Baby X was born in 2009 after some 20 years frozen as a fertilised embryo. Her biological parents Peter and Christie Clark donating the embryo to a childless couple asking by return for openness and continued contact. Unfortunately, and perhaps somewhat naively, accepting the word of baby X's parents that they would be involved in the life of their biological child. Who might not be naive, Peter and Christie had endured many years of being childless, adopted a son Dylan, then later as IVF made it's place in NZ became parents of a natural son Troy. They chose to keep the fertilised embryo of baby X, perhaps for the reason that the embryo of baby X lived in their minds as a child that might yet be born with all the promise of new life from part of themselves. They were no doubt influenced by understanding the experiences of people childless like they themselves had been for 11 years before adopting one son and the later successful birthing of a natural son.
They formed a contract with baby X parents, a childless couple, that captured good faith and a commitment to love they might share from a subtle distance. It was a time of expectation and excitement for both couples, there may have been misunderstandings between them and it was apparent that Peter and Christie were wealthy if but also kind. They may have given the impression of financial benefactors supportive of the couple and the baby, they may have even have imagined some financial control over the relationship.
They speak now about baby X's parents seeking money and agreeing to that before finally shutting the door when becoming concerned that the relationship might have been distorting. Finally, they were served notices excluding them from the baby's life. They discovered soon after, although it being made apparent to them before, that they had consigned all their biological parental rights away when signing a Donation Consent form. On the surface a complete situation contained in the law - total exclusion from the child's life?
Well yes, that is what they consented to - even though they had a verbal and operating agreement with baby's parents which was exercised for 12 months. A colour of right, an operating agreement - something that could be judged as in the best long term interests of the baby, but regardless a firm basis in law operating that gave baby X no right to know her true identity. It should not be that baby X lives in a information vacuum, not knowing the natural right of identity because of a Law claiming to determine all that her life might mean before she were ever born, a law that excludes her from knowing her biological parents or anything about them - a situation that placed her without certain rights before she took her first breath.
So who speaks for her, the child? In any other situation, a divorce, separation, eventually even adoption someone, the law, the rights of the child speak, but not for baby X. No one speaks for her, she is unrepresented, a test tube baby whose course in life was determined by contract that she had no part of. Well, shouldn't the Courts let her speak? Recognising rights in a contract that she is the essential part. Who could claim that a baby's rights were contracted away from her before she was even born. It is clear for humanitarian reasons that she should be represented and her rights should never have been assigned away without someone representing the dialogue of her life. Baby X is real, breathes her own air, someone, by every human right, should speak for her - look to bring all the elements of her family life together in a way representing herself, her best interests at least until she reaches the age of consent.
Baby X is like the adopted children who once under the law where never allowed to know or contact their birth parents, like the war baby's, and refugee children brought to NZ during and after the 2nd World War and often told their parents were dead when in fact they still lived. In all these cases something is taken from the children, something is assumed about them - that they have lesser rights. Probably we all know adults who've suffered by not knowing they were adopted or that they had birth parents in the world and know the tragedy that can mean to some.
Step in Polynesia, the Pacific way - where children can, and sometimes are, raised by other members of the family, have 2 mums or dads but where the truth is never kept from them. Children that when they become adults can acknowledge all parts of their lives and are accepted no less that any other, children not constrained by a law that keeps the truth from them, children not caught in a dispute between parents that sees part of their lives shut out and takes away from them their basic rights. The lawmakers can be as callous and cold against a child they might never meet, nor understand that is abhorrent to hide the truth from them, hide the essence of who they are in such a way that devalues their existence and rights - a palangi way.
The case of Baby X is important for her and others like her. It surely must be within the law to recognise the contract that operated before it was arbitrarily shut down by one side having enjoyed the fruits of that contract in a financial way for a whole year before retiring behind a second 'contract' that they had ignored to that point. There is little fairness in that, and that they accepted the 'gift' on an embryo on an acknowledged and operative verbal agreement. A situation that reasonable adults, with the help of the Court and Government agencies if necessarily, should be able to resolve, but the gross unfairness is that nobody represents Baby X, or speaks for her until she can speak for herself.
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