Bloodlines and Belonging: Time to Abandon Ius Sanguinis?
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Genovese v Malta,8 the differential treatment of children born within and out
of wedlock with respect to access to citizenship amounts to discrimination
on arbitrary grounds. This practice is also at odds with contemporary trends
that indicate an impressive surge in births out of wedlock; the share of such
births in the EU27 rose from 17 per cent of total births in 1990 to 40 per cent
in 2013.9
One of the biggest challenges to ius sanguinis citizenship comes from the
spread of assisted reproduction technologies (ART). About 7 million babies
worldwide have been born through ART since the birth of Louise Brown,
the first ‘test-tube baby’, in 1978.10 ART have developed rapidly generating
a multi-billion dollar market in assisted reproduction. A significant share of
this market involves the international movement of doctors, donors, parents,
children and gametes. In order to avoid legal restrictions or to cut costs, a
growing number of infertile men and women, usually from high-income
countries, travel to destinations such as India, Thailand or Ukraine in order
to have ‘their’ babies conceived through in vitro fertilisation procedures
using sperm or eggs (or both) donated by people from places such as Spain
or Romania.
Many problems arise because the international market for assisted reproduction is not properly regulated, which means that national regulations
often conflict with one another. Countries that oppose surrogacy consider
the surrogate mother as the legal mother even if they are not genetically
related to the child. According to this reasoning, the husband of the surrogate mother is the presumed father of the child. However, countries that
encourage surrogacy usually recognise the intended mother and father as the
legal parents, regardless of whether they are genetically related to the child.
As the stories on Samuel and Manji show, when these two approaches collide the children risk becoming, as Justice Hedley put it, ‘marooned, stateless and parentless’.11
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10
11
Genovese v. Malta, Application no. 53124/09, European Court of Human
Rights, 11 October 2011, available at http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/
search.aspx?i=001-106785#
‘Two in five EU babies born out of wedlock’, BBC News, 26 March 2013,
available at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21940895
This number has been updated to the most recent figure. See: The European
Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (2017), ESHRE fact sheets
1, available at https://www.eshre.eu/~/media/sitecore-files/Press-room/
Resources/1-CBRC.pdf?la=en
Re: X & Y (Foreign Surrogacy), [2008] EWHC (Fam) 3030 (U.K.), available
at http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed28706
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