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{
    "id": 540578,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/540578/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 70,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Ms.) Tuya",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 926,
        "legal_name": "Roselinda Soipan Tuya",
        "slug": "roselinda-soipan-tuya"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, hon. Speaker. I also stand to support this Bill. The Bill is not only timely but also important. It is important for all of us to understand what the whole issue of in-vitro fertilisation, commonly known as IVF, is all about. The gist of the Bill is provision a legal framework to protect a situation where there is difficulty in child bearing. The situation has not been commonly talked about. It has not been protected legally in this country. What we all know is the pain, suffering and agony that childless women or men, who are not able to conceive naturally, go through within our communities. Childlessness, or the inability of a woman to have children, has been a very common source of domestic violence within our communities. These women are ostracised. Childless women are shunned within our communities for a situation which they can do nothing about. It is natural and some of it is medical; we know of women who are not able to carry a child to full term. There is a lot of emotional distress for women who find themselves in this situation. That is why as I support the Bill, I wish to say that surrogacy also comes with its ups and downs. One will be forgiven for even sympathising with a surrogate mother, because when you carry a child to a full term of nine months, you cannot fail to have emotional attachment to the baby, or the embryo. So, you find a surrogate mother having developed an emotional attachment to a child who is not legally hers. On the other hand, when this child is born, the agony and emotional distress begins for the biological mother of this child. We need a legal framework to support this in terms of the financial implications for the biological mother. We also need a law to regulate the whole issue of legal ownership of the child born out of surrogacy. We have heard of cases where a child is born of a surrogate mother and the biological mother is not able to register this child as her own at birth. You can imagine the emotional distress that goes with it. The law that we want to develop should be able to provide for this as well as the confines of the financial implications, or the amount of money that needs to be paid towards surrogacy, and, in essence, have a legal protection for IVF. We may not be ready for this as a country; I am not aware of any test-tube babies that have come out of IVF. I stand to be corrected. So, what we need to protect now is the whole question of surrogate motherhood. It is also instructive to note that as much as most of us, or most Kenyans, may view the whole issue of IVF as a foreign concept, we know we have practices of assisted reproduction in some of our communities. I think in the Kamba community, or in other The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}