Aggregated News

Untitled Document

On Feb. 6, the McGill Journal of Law and Health held its eighth Annual Colloquium, with this year focusing on legal and policy issues concerning assisted reproduction in Canada. The discussion was held by well-known professors, lawyers, and physicians—all meeting to debate and discuss hot topics in Canadian bioethics surrounding reproductive rights. This year’s panel was titled Assisted Reproduction: Navigating the Criminalization of Commercial Surrogacy, and focused on Canada’s decision to make it illegal for surrogates to be paid to carry someone else’s child, eliciting much debate among Canadian scholars and practitioners of bioethics.

 The discussions centered on the federal Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA), which criminalizes the payment of surrogate mothers, setting penalties between $500,000 or a 10-year prison sentence if violated. Surrogates agreeing to carry another couple’s child are to do so entirely altruistically. Since its passing in 2004, the AHRA has exposed rather polar views amongst leaders in Canadian public health ethics.

One of the speakers, Canadian fertility law lawyer and founder of Fertility Law Canada, Sara Cohen, argued that the act of commercial surrogacy...