South African surrogacy and egg donation
The conference is well regarded, being run by one of the premier South African family law firms, Miller Du Toit Cloete Inc and the University of Western Cape.
The qualifications of partner Zenobia du Toit speak for themselves:
She was admitted as an attorney in 1982 and has practiced exclusively in Family Law, human rights and related and commercial law issues from 1998 onwards.
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While there, I will also have the joy of being able to lecture post-graduate law students about surrogacy, and visit one of the leading IVF clinics, Cape Fertility.
South African surrogacy law is interesting.
South African egg donors
It is an unfortunate reality that many in South Africa are poor, including young white women, who are wanted as egg donors in countries like Australia. Unfortunately, in South Africa, the identity of the donor is not known to the intended parents, or more importantly not known to the child. Hopefully this will change.
Many Australians go to South Africa for egg donation, but in the process may put themselves at risk of breaching longarm provisions of Australian law, which might mean that they are unintentionally committing an offence punishable by up to 15 years imprisonment. No one has yet been prosecuted.
More recently there have been media reports of South African egg donors flying to Australia to be donors here.
South African surrogacy
Surrogacy in South Africa is open only to those who live there.
What is unique about the process of surrogacy in South Africa is that, unlike anywhere else, before you start the surrogacy journey, a judge has to make a pre-approval order. The pre-approval order deems that, subject to the rights of the surrogate not to hand the baby over, when the baby is born the intended parents are the parents of the child.
The process of surrogacy in South Africa was highlighted in a Family Court case in 2013 when a South African man underwent surrogacy there, then fell in love and with his babies moved to Australia.