Ireland urged to recognise lesbian mothers following Italian court ruling
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Maeve Delargy
An Irish lawyer has welcomed an Italian court ruling that women in same-sex relationships who conceive children abroad through IVF should both be named as mothers on their children’s birth certificates.
Italy’s Constitutional Court yesterday ruled that it was discriminatory not to include the names of both mothers on a child’s birth certificate.
Maeve Delargy, a senior associate at Philip Lee and founder of the Lesbian Lawyers Network (LLN), told Irish Legal News that Ireland is now lagging behind Italy in the wake of the “very positive decision”.
Irish LGBTQ+ advocacy groups yesterday met with the health minister, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, to raise issues including the issue of parental rights.
“Currently, and contrary to what would now seem to be the position in Italy, same-sex female couples who use in vitro fertilisation abroad are not both legally recognised as parents in Ireland,” Ms Delargy said.
Campaigners are urging the government to address this in the forthcoming Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) (Amendment) Bill 2024, which has not yet been published.
Ms Delargy said: “Hopefully we’ll end up with the same situation in Ireland where lesbian couples, like any other couple, are free to choose where they go for their fertility treatment without their children being punished for that decision by a lack of a legally recognised relationship with both their parents.”
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