Triplets land their dad behind bars!

Hong Kong police were on Thursday investigating a surrogacy case believed to involve the son of a land tycoon who recently announced the birth of triplet sons by a California-based woman.
47 year old Henderson Land Company's Executive Director Peter Lee Ka Kit gets double happiness within a month. First it was rumored that he has intentions on acquiring TVB, the news wasn't even been confirmed yet and he's already been promoted to a father of boy triplets, fulfilling his father's 4th Uncle Lee Shau Kee's dream. 4th Uncle even took out HK$1 million to give out to his employees. Also, 4th Uncle's three grandsons are named Lee Chi Sun, Lee Chi Yan and Lee Chi Yung are all very lucky, matching well with their grandfather and father.
Have always kept a low-profile, recently Peter suddenly comes into the spotlight, stealing his sister-in-law and also actress Cathy Tsui's limelight. In 2006, when 4th Uncle's second son Lee Ka Shing married Cathy, he opened his golden mouth and said he wanted a grandson, unfortunately Cathy only gave him two grand daughters.
Peter's 3 sons are born Year of the Tiger, and Peter is a rabbit, born in 1963. According to fortune teller master Mak Ling Ling, rabbit matches tiger very well, the father-son relationship will be really good. The babies were born in July, which makes them the summer tigers, very good fortune. As tigers are loners, but they are triplets and will be very independent. When the triplets get older, they can develop very well on their own. Mak Ling Ling saw the pictures of the triplets, they all have long ears attached to cheeks and wide foreheads, is a face of good blessings.
The 47-year-old millionaire bachelor said the babies had been born in the United States to a surrogate mother but kept the birth mother's identity secret. News reports claimed the surrogacy had been arranged by a Californian surrogacy agent, prompting public discussion and some criticism. Commercial surrogacy, in which a woman is paid to carry and give birth to a baby, is outlawed in Hong Kong.Police have also confirmed an investigation is under way but declined to give further details.
The investigation came to light after lawmaker Cyd Ho raised the issue at a meeting of the Legislative Council Wednesday.
Ho asked Chow if it was illegal for a Hong Kong resident to hire a surrogate mother overseas, referring specifically to a Hong Kong man who had issued a press release announcing the birth of three sons by a surrogate mother in the United States.
In response, Chow pointed out the law prohibited the making and receiving of any payment relating to a surrogacy arrangement regardless of whether it was made or received in Hong Kong or elsewhere.
"While we will not comment on individual cases reported in the media, we can confirm that referral concerning suspected surrogacy arrangements has been made to the police for consideration as to whether investigation and law enforcement action are required," Chow said.

Accidental surrogate hands over baby after IVF mistake

Carolyn Savage gave birth to a beautiful baby boy at Mercy St Vincent Medical Centre in Toledo, but he wasn't hers.

Due to a mix up at the fertility clinic, Mrs Savage had been implanted with an embryo belonging to Shannon and Paul Morell.

Given the choice of terminating the pregnancy or handing the baby over once he was born, she chose to carry the child to term.

Mrs Morell, whose maiden name was also Savage, had six embryos frozen after giving birth to twins. But when they were ready to try for a third child they got an urgent call from their fertility doctor, the New York Post reports.

"I'm so sorry, Shannon, but there's been a terrible incident in our lab," he said. "Your embryos have thawed."

"Your embryos were transferred to another woman."

Due to a human error at the lab, Mrs Morell's embryos were filed under her maiden name and transferred to Mrs Savage.

"I couldn't have felt more violated," Mrs Morell wrote in a new memoir, Misconception. "Of all the people in the world - of all the people who have embryos at this clinic - why did this happen to us?"

The two couples met during the pregnancy and the women warmed to each other. They bonded and became friends. The baby, named Logan, also has the middle name Savage.

"There's a connection with these people," Mrs Morell said in an interview with The New York Post. "He's given that name so he'll always remember what happened."

Women denied NHS fertility treatment because 'they cannot carry child themselves'

Women have criticized the situation saying only a 'quirk of nature' means they cannot carry their own child and if they were suffering from a different fertility problem the NHS would fund treatment.

Guidance on NHS funding for fertility treatment has been interpreted differently around the country meaning that in some places women who cannot carry their own child are funded but in others places they are not.

In many areas primary care trusts refuse to fund IVF because the resulting embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate, even though the patients are willing to fund the surrogacy costs themselves.

