Nothing as It Seems

Earlier this year, the Government announced that they are preparing new laws to regulate surrogacy and the broader area of assisted human reproduction. The draft legislation will contain proposals to regulate surrogacy in Ireland for the first time, and will include an obligation for commissioning parents and surrogate mothers to give their consent and have counselling prior to any arrangement. Yet the legislation is expected to include a ban on commercial surrogacy—an arrangement where the surrogate mother receives a payment for bearing and giving birth to a child, on the condition that she eventually hands over the child, as well as the parental rights and responsibilities, to the commissioning couple. The legislation will only permit non-commercial surrogacy (or altruistic surrogacy), where surrogates receive no financial gain—although a reimbursement of out-of-pocket costs will be permitted. In an interview with RTÉ around the same time as the announcement, the Heal...

Hot-Button Issues—looking at more than the facts A version of this article was printed in Humanism Ireland , Vol. 141 (2013) Conservative theorists and right-wing economists often tell us that individual human behaviour is the product of nature, and differences in ability, skills, and intelligence can be understood as those that are rooted in biology. Liberal ideologies, on the other hand, frequently say that differences between individuals are not the product of nature, but are in some way socially constructed due to unfair social and institutional infrastructures; variations on IQ scores between different ethnic groups, they argue, can be explained as a result of one ethnic group having less access to higher education or because of the inherent cultural bias situated within IQ tests. What’s more, humans are not violent by nature. Violent behaviour, they claim, is down to the fact that modern capitalist systems create societies of vast inequality, where luckless people, ...