourne conference where she said it.
Mr Shelton says Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, told The Australian on 21 August that "international law doesn't give you a right to form a family using whatever means", a statement that removes the legal foundation on which the case for expanding surrogacy in Australia has been built. Ms Alsalem was the keynote speaker at "In the name of the Child: The Perils of Surrogate Motherhood for Mother and Baby", hosted in Melbourne by the Association Representing Mothers Separated by Adoption.
The conference was held while the Australian Law Reform Commission completes a review of surrogacy laws commissioned by the Albanese government in 2024, with findings due on 11 September. ALRC president Mordecai Bromberg, who is leading the inquiry, was invited to give a keynote address. Neither Justice Bromberg nor any other member of the commission accepted an invitation to attend. Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence Ged Kearney, initially advertised as opening the conference, was also absent. Former Family Court judge Nahum Mushin, who chaired the working group behind the national apology for forced adoptions, opened the conference in Ms Kearney's place and described the commission's absence as "at least a pity, if not more".
"Three weeks out from handing down findings that will shape how children are made and who they belong to in this country, the Law Reform Commission had a United Nations special rapporteur, surrogate mothers, donor-conceived adults and adoptees gathered in one room in Melbourne, and it could not spare one commissioner to sit and listen," said Mr Shelton. "I find that disgraceful."
"A review that cannot make time for the women who have been surrogates, the adults conceived by donors and the adoptees who lived through the last great policy failure in this area is not conducting an independent inquiry. It is running an activist one, and Australians should read its September findings in that light," Mr Shelton said.
Mr Shelton says Ms Alsalem was explicit that the limits she described in international law apply to every commissioning arrangement without exception. "International law doesn't support a view that just because you want to have a child with your genetic makeup, that you are entitled to have a child," she told The Australian, adding that her position held "irrespective of who the commissioning persons are and what kind of family form, or relationships they have". She urged governments looking to reform surrogacy laws, Australia's included, "not to rush into quick fixes", and to ensure the voices and rights of surrogate women and children born of surrogacy were properly taken into account.
"The claim that adults hold a right to a child, and that the law must clear a path to one, has been the engine of surrogacy law reform in this country. The United Nations' own expert on violence against women has now said plainly that no such right exists in international law. Every member of parliament should read those words before 11 September," Mr Shelton said.
Mr Shelton says Ms Alsalem also drew what she called "astonishing" parallels between surrogacy and prostitution, describing both as practices that "rest on patriarchal notions that commodify and exploit women's sexual and reproductive capacities" and that take advantage of women who are "disadvantaged, vulnerable" and involved "in order to survive". She called for consequences for the demand side of both practices and for the criminalisation of the intermediaries who take the money.
"Family First has said for years that a child is not a product and a woman's body is not a service to be contracted. Hearing it from a United Nations special rapporteur, at a conference the government's own review would not attend, tells you how far Australia's political class has drifted from the evidence and from the women and children who carry the cost," Mr Shelton said.
Mr Shelton says Ms Alsalem's visit also vindicated Family First's campaign on the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. The rapporteur backed calls for an independent inquiry into AHPRA's treatment of doctors who have raised concerns about paediatric gender medicine and into its relationships with transgender lobby groups, said Professor Gary Geelhoed's freedom of information documents raised serious questions of conflict of interest, and said Australia was "absolutely out of step" with international evidence, asking why Australia had not followed the course taken by other countries.
"When the United Nations' special rapporteur on violence against women and girls has to come to Melbourne to say out loud what Australian doctors are being investigated for saying, governments have run out of excuses. When even the UN can see the problem, action must follow," Mr Shelton said.
Family First's position is that every child should wherever possible be known, loved and raised by their own mother and father, and that the job of public policy is to support families rather than to manufacture substitutes for them. Mr Shelton says that means practical help for couples facing infertility, including proper medical investigation and treatment of its causes, an adoption and foster care system that finds permanent homes for children who need them, and tax and cost of living settings that let parents afford the children they want.
"The longing for a child is real and Family First does not dismiss it for a moment. The answer is to help people build families, not to build a market in which one woman's body and another child's identity become the price of an adult's wish," Mr Shelton said.
Family First is calling on the Australian Law Reform Commission to hold public hearings before it reports on 11 September and to put the evidence of surrogate mothers, donor-conceived adults and adoptees on the public record; calling on the Albanese government to rule out any move toward commercial surrogacy and to legislate against Australians commissioning children through commercial arrangements overseas; calling on the Attorney-General to respond to Ms Alsalem's call for the Sex Discrimination Act to be revised so that discrimination on the basis of sex means biological sex; and repeating its call for an independent inquiry into AHPRA's impartiality.
Mr Shelton says both major parties now face a straightforward question. If the United Nations expert on violence against women and girls says international law gives no one a right to a child by whatever means, what is left of the case for expanding surrogacy in Australia, and why is the government's own review refusing to hear from the women and children the practice affects? Mr Shelton says the case for a genuinely independent voice in Parliament, one prepared to keep asking these questions when the major parties will not, has never been clearer.
