Tag Archives: hungary

I think that this case has probably been in the news, or is about to be.

It is yet another example of a case where arrangements that were made before the birth of a child where conception was not the routine (birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it) method, but a complex arrangement between adults that the adults involved did not properly record.

Re H v S (surrogacy agreement) 2015.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2015/36.html

I will use fake names, because I find in these cases that the bare initials just leave you grappling around for what the heck is going on.

The child is M (Mary). Mary was born on 27th January 2014.

Mary’s mummy and daddy were not two people who loved each other very much and when a mummy and daddy love each other very much, they have a special cuddle.

Mary’s mummy S (Sarah) says that she wanted a baby, and a gay man that she knew, H (Harry) agreed that he would provide her with the genetic material to have a baby, and that when she had that baby, she would be the only carer for that child.

Harry, on the other hand, says that he and B (Bob) are in a committed homosexual relationship, wished to have a child, and reached an agreement with Sarah that Harry would artificially inseminate Sarah, and that after the birth, Harry and Bob would care for the baby together, but that Sarah would play an active role in the child’s life.

That is not so much a gap but a Grand Canyon in the different understandings of the people involved.

Ms Justice Russell said this:-

Very sadly this case is another example of how “agreements” between potential parents reached privately to conceive children to build a family go wrong and cause great distress to the biological parents and their spouses or partners. The conclusions this court has made about the agreement between the parties which led to the conception and birth of this child will inform the basis of future decisions the court has to make about the arrangements for the child. The lack of a properly supported and regulated framework for arrangements of this kind has, inevitably, lead to an increase in these cases before the Family Court.

The Court had to deal with this as a straight private law children dispute under the Children Act 1989, rather than an application by Harry and Bob for a Parental Order under Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, because Sarah did not consent to the making of a Parental Order  (and the Court have no power to make one if the biological mother does not consent)

Also, some of these adults were Romanian, some had been raised in Romania but were of Hungarian birth, and so the child is of mixed Romanian and Hungarian heritage, although all concerned now live in England.

We add into the melting pot of complexity here that the three adults concerned are not all of the same religion and there was a dispute about what religion the child should be baptised into. There was a Court order that Sarah should not baptise the child until the Court had heard argument about this and determined the dispute, but she did, and she also lied about it. Also registering Mary with names that had not been agreed or even discussed.

On the 21^st May 2014 the Applicants applied for prohibited steps orders regarding the child’s name and her baptism. The Respondent had registered the child on her own with her surname and with first names chosen by her that had not been discussed with the Applicants or agreed between the parties. The Applicants also applied for an order prohibiting S from having M baptised according to Christian Orthodox rites as although all three of the parties are Christian H is a Protestant and B is Roman-Catholic. An order was made by Recorder Bazley QC which prohibited any party form removing M from the jurisdiction or from causing or arranging for her to be baptised or christened. In the event S not only disobeyed the order of the court and had M baptised but lied about having done so. She informed the court and the parties that she had M baptised in October 2014 at the hearing in January 2015; this despite her assurances to the contrary to the guardian in December 2014 and to the court in her own statement dated the 7^th January 2015.

Towards the end of the hearing, the Court heard that a Tweet had been sent about the case and that the tweet had been tagged with the name of a reporter at ITN, no doubt with the intention of stirring up a public debate.  {I think that I have seen that tweet, or retweeted versions of it on my own twitter feed, which is why I had been watching out for this judgment}

38. At the outset of the trial the guardian (on behalf of M) and the Applicants drew my attention to the publication of information regarding the case on social media. The first was a posting on Facebook on the 5^th October 2014 by a person known to be a friend of S. The guardian was made aware of this post soon after it was published but considered that there was no information by which M herself could be identified and decided not to bring it to the court’s attention. I accept from the information contained in it that the source of that information must have been one of the parties (or someone very close to them) and it is more likely than not that that source was S. The person concerned wrote to the court and had been involved in “mediation” between the parties. This is an example of S’s mode of conducting her case not through the court alone but by recruiting support from others to pursue her case in other arenas. I do not accept that he would have published this or the Tweet in January 2015 without her knowledge or consent.
39. On the 16^th January 2015 the guardian was made aware that the same person had made the following Tweet: “Wealthy gay couple force child from good mother’s breast setting bad precedent. Starts Mon19Jan 10am High Court RCJ, court 35,“
40. The Tweet which was available to anyone online was tagged to alert a reporter at ITN. S denied any part in this tweet, and while it may be the case that she did was not directly involved in posting the tweet, it is in keeping with her conduct of the case during which she sent emails copious emails to the court, to the President of the Family Division and pursued an appeal against the order made on the 1^st October 2014 apparently against legal advice. The solicitor for the Applicants, sent an email to the person who had tweeted requesting him to take the tweet down and informing him of the objections of the Applicants to him tweeting about this matter.

