 In New Zealand, surrogasi was basically shoved into a 2004 piece of legislation with almost no discussion. So, 20 years on, I decided I actually wanted to look at what the law is on surrogasi and whether it sort of reflected the vague references to why surrogasi law was regulated the way it was in the Act, which was basically, surrogasi is bad is sort of the only reference I could find in the parliamentary debates. So, what I decided I was going to do was look at sort of the public perspective where I asked if the public really thought surrogasi was bad and I thought that I would also look at the perspectives of the professionals that work in surrogasi because I'm sort of a commercial criminal lawyer. So I wanted to look at the lawyers, the councillors, the medical professionals that actually have to work in the regime and see how they think it operates. So just as a vague overview, the way that surrogasi works in New Zealand, if you want to go through a fertility clinic, then there's a process that you have to go through. An ethics committee has to approve surrogasi in New Zealand, otherwise the fertility clinic commits a criminal offence. So this process involves medical reports, legal advice and then an ethics committee which assesses each application individually, looks at the facts of the case and then approves or defers or declines an application. If it approves an application, then the fertility clinic can go ahead. Once a child is born, then adoption is the only way of transferring legal parentage. If you don't want to use a fertility clinic, then anything goes. It's a private arrangement, but again, adoption is the only way of transferring legal parentage. So the empirical research I've been doing for the last couple of years, I talked to all of the fertility clinics in New Zealand. That sounds a lot more impressive than it is. There are three of them. It sounded good for like three seconds, right? You're like, wow, but I did talk to all of them. I annoyed every single lawyer in New Zealand who happened to claim any kind of ability in family law or child law or adoption law or surrogasi law. If they put on the New Zealand Lawyer's website that they had expertise in those areas, they got an online survey from me. A lot of them filled that out, so I got information there. We harassed family court judges and we got to sit down and actually talk to about eight or nine of them that dealt with surrogasi cases and we asked them about the process that they went through. How did they feel dealing with surrogasi cases through an adoption lens and how could that system be a little bit bitter for them and we got some very interesting results. And then what I'm going to be talking about today was the thing that has been torturing me for the last year and a half was a public perception survey. So that's kind of my advertisement. All of that's about to be published. If you want to read it you'll find out how to contact me and you can have about a thousand pages of what I consider to be crap but what you might find is really interesting. So the public perception survey, basically what I did was I got hold of the electoral role. In New Zealand you have to be on one of two electoral roles. About 95% of the population is on the general role. If you're Maori, which is our indigenous people, you can choose to be on the other electoral role. You can grab the general electoral role for health-related research so I managed to get hold of that. We then went through and broke it down into age rangers. Every 20th person on the electoral role got a copy of my survey. Unfortunately, I only got their physical addresses so that turned out to be a lot of paper that had to be sent out so I grabbed a whole bunch of students, locked them in a room. They were only allowed out once they'd stuffed a whole bunch of envelopes for me. They got a bit of a reprieve. They were allowed out. When the survey started coming back with questions filled out, the same students got locked back in the room. They then had to enter that data onto a computer tool that could analyse the data for me and create pretty little graphs and so they sat there and they entered all the data into computers and they were then allowed out again. So what I thought I'd do is give two or three of what I thought were some kind of interesting results that actually surprisingly do reflect some of the stuff we've been talking about for the last day and a half. I asked about 60-odd questions. About 30 of them were only relevant if the people answering had some kind of impact with surrogacy. If they'd been a surrogate or if they were thinking about surrogacy, about 30 or 40 questions for them. If they hadn't, they could skip all of those and they only had about 15 questions to answer. So the survey looked a lot scarier than it actually was. But again, if you want to read the 500 page report that's come out of that, then I'm publishing it in a couple of weeks. Yay. And then I can do something else with my life, like sleep. Okay, so my first finding, so this is a quote. Why shouldn't surrogates get paid for some women getting pregnant as their superpower? So one of the questions that we asked, should domestic surrogacy be legal? And so the question basically asked, should it be legal and basically should they get paid? So what I was interested in was should we allow for compensated surrogacy or commercial or altruista, which is currently the New Zealand model. The results, 54% of the respondents, 500-odd respondents, thought that a compensated model was appropriate, 27% thought commercial. Interesting to me was only 6% thought altruistic, which is the current New Zealand model. So not a lot of support for the current New Zealand law. Because my wonderful little students managed to shovel this into a computer-generated program, I was able to filter the results by a lot of the demographic material that we'd obtained. And so I was able to see if things like age and education and ethnicity actually changed some of these results. Filtering it by age showed that compensated surrogacy is favoured by the young. Altruistic is favoured a lot more by age. Commercial has kept that kind of 27% just pretty stable throughout everything. Education level didn't really make a difference, although lower levels of education seemed to favour an altruistic model. So if high school or less than high school was your education level, then altruistic seemed to be about right for you. Altruistic had no support from certain ethnic groups. In particular, our indigenous people had no time for altruistic. They wanted compensation or commercial, which I'd expected because indigenous people have a strong belief in a gift-giving or reciprocal-type relationship. But I thought it was quite interesting that, again, that is not consistent with our current law. Oh, sorry, compensated. We did actually define these a bit further. So compensated is reasonable expenses. Commercial means that you get paid for your time and effort and stress and pain and suffering as well. Altruistic, nothing whatsoever. Yes, so in New Zealand, no money whatsoever