GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Surrogacy under threat after Trump vows to remove birthright citizenship

domingo, 4 de noviembre de 2018

BioEdge: Surrogacy under threat after Trump vows to remove birthright citizenship

BioEdge: Surrogacy under threat after Trump vows to remove birthright citizenship

Bioedge

Surrogacy under threat after Trump vows to remove birthright citizenship

by Michael Cook | 3 Nov 2018 | 1 comment

Bioethics in American politics. Donald Trump’s vow to remove the right to citizenship to babies born in the United States to immigrants and non-citizens has an unexpected bioethical angle. As Australian surrogacy lawyer Stephen Page points out, this could put a dent in the booming US surrogacy market.

At the moment, a baby born in the US to a surrogate mother automatically bcomes a US citizen under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This makes commercial surrogacy in the US a popular market with wealthy foreigners, especially Chinese. “There is rarely a surrogacy law conference I go to in the US where the subject of the 14th Amendment is brought up in conference presentations or discussions amongst delegates,” says Page.

The 14th Amendment was introduced in the Reconstruction Era to protect slaves. In 1857, before the Civil War, they had been deemed not to be citizens by the US Supreme Court – “they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” according to Chief Justice Roger Taney.

As Page points out, if Trump carries through with his threat, the consequences for the surrogacy industry will be dire:

One of the complications for Australians undertaking surrogacy in the United States is that if the executive order issues and is not stayed or frozen by the courts, then the children being born in the United States will not be recognised as US citizens. They will not have in fact any citizenship at all unless and until an application for Australian citizenship is successfully made to the Australian Government.
Typically, Australian citizens undertaking surrogacy in the United States obtain US citizenship for their child, and then travel back to Australia where the child applies for and obtains Australian citizenship. The change, which my colleagues in the US say is unlikely to succeed, might mean that Australian citizens caught up in the mess may have to apply for Australian citizenship in the United States.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

It happened so long ago that the exact details are dim in my mind, but I seem to remember that a nominee for the US Supreme Court nearly failed to score his dream job because of an alleged crime of attempted rape when he was a 17-year-old high school student. There was a huge controversy, wasn’t there? Demonstrations, twitterstorms, talking heads across the nation in a frenzy, politicians grandstanding...

Of course times were different way back then and public figures were held to a higher moral and legal standard. As the saying goes, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Nonetheless it is disturbing to read that the Democratic candidate for the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, casually told a journalist for The New Yorker that he assisted his mother to commit suicide in 2002. Assisting a suicide was a crime in California in 2002– and it still is if you are not a doctor. And at the time Newsom was not a callow teenager, but a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The odd thing about this is that there has been almost no reaction. Assisting a suicide is just as much a crime as attempted rape and in this case Newsom has admitted that he did it. You would think that at least his Republican opponent would seize upon this blithe admission as a golden opportunity to knock off Newsom's Kennedy-esque halo.

But no one seems to care. What more do you need to show that assisted suicide has been normalised in California?