During the hearing, the mother raised two major arguments. The first was that as she had been breast-feeding Mary, that had led to a bond and relationship which would be damaging to break.

98. S has made a great deal of her status as a breast-feeding mother and the disruption to M’s routine of staying with her father overnight; not least because M “co-slept” with S and was breast fed during the night. Although some weeks after the hearing concluded S changed her position and agreed to M staying over-night with her father and B it is evident that she did so as she accepted that she had to following the decision to refuse her permission to appeal. Prior to that S had, as I have set out above, used the fact that she continued to breast-feed M as a reason for reducing or limiting contact and claimed that it was in M’s best interest. It is the current orthodoxy, which the court does not gainsay, that breast feeding, if possible, for the first year or more as it provides many health advantages for a child. In her first statement in April 2014 S said that she wanted to breast-feed for the first 9 months; as time has progressed so the length of time she wishes to breast-feed has increased. In her oral evidence she was unable to say how long it would go on but indicated that it would be as long as M wanted it to which could be as much as several years into the future.
99. Part of S’s case is that she sleeps with M which also provides the child with health and emotional advantages in respect of their co-attachment. The practice is not recommended for babies and small infants as there is a danger of over-lay and as a result may be considered to be more controversial, but that was not a matter that I was asked to decide. This practice when it takes place cannot be used as a reason to inhibit or curtail a child’s right to form a positive and substantial relationship with her other parent or parents; which was a direct effect of S’s practice in this case and she used it as part of her argument to support the curtailment of overnight stays. Based on the needs of a child, as M grows she must be allowed to become independent and grow as a human being separate from her parents and carers. At her age it is most unlikely that she will not suffer any harm sleeping on her own; indeed she has already experienced it without ill effect when she stayed with her father and his partner overnight.

The second was that Harry and Bob were in a gay relationship and that all such relationships were promiscuous and inherently wrong and unstable.

50. I have now heard the oral evidence of all the parties and read copies of electronic communication between them. The dispute about the agreement is largely based on S’s assertion that she and H decided to parent a child together, and that B was to play no part other than as the child’s father’s “boyfriend”; to use her word. S has sought to present herself throughout the proceedings as a victim and someone whose “rights” as a mother and as a woman have been trampled over and abused. She claims, in terms, that H and B are attempting to remove her child, from her breast, in a cruel and calculated attempt to build a family and that she is being discriminated against and victimised. She describes H and B in an openly disparaging and dismissive way saying that they are not like a very well known celebrity couple (who she names) who have had children by surrogates; “They are not a gay couple having a child”.
51. S repeatedly made allegations, wholly unsupported by any objective evidence, about H and B; about their relationship and about their lifestyles. About the former she repeatedly relied on stereotypical views on the nature of their relationship suggesting that she knew “they have an open relationship, what gay people call it, have sex in groups.” There is no foundation to this claim which I consider to be a reflection of her deliberate attempt to discredit H and B in a homophobic and offensive manner. At the outset of the case she filled in a form (C1A dated 19^th February 2014) alleging harm and domestic violence. She said in this form that H “has an open view on class A drugs. He believes that it is OK for people to use class A drugs and has said he would like to try it himself” She went on that H “is a self-confessed antibiotics user he gets his own supply of very strong antibiotics from Belgium and use [sic] them all the time”. S went on to allege that H might give them to M if he had unsupervised contact; and to allege that there were “loads of people coming and going” from the Applicants’ address and that drugs may be used at that address. None of these allegations were followed up before or during the hearing when the Applicant’s gave oral evidence. The abandonment of allegations during the trial lends little to the weight that that court can give her evidence as a whole.
52. I had the opportunity of re-reading the emails sent to the court and evidence filed by S both during this case and after it concluded. It is peppered with allegations, innuendo, offensive and disparaging comments about H and B. I do not need to set them all out or repeat them as most of it was never put to the Applicants and was not pursued in evidence. I had the opportunity to see the Applicants and S in court during the five days of the hearing and on other occasions when they have appeared before me. I saw S give evidence and observed her while she listened to the evidence of others. There was never the slightest indication of a cowed, submissive or victimised person. On the contrary she conducted herself in a very confident and most assertive manner throughout. She has sought to impose her will on the court and manage the proceedings. The need to express her breast milk while genuine was used to interrupt and disrupt the evidence of the Applicants. The evidence in support of this was the manner in which she could, suddenly, regulate it after their evidence was completed

