All Kids are Equal

In this video, Multi-Award Winning Surrogacy & Fertility Lawyer, Stephen Page talks about his involvement over the past year in the ‘All Kids are Equal Campaign‘ that is run by Rainbow Families, the role of the campaign and how this campaign can change how the nation will look at surrogacy.

Learn more about the All Kids are Equal Campaign Fundraiser.

Transcript

G’day, I’m Stephen Page from Page Provan Family and Fertility Lawyers. I’m talking today about the ‘All Kids are Equal campaign’. For the last year or so, I’ve been proudly a member of helping the ‘All Kids are Equal campaign’.

This is sponsored or coordinated by Rainbow Families, and what it aims to do is exactly what it says, namely that all kids are treated equally, however they are created. Back in the 1970s, there were two types of children in existence.

They were legitimate children, those born within a marriage, and illegitimate children, those that weren’t and it had always been those. Thankfully, in the 1970s, sanity prevailed, and suddenly, children were just recognised as being children, you didn’t put them in one category or the other.

They were just children. Sadly, with the rise of surrogacy, in particular international surrogacy, we now have two categories of children in Australia.

Those who are born by domestic rules are recognised as being who the parents are, there’s clear rules about who the parents are, and those who are born internationally through surrogacy where the rules are not so clear, and this has been a problem internationally.

The Hague Conference and private international law has recognised this problem since 2011, it hasn’t yet been fixed.

But at an Australian level, there ought to be reforms about surrogacy, and there ought to be reforms to allow surrogacy to be easier here and to allow recognition of these children’s parental rights.

So that’s why I’ve been involved, I’ve used my expertise with that campaign, and I hope it works. We really need to have sanity with our laws with surrogacy, the House of Representatives Committee, back in 2016, recommended that there be national non-discriminatory surrogacy laws.

We still don’t have those, we have eight variations of surrogacy laws. We still have laws in Western Australia as of, and this is March 2024, that discriminate against single men and gay couples, and also may well discriminate against intersex, transgender, and non-binary people.

So this campaign is vital to changing how the nation looks at surrogacy, and it needs money. I encourage you to go to All Kids are Equal. You can find it easily on the web and please donate because we need to have someone professional running this campaign, and they need to be funded.

If you have been lucky enough to have a child via surrogacy, and if you have the means, please donate. Donations are tax deductible through Rainbow Families, New South Wales.

So please help, any money that you can give will be of great assistance and enable these children to be recognised as equal with other children.

Thank you.

For more information and Seeking Legal Advice contact our Surrogacy Lawyers Sydney.