South Australian surrogacy and IVF changes started last night

Changes to South Australian assisted reproductive treatment and surrogacy laws that partly remove discrimination started yesterday.

The laws will allow for the first time:

• lesbian couples without medical infertility (which has traditionally been the failure to fall pregnant after 1 year of heterosexual intercourse- you see the problem) to have IVF or other ART
• single women to have ART and IVF, even if they do not have medical infertility
• LGBTI couples to have surrogacy

What the laws won’t do, due to amendments in the Upper House brought about by Families First, is to allow single men and women to undergo surrogacy. Doctors will not be able to provide IVF and ART to those patients if they need to undertake surrogacy.

Men and women who are single and cannot have a child except through surrogacy, for example breast cancer survivors, cannot still undertake surrogacy in South Australia and might have to go interstate or overseas.

As well as helping South Australian clients proceed with surrogacy, I have helped clients from South Australia plan to be parents elsewhere when surrogacy was not available to them in South Australia.

The silly change- registered objectors

Some bright spark in Parliament came up with an amendment of being a registered objector. If a person holding an ART registration  objects to treatment of a patient due to their relationship status or sexuality, according to this change- that’s OK- BUT the registered person must go on a public register and say so (the name and shame file) and refer the patient to someone else.

At first blush this would appear to an IVF doctor- but it isn’t! The registered person, due to the fine print- regulation 6 of the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Regulations must be an IVF clinic. Now which of the four South Australian IVF clinics is going to do that and give their work to their competitors:

• Repromed?
• Fertility SA?
• City Fertility Clinic?
• Flinders?

I am sure none of them- which makes the whole exercise rather pointless. It was probably assumed by the politician in question that the amendment would cover  doctors, not clinics. Quite simply, it doesn’t.