On the factual dispute – whether this conception was intended (as Sarah says) to be a baby for Sarah to look after with Harry donating his sperm or (as Harry and Bob say) a surrogate arrangement where Harry and Bob would care for the baby but Sarah would play a role in the baby’s life, the Judge heard evidence and read a lot of emails between the main players.  The Judge concluded that the stated  intention between the parties  HAD been for Harry and Bob to be the main carers, and more significantly that rather than this being a case where mum changed her mind after the birth (as can happen), that she had basically tricked and manipulated these men into providing a baby for her when they would never have agreed if they had known it was always her intention to keep the child.

54. The emails do not set out an agreement in terms and it is H’s case that after the beginning of February the discussions were oral and went on to include B. The fact that there are not any emails produced after February supported his case. It also fits in with the insemination taking place about the fourth week of April 2013, in the Applicants’ home with B there on at least one occasion. It is, and I use the term advisedly, inconceivable that B was not aware of what was going on before April and was not party to any of the discussions. In this as in much else I do not accept the evidence of S. Her later use, in evidence, of the term “sperm donor” is completely at odds with the tone and contents of her emails in February. It is not possible to accept both from what H told her in the emails and from the obviously close relationship of H and B (which I have seen at close quarters throughout the trial) that S could have ever thought that she was having a child with H to the exclusion of B; she says so herself in her emails. I conclude that she must have either deliberately misled the Applicants about her intentions or changed her mind as the pregnancy progressed.
55. On the balance of probabilities, and for the reasons set out above and in the following paragraphs of this judgment, I find that S deliberately misled the Applicants in order to conceive a child for herself rather than changing her mind at a later date. Having at first encouraged H to be involved S was already trying to exclude H not long before M was born from involvement with the birth and with the child. I accept the evidence of H and B that S was a part of the arrangements that were made to rent a larger property. If as she claimed they were aware from the outset that any child would be her’s and live with her there would have been no reason to go to the expense of moving and furnishing a larger home. It highly unlikely that S could ever have thought H, who had told her he so desperately wanted a child in his emails, would decide to act as a sperm donor for her, there was no reason for him to do and it would have been entirely at odds with his own plans and wishes.
56. S has consistently done all she can to minimise the role that H had in the child’s life and to control and curtail his contact with his daughter. Far from being a child that she conceived with her good friend, as she describes it, her actions have always been of a woman determined to treat the child as solely her own. She made sure that H was not at the hospital when M was born; she registered the birth without putting H on the certificate and did not give the child any names except those chosen by her and did not reflect the child’s paternal family names in that choice. The history of these proceedings bears this out; H and B were left with no choice but to issue applications.

The question then was where this child should live during her childhood?  You need to read the whole judgment to get a proper feeling for the case, there was a lot going on, but it finally gets distilled here:-

