Rita D’Alton-Harrison provides an update on the employment rights of commissioning mothers
Last month, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down two important decisions on the employment rights of commissioning mothers whose children were born as a result of a surrogacy arrangement (see NLJ news story).
Surrogacy can be defined as an arrangement whereby a woman (the surrogate mother) agrees to carry a child for another or others. In such a situation there will be two potential mothers, the surrogate mother who carries the child and the commissioning mother who is intended to be the mother responsible for the nurture and care of the child. While it is recognised in both the UK and Ireland that the surrogate mother is entitled to full maternity rights as the gestational carrier of the child, the law does not provide the same protection for the commissioning mother. This is despite the fact that in some circumstances a commissioning mother could have a biological connection to the child if her ovum were
