National Ethics Board says surrogacy veto is ‘opportunity’

The National Council of Ethics considered this Monday that the veto of the President of the Republic on the regulation of surrogacy would be an “opportunity” to integrate the recommendations of this advisory body in order to protect the interests and rights of the parties involved.

The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has returned to the government a proposal to regulate surrogacy, defending the hearings of the National Council of Ethics of Life Sciences (CNECV) and the National Council for Medically Assisted Childbirth to avoid “future disappointments.” »

In a conversation with the Lusa agency, the President of the CNECV, Maria do Ceu Patran Neves, began by explaining that the President of the Republic vetoed a document approved by the Council of Ministers on November 16, 2023 and of which the National Council of Ethics of the Life Sciences was not aware.

“We were waiting for it to be made public. This did not happen within what we thought was a reasonable period of time, and then we made a written request for this document to be provided to us, and to date this has not yet happened. That’s why we do it. In fact, I don’t know the document that led to the veto of the President of the Republic,” he emphasized.

For Maria do Seu Patran Neves, the head of state’s veto will be “an opportunity to revise the rules” to include the CNECV recommendations, which “always aim to protect the interests and rights of the people involved, namely the unborn child, the surrogate mother and the biological parents.”

It would also provide an opportunity for “legal clarification of procedures for medical professionals” who will have to oversee the process, and for lawyers who will have to draw up the surrogacy agreement, he said, stressing that “those two requirements are absolutely fundamental.”

Maria do Ceu Patran Neves recalled that the CNECV issued an opinion on three regulatory proposals that were “significantly different from each other.”

“This was not a proposal that needed to be incrementally improved by integrating the recommendations of organizations such as the National Ethics Board, but rather, they were significantly different proposals,” he said.

The President of the CNECV stated that she does not know whether the proposal vetoed by the President of the Republic corresponds to the third and final proposal that the National Ethics Council has assessed and for which it has prepared recommendations, or whether it is the fourth proposal that will or will not take into account the recommendations of the Council .

“Based on the content of the text of the President of the Republic, it turns out that in fact this is not the case and even our recommendations were not included” in the document, which “will apparently be different from the one” in relation to which the CNECV made a statement.

Marcelo Rebelo de Souza justifies the return of the resolution to the government currently in charge by saying that it requires a hearing of the CNECV CNPMA “on the final and most updated version of the diploma”, given that the opinions already issued by these two organizations are against the diploma in question.

He believes that “the opinions issued by the above-mentioned organizations express direct opposition to the diploma proposal under consideration, as well as the need to clarify concepts (possibly restoring existing solutions in previous projects), as well as the alleged lack of human and logistical resources and the inadequacy of conditions, materials and the procedures that must accompany the relevant surrogacy processes” justify the non-publication of the PMA diploma.

In September, the CNECV warned of the need to maximize the protection of children born through surrogacy in all situations that may arise before their delivery to beneficiaries.