116. The evidence has to be considered in the light of the child’s best interests. I have used the welfare checklist as the basis for my decision because I am concerned with how to best provide for M’s physical, emotional and educational needs under the provision of s 1 (3) (a) CA. Although M is not yet at school it is more likely than not that the parent who can best meet all her other needs and is most likely to be able to provide her with a secure home and stable upbringing with room to grow emotionally for the remainder of her infancy is more likely to meet her educational needs fulfil her potential in the future. The latter requires that M is afforded the scope to grow up in an environment where conflict is at a minimum. M is not yet able to say as she is just learning to talk so I do not know her expressed wishes and feelings but I assume it that for the immediate future she would want to continue to remain with S and continue to spend time with and H and B, including overnight stays.
117. Any decision that M lives with H and B and spends much less time with S is bound to affect her, likely to upset and distress her in the short term at least and necessarily amounts to a change in her circumstances. However familiar M is with her home with H and B she would miss her mother with whom she has spent most of her time. Against that I will weigh the harm that she is at risk of suffering if she remains with her mother. As she gets older she will become more aware of, and will be directly affected by, her mother’s negative views about her father and B. These views will affect her own sense of identity; negatively inform her view of herself and where she fits into the world.
118. I can only judge S’s ability to parent M based on recent history and based on that history M is more likely than not to suffer harm; to continue to be taken to the GP and to hospital at times when it is not necessary in furtherance of S’s determination to control M’s contact with H and B or in respect of contact or any other dispute she may pursue over M with H in the future. It is likely that S will present H and B in a negative way to M and give her limited opportunity to understand the history behind her conception and of how she came to be here; nothing in S’s conduct of her case can offer any assurance to the court that S is capable of doing that for M in a balanced way that is free from S’s own agenda.
119. At present S is able to care for M well physically but there are already grounds for concerns about her mother’s over emotional and highly involved role in this infant’s life. Ultimately the role of a parent is to help the child to become independent. This is a child who at 15 months old is still carried by her mother in a sling on her body. M spends most of her time with her mother who does not set out any timetable for returning to work, as S would have to, to provide for M and for herself. There is a potential for enmeshment and stifling attachment rather than a healthy outward looking approach to the child’s life. The question is who benefits most from this chosen regime which points towards an inability to put the child’s needs before her mother’s need or desire for closeness.
120. The attachment which will develop in an infant who sleeps with her mother, spends all day being carried by her mother and is breastfed on demand through out the day and night raises questions about the long term effect on M. From the point of view of this judgment it further begs the question as to who benefits most from the regime S has chosen to impose without reference to M’s father, H. I have little doubt that the breast-feeding was used a device to frustrate contact during the proceedings, a conclusion supported by S claiming at first that she could not express her milk which so reduced the time available for contact; subsequently when it was clear that M could be fed and was able to eat other foods S no longer had difficulty expressing milk. I am forced to conclude that S has shown herself to be unable to put M first and that she is unable to meet M’s emotional needs now and in the long term.
121. The contact that S has with H and B has been very successful; the guardian who has observed it more than once described M as alert, happy and relaxed in her surroundings. Unlike S, H and B have not made a plethora of allegations against S; apart from those directly concerned with contact or her conduct towards them during contact. They have said that they want there to be as harmonious a relationship as possible between the adults and their support of M spending time with her mother is evinced by the level of contact they suggested. Their conduct has been consistent with this approach and while it is exemplified by an offer of contact which is greatly in excess of that proposed by the guardian they have never sought to exclude S from M’s life and to the end of the proceedings expressed the hope that the relationship between the parties could become more harmonious for the sake of M. The Applicants could easily have adopted the recommendation of the guardian that contact should be once a month but they have not done so.
122. While to move a young child from her mother is a difficult decision and is one which I make with regret as I am aware that it will cause S distress I conclude that H is the parent who is best able to meet M’s needs both now and in the future. It is he who has shown that he has the ability to allow M to grow into a happy, balanced and healthy adult and it is he who can help her to reach her greatest potential. I accept the evidence of the guardian that H and B have had a child-centred approach throughout. It was obvious from their oral evidence and their statements. H, in particular, has always sought to put M first.
123. H thought carefully about having a child and his discussions with S in the emails that they exchanged in February 2012 are an illustration of his awareness of the difficulties that would be encountered as well as a clear expression of his very great desire to have a child; and to have that child with B. It is highly unlikely that H would have reached any agreement about having a child without involving B, not least because it would have jeopardised his relationship with B and H’s future role as father to the child he very much wanted to have.
124. The best that can be said for S is that she deluded herself about the nature of the agreement she was reaching first with H and later with H and B. It is very unlikely that such an obviously astute and determined woman would have left anything to chance when it came to having a baby. While I do not rely on the substance of the CA proceedings in Kent I do take account of the fact that S no longer has her daughters living with her and has limited contact with them. This situation, whatever its cause and whatever her role in it, will indubitably make it more likely that she wanted, as she said, to have another child for herself. The emails that she sent were deliberately misleading and S continued in the deceit, allowing H to believe that he and B would be the main carers for the baby until pregnancy was well advanced.
125. It is not the function of this court to decide on the nature of the agreement between H, B and S and then either enforce it or put it in place. It is the function of the court to decide what best serves the interests and welfare of this child throughout her childhood. It is, however, a fact that M was not conceived by two people in a sexual relationship. The pregnancy was contrived with the aim of a same-sex couple having a child to form a family assisted by a friend, this was ostensibly acquiesced to by all parties at the time the agreement was entered into and conception took place. Therefore M living with H and B and spending time with S from time to time fortunately coincides with the reality of her conception and accords with M’s identity and place within her family.
126. M should live with her father H and his partner B as it is in her best interests to do so; I reach that conclusion having had regard throughout to the welfare checklist and to M’s interests now and in the long term.

The Court therefore decided that Mary should move from Sarah’s care to live with Harry and Bob.  We will wait to see whether the media reporting deals with the substance of the case that the Judge had to decide, or whether it follows the easy sound bite narrative of the tweet – Court rips child away from mother’s breast to give to gay couple…

There is a Reporting Restriction Order in place that the child and the adults involved not be named, and as ever it applies to me and any commenters, so if you do know the names, I don’t want to see them here.