goes to the surrogate. gender, no difference. So male and female, I didn't see any kind of difference in the results there. With the exception when I filtered the female results again by age, there was a really noticeable blip in the 45-54 age range for females where they suddenly became very interested in commercial surrogacy. And I thought, well, that's probably the age where they'd be the most interested in using a surrogate. And they suddenly thought commercial surrogacy would be OK. Religion didn't seem to make a lot of difference. Previous experience with fertility treatment, we had some people that had been surrogates before. We had a lot of people that had experience with other forms of fertility treatment like IVF. Those groups were a lot more interested in commercial surrogacy. They were a lot more interested in that. I'll move on because I know how much time we've got left. Second finding, how important is genetics? This is something we've talked about a little bit throughout this conference. If you flat out ask people, is genetics important, they do tend to say no, but I'm not sure how true that really is because if you ask them in a slightly different way, it actually does seem to be quite important to people. So when we said should there be a genetic link between intended parents and child, 47% said no, 39% said that there should be. Who is it most important to? People with lower levels of education seem to find it more important. So our high school, less than high school people seem to find it more important. Older people, so as the age levels went up, both male and female saw a genetic link as important. Particularly ethnic groups, if they identified as Asian or Maori or Pacifica, then a genetic link was more important. Anyone who'd ticked the interaction with other fertility with fertility experience, so anyone who'd used or donated gametes, sperm or eggs before, a genetic link was important, and also people with experience of surrogacy found that a genetic link was important. So for those groups, they did find it important. What I found that was quite interesting was if you ask about a genetic link in a slightly different context, it did become important. So the flat-out question isn't important. Generally not. But when you ask more difficult questions, genetics becomes a way of answering more complicated questions. So who should the parents be? The ones with the genetic link to the child. What happens if the parties change their minds? The ones with the genetic link to the child. So although we like to think that genetics is important, it did become a way of resolving the more difficult issues for a lot of people. So to me, that suggested that maybe a lot of my respondents weren't as clear as they thought on what they were thinking. Or they're not as convinced. So they really didn't think it was important, not as certain as it's really, really certain to me that it's not important. And my final finding, and this was the one that surprised me the most actually, I was not expecting this one at all, I asked the question, what if the surrogate changes their mind? Who should the court grant custody to? And I also asked the other question, what if the intended parents don't take the child? What should happen to the child? Just a couple of comments there. Bringing a new person into the world shouldn't be a change in mind situation. And it's not a play date. You don't get to cancel. Right, so if there is a conflict between surrogate and intended parents, what should the court do? And I was expecting it should go to the surrogate. Legal parents, surrogate should get the child. This is the baby M type situation. Overwhelmingly, custody should go to the intended parents with the outcome. I was completely surprised by that. So only 15% of my respondents considered giving custody to the surrogate. So again, I started filtering these by some of the demographic material trying to see if I could find why this result was there. And I didn't really get a clear answer. Older people sort of favoured custody going to the surrogate, whereas the younger people were quite convinced that it should be the intended parents. When I sort of had asked for explanations, a lot of people jumped to things like the contract, the agreement. This is what the parties agreed, so this is what they should be sticking to. So I saw a sort of, if I draw graphs, it was quite clear that the younger people sort of said intended parents and then as they got older, they went through the surrogate. Sort of went the other way with the surrogate. Younger people weren't too convinced that they should go to the surrogate. That increased as they got older. People in sort of the middle-aged ranges, they liked the idea of some kind of joint agreement if that would work. Maybe some kind of shared custody agreement between intended parents and surrogate. Gender, I thought well surely females are more in favour of the surrogate getting custody. Nope, intended parents. Even the same with males. But interestingly, it was the males that sort of had the more creative answers. Females are just like, no, intended parents. The males were like, what about the families? So the families of the surrogate should maybe take custody or what about the families of the intended parents? Maybe we should consider something like that. So they were sort of looking for something a little bit different. Even previous experience with fertility treatment, we clearly had some people that had been surrogates in the past. And even they said, no, the surrogate should not get to get the child even if she wanted to. The child should go to the intended parents. So I thought that was quite an interesting outcome. And we finally asked them, would you like to explain your answer? Would you like to give any additional information? And some of the comments that we got were comments that I would kind of expect to come out of this room. What we should do is what's in the best interests of the child. We should go on contract. A lot of them talked about the idea of having a decent screening process in place beforehand so that this kind of issue did not come up. They said, well, isn't this what the Ethics Committee process is designed to prevent? Why would this even come up? Some reverted to the genetic link. Who's got the genetic link? That should solve it. But what I found throughout was quite intelligent responses. People just really trying to see the problem through and saying, well, I know it's a problem, but the child's got to go somewhere. What's in the best interests of the child? Can we find a way to solve it? So those are just very, very quickly three of the findings that I found. I did have 67 questions, the last one being tell me anything you feel like. And I think I got like 100 pages of comments. So even after all those questions I asked, people just had a massive amount of things that they wanted to get off their chests about sorority. If you want to read all of it, the way that I did, my results are almost ready to be published. So you too can experience the New Zealand view of sorority. Thank you.