Health Ministry mulls letting gay couples use surrogate mothers

The Health Ministry is considering allowing gay couples to have a child through surrogate mothers, ministry legal adviser Mira Huebner-Harel said Tuesday.

Speaking at an Israel Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology conference, she said the ministry was planning to establish a committee to update the law that allows only heterosexual couples to use surrogate mothers. The move toward relaxing surrogacy restrictions comes a few days after Attorney General Menachem Mazuz directed the Health Ministry to permit a lesbian woman to donate her eggs to her female domestic partner.

"The traditional family unit has been changing lately," said Huebner-Harel. "A man, woman and child was good, but the trend is changing, and we know of male couples who travel across the sea to have children through surrogates."

A local gay couple has recently asked the Health Ministry for permission to have a child in Israel through a surrogate mother, and Huebner-Harel said the ministry should amend Israeli law, which requires all such requests to go through the ministry's surrogate law committee, before the couple petitions the High Court of Justice.

"We have to bring all the new aspects into orderly legislation, and it's best to do that before the High Court orders us to," she said.

One of Israel's leading gynecologists, Professor Shlomo Mashiach of Assuta Medical Center in Tel Aviv, said Israel should move quickly to reverse the "intolerable discrimination" that he said in effect prohibits gay men from having children.

"We have to move the timetable forward quickly, and allow gay couples in Israel to have children," he said at the conference. "There is injustice and discrimination in favor of lesbians, who can have children [biologically], in contrast to gay men, whose right to do so is being withheld. Such discrimination is intolerable."

Although gay couples are banned from becoming surrogate parents, the law does allow for unmarried heterosexual couples to become surrogates and allows couples of any age to become surrogate parents, although the ministry is looking into setting a maximum age limit. The age of women seeking to become mothers through surrogates has been on the rise, and a 52-year-old woman was recently granted approval to use a surrogate.

Under Israeli surrogacy law, the man who donated the sperm to a surrogate mother is listed as the father, and the sperm donor's partner can be listed as the mother only after adopting the child.

Some 320 children have been born to surrogates in Israel over the past 13 years, though last year alone saw 89 requests.

In the United States, several states, including Illinois and California, have laws allowing gay couples to use surrogate mothers. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued a position paper in October saying single-sex couples should also be allowed access to all available forms of fertility treatments.