An Australian politician has called for children born through a surrogate in certain countries to be denied citizenship in Australia after a Victorian man pleaded guilty to sexually abusing his 27-day old surrogate twin daughters.
The 49-year-old man pleaded guilty in the federal court in Melbourne on Thursday to 38 offences, including 20 counts of incest against the twin girls, two counts of child trafficking, eleven child pornography offences and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child for the abuse of his four and six-year-old nieces.
He also pleaded guilty to filming upskirt videos of women on Victorian regional trains between 2009 and 2014.
According to a report of the hearing by Fairfax Media, the twins were born in Asia in March 2014, using a donor egg from Ukraine. They were abused for seven months before his regional Victoria home was raided by the Australian federal police, who uncovered the abuse through a child pornography investigation.
The children are now in the care of child protection workers.
The office of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has confirmed the man pleaded guilty to all 38 charges and will be sentenced on May 12.
It comes a month before a parliamentary inquiry into surrogacy, chaired by the Nationals MP George Christensen, is due to hand down its final report.
Speaking to Guardian Australia on Friday, Christensen said the case illustrated the need for Australia to strengthen its surrogacy laws and introduce deterrents for people seeking a surrogacy arrangement from countries linked to the exploitation of women and children.
“From the evidence that I have seen, my view has become pretty hard and fast that there’s a major problem that we have got with surrogacy going on in countries and areas such as India, Thailand, Nepal and the Ukraine.
“Surrogacy goes on and it goes on for cheap, and the risk of exploitation in these cases is extremely apparent.”
Australia does not allow commercial surrogacy, so prospective parents unable to find an altruistic surrogate in Australia are forced to enter into an international arrangement. It’s an expensive process but the most affordable options, according to a cost comparison by advocacy group Surrogacy Australia, is Thailand, followed by Ukraine and India.
Thailand banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners last year in response to the case of Baby Gammy, a surrogate child with Down’s syndrome, whose Australian parents left him with his birth mother.
Christensen said the law governing the ability of Australians to enter into international surrogacy agreements was “too lax”. “We need people to go through countries where they have got proper regulation, where they can weed out people like this guy.
“I am not saying there needs to be a criminal offence for entering into international surrogacy agreements, but we need to have something that basically stops Australians from entering into the process in these countries and being able to bring the child born of that process back into the country.”
That could include not extending citizenship to children born through surrogacy in certain countries, or requiring returning parents to undergo an extensive screening process to determine their fitness, which if inadequate, could result in the child being removed. Christensen said making it more difficult for parents to have a child via surrogacy from some countries would “point them in the direction of countries which we think have an ethical system”.
He would not comment on what the parliamentary inquiry’s final report might recommend, but said they had heard submissions concerning child safety and the exploitation of women. “I think you will find that these concerns will be reflected in the report,” he said.
“From the evidence that I have seen, my view has become pretty hard and fast that there’s a major problem that we have got with surrogacy going on in countries and areas such as India, Thailand, Nepal and the Ukraine.
“Surrogacy goes on and it goes on for cheap, and the risk of exploitation in these cases is extremely apparent.”
Stephen Page, a Queensland expert in surrogacy law, said Australia should make it more difficult to access unsuitable surrogacy options, and easier to access these in countries with strong commercial surrogacy systems, such as the United States, Canada and the UK.
“We have made it so hard to access surrogacy in Australia and so easy to go overseas that many Australians do go to developing countries to access it,” Page said, adding that between 200 and 1,000 Australian surrogate children were born overseas each year.
“If we are not the biggest exporter of intended parents, we are certainly close to it.”
Allowing commercial surrogacy in Australia would ensure that genuine parents were able to access surrogacy without putting children in danger, Page said.
“This case is deeply troubling, but we can do better than this.”