Fertility clinic will only treat married couples…..Irish Daily Mail (Friday 16 April 2010)

Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010

By Susan McKay, Director of the National Women's Council of Ireland

When my daughters were small, we went to live in a very conservative little village in the far North. At their very Protestant state school, they were approached by a posse of small friends, who demanded know why their parents weren't married. They are, my girls countered. No they aren't, their friends insisted. They can't be, because your Mummy has a different name from your Daddy. Well, retorted my girls, we know they are, because we were their bridesmaids.

This country has a long and dishonourable tradition of people poking their moral noses into other peoples private business. This history is particularly tragic in relation to sexuality outside of marriage. It includes the horrors of the Magdalene laundries and certain other institutions in which unmarrried women were forcibly parted from their babies, the babies often then given up for adoption by respectably married couples.

Recent examples include, in the North, the Protestant B and B owner who can't abide the prospect of what homosexuals might be getting up to under his candlewick bedspreads, and now, in the Republic, the Catholic doctor who refuses to provide fertility treatment to couples who are not married. Dr Phil Boyle claims that he does so in the best interests of the children whose birth he is preventing.

A baby needs milk. A baby needs warm, clean clothes. A baby needs love. And that is just about all a baby needs, to begin with. The milk and babygro bit changes and gets a bit more complicated as the baby becomes a child, but the love part is constant. Love, love, love. Without it, a child cannot thrive.

There is no evidence to show that a baby has more chance of being loved and cared for by a married couple than by an unmarried couple, a single parent, or by a gay couple. There is plenty of evidence that marriage is no guarantee that children will be loved and protected. Indeed, in the absence of any constitutional protection for children, the family based on married heterosexual parents can be an extremely dangerous environment for children. In far too many cases, the imperative to keep the family together has overridden the best interests of children exposed to neglect and violence.

People who seek fertility treatment have a deep longing to be parents. Surely a conscientious doctor can find better ways of assessing their ability to care for a child than by demanding that they conform to his moral code. But if not, let other more humane doctors step in. After all, the treatment Dr Boyle is offering isn't a secret. [ends]