The guidance from the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence states that where the reason for infertility is known patients should be fast-tracked for NHS funded treatment but it goes on to say surrogacy lies outside the remit of the guidance.

This is what primary care trusts are using to justify refusing to fund IVF treatment for women who would require the services of a surrogate.

Sabreena Mahroof, of Surrogacy UK, said in around 80 per cent of cases IVF treatment must be pad for privately because primary care trusts have refused NHS funding. But some areas will fund the IVF part of the process leaving patients to pay the surrogacy fees.

She said: "It all depends on the primary care trust. There is a real postcode lottery here. We had hoped the new Human Fertilization and Embryology Act would clarify this situation but it has not.

"It is a real nonsense. These women are being discriminated against because they do not have a womb. Cost-wise it is no different to funding an IVF cycle where the embryo is implanted back into the same woman.

"No one is asking the NHS to fund the pregnancy expenses of the surrogate, that would be unfair.

"It is not fair that only the wealthy who can afford private IVF who can use a surrogate."

Tracey Davey, 40, from Fareham in Hampshire, has been trying to have a baby with her husband Terry, 48, for the last 12 years. She was born without a womb but produces eggs normally.

The couple have repeated been turned down for NHS funding for IVF treatment, been through appeals and have even attempted to adopt.

Eventually the couple remortgaged their home, spending £18,000 on private treatment, undergoing two cycles of IVF treatment.

Last year an embryo was implanted in a surrogate mother only for the pregnancy to fail.

The couple cannot afford to fund another cycle of treatment themselves and time is running out as a woman's age is a significant factor in IVF success.

Mrs Davey, a bank cashier, said: "I have been fighting this for the last 12 years and am angry at the way I have been treated. I did not ask to be born this way and is there was something else wrong with me my treatment would be funded.

"There are dozens of young girls in my situation and I hate to think that they will face the same thing as us.

"I feel they have put my life on hold. I was told that I could not have children when I was 16 but then in 1989 a woman became the first surrogate mother in the UK and that gave me hope. I cannot give up."

Clare Lewis, of Jones of Infertility Network UK said: “Surrogacy is a necessary treatment for those whose only chance of having a family is by this method.

"We are aware that many primary care trusts don’t fund surrogacy, probably because of concerns of legal ramifications and we would suggest that national guidance on this issue would be welcomed by the PCTs to eliminate such concerns and allow patients to access the treatment they need to have the family they so badly want.”

Dr Stuart Ward, clinical director of NHS Hampshire said: “We will fund one cycle of IVF for patients who meet the eligibility criteria. However, due to the complex legal and ethical complications that can arise with surrogacy we are unable to support fertility treatment through this route.

“If a consultant or GP feels that their patient has exceptional circumstances and should be considered for IVF treatment, even though they don’t meet the criteria, they can ask for the case to be considered through the PCT’s special referrals process.”

Current rules mean surrogate mothers can decide legally to keep the child, meaning many people still see the issue as fraught with controversy.

Around 50 successful surrogacies occur each year in Britain.

Moving surrogacy law forward in the UK?

Of all the prospective parents conceiving through assisted reproduction, those in surrogacy arrangements often face the most difficult legal issues. The surrogate and usually also her husband will be treated as the child's legal parents at birth, leaving the commissioning parents with no legal connection with their child whatsoever, even where both are the biological parents.

There is a special remedy available called a parental order. This is an order made by the family courts which reassigns parenthood after surrogacy, extinguishing the responsibility of the surrogate parents and transferring it to the commissioning couple. The process takes place post-birth: the application must be made within the first six months of the child's life (though the surrogate's consent is ineffective until after the first six weeks) and typically takes many months to be processed by the courts. At present, only married couples can apply, but as from 6 April 2010, unmarried and same sex couples will also be eligible.

The Department of Health (DH) is currently consulting on new draft regulations which prescribe the detail of this court process, and which will replace existing regulations that have been in place since 1994. The consultation closes on 23 November.

What is in the draft regulations?

Like the existing regulations, the proposed revised regulations apply provisions of adoption law to the parental order application process, setting out court procedure and giving a surrogate child broadly the same legal status as an adopted child. Adoption law has itself been overhauled substantially in recent years, and this is reflected in the wording of the new regulations. However, as part of the general updating, there are some important revisions being made to the existing parental order system which need to be looked at carefully.

