Both partners will be regarded in law as parents when lesbian couples conceive with donated sperm, or gay men use surrogacy, under reforms announced yesterday by Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister.

At present, only the natural mother or father of a child born when a homosexual couple has fertility treatment is automatically considered to be its parent. The other partner, who is biologically unrelated to the child, has no formal parental role, though he or she can apply to adopt.

The change will bring their rights into line with those of heterosexual couples, who are both regarded as the legal parents of children born by donor insemination, even though the male partner is not the natural father.

It also provides for homosexual and unmarried heterosexual couples to apply jointly for parental orders after having a child by surrogacy. These are currently granted only to married couples: while unmarried men whose sperm is used in surrogacy are legal fathers, their partners, whether male or female, are not granted the same parenting rights. The revised law will guarantee that lesbians and single women have access to IVF and donor insemination services, by removing the 16-year-old condition that clinics take into account the child’s need for a father before providing treatment.

Homosexual advocacy groups said the changes were as significant as the Adoption and Children Act 2002, which permitted gay couples to adopt together for the first time.

The reforms to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which is agreed widely to have worked well but to be out of date, were set out in a White Paper that will go before Parliament next year.

It proposes retaining the requirement that clinics consider the welfare of children before offering IVF, but the rule will be clarified to ensure doctors are not asked to vet their patients’ suitability as parents.

“We want to get together with medical organisations and work out how this can be a practical guide,” Ms Flint said.

The proposed legislation will ban formally sex selection for non-medical purposes, and establish the first legal criteria for when it is acceptable to screen the genetic profile of embryos.

This will be restricted to preventing serious disease, disability or miscarriage, and to determining an embryo’s suitability as a tissue donor for a sick sibling. Embryo screening for social traits such as intelligence and deliberate “selecting in” of a condition such as deafness, will be banned.

The period for which embryos may be frozen and stored will be extended to ten years, and will introduce a “cooling off” period of a year after a partner withdraws consent.

The document also proposes an interim ban on the creation for research of “chimera” embryos that are part-human and part-animal, though it suggests that Parliament may wish to reconsider this in the future.

Fertility regulations under review

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