For example, a court considering whether to grant an adoption order now has to first consider the 'welfare checklist', a prescriptive list of considerations which includes ascertaining the child's wishes and feelings and considering his or her relationship with the birth family. The new parental order regulations incorporate this checklist into the parental order process. However, it does not seem appropriate for the court to have to address all these issues in surrogacy cases, given that the child will inevitably be less than six months old, and will be already living with the applicants (at least one of whom is his or her biological parent).

Importing the new adoption law without amendment fails to adequately take account of the special nature of surrogacy arrangements, and there may be a risk that this could make the process of applying for a parental order even more onerous than before. While a parental order is similar to an adoption order (in the sense that it transfers legal parenthood from one person to another), surrogacy is very different from adoption. Because a surrogate child (or at least those to which parental orders can apply) is biologically connected to at least one of the commissioning parents and is almost invariably in their care from birth, the dynamic of the family is perhaps closer to donor conception than to adoption. Adapting adoption law is therefore a difficult task, and one which we think could be handled more carefully by the regulations.

The parental order system

Even though a more fundamental review may not be within the power of these regulations, it seems impossible to look at any legislation relating to parental orders without making the point that the whole system is problematic. Parental orders were introduced as a late amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 in response to a specific surrogacy case. At the time, surrogacy was viewed as very rare and something which occurred largely on the fringes of the law and ethical acceptability. The 1990 rules on legal parenthood clearly prioritised donor conception (making the carrying mother the legal mother, and her husband the legal father), and parental orders were designed as a limited remedy - a 'sticking plaster' - in respect of the awkward application of legal parenthood rules in surrogacy situations.

As all those working in this field know, things have changed radically since then. Surrogacy as a form of fertility treatment has blossomed, both in the UK and abroad, and no longer affects just a small number of altruistic inter-family arrangements. Indeed, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 itself has endorsed this, by legalising non-profit making surrogacy agencies like Surrogacy UK and COTS and extending the categories of couples eligible to apply for parental orders. We are also seeing growing numbers of fertility patients travelling abroad for surrogacy, which brings even more complex legal challenges.

The current system, which came about by historical accident rather than a concerted policy decision, fails to meet this increased demand, and is inadequate from almost every perspective. The surrogate and her husband (who, in the vast majority of cases do wish to surrender the child) remain legally and financially responsible for the child for up to a year after the birth, and may have no legal redress against intended parents who refuse to assume responsibility. The intended parents often have no status in respect of their child for many months, including no right to make decisions or to consent to immunisations, no right to transmit inheritance or citizenship rights automatically and the intending mother has no rights to maternity leave (though this is the subject of another current campaign), leaving children very vulnerable during the early months of their lives.

The system is not an effective guardian of public policy against commercial surrogacy, since the check on payments comes at the end the process (by which time any payments have already been made) and the only sanction available to the court is a refusal to grant an order, which is almost impossible to enforce since this would prejudice the welfare of a newborn child. And, most importantly of all, these problems mean that surrogate children lack even basic protection. The problems are highlighted most starkly in foreign surrogacy cases. For example, in the landmark case of Re X and Y (foreign surrogacy) [2008], the law left surrogate twins born abroad to a British couple stateless and parentless. Such children risk being abandoned to foreign state care in the absence of complex and expensive legal intervention - surely this is an outcome which the law has an obligation to avoid at all costs.

We need a better and more planned approach to surrogacy. Of course, there are difficult and sensitive issues to be handled in creating new law. Surrogacy arrangements are among the most ethically and humanly complex in assisted reproduction, with three or even four adults involved throughout the process of conception, pregnancy and birth, and possibly third party gamete donors as well. The respective interests, protection and independence from exploitation of all these adults and, most importantly, the resulting child, need to be adequately balanced and protected by the law.
It is disappointing that such issues were not properly addressed during the government's overhaul of assisted reproduction law last year. Although the Minister indicated that surrogacy was a sensitive issue which would be looked at separately, no firm commitment for this review, or a date, has yet been set - and it seems, given the current 'status' of surrogacy - odd to continue treating it separately. In order to ensure that our law can cope with the demands of modern surrogacy practice, and to ensure that vulnerable children are protected, we urge the government to take a fresh look, not only at the regulations, but at the law itself.

By Natalie Gamble and Louisa Ghevaert
Partners with specialist fertility law firm Gamble and Ghevaert LLP (www.gambleandghevaert.com)