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Latest Surrogacy News
June 18, 2004
ContraCostaTimes.com
TOKYO -
The Japanese government has rejected a popular
television actress' request that her twin sons --
delivered by a surrogate mother in the United States --
be recognized as her own, the justice minister said last
week.
Aki Mukai and her
husband, former professional wrestler Nobuhiko Takada,
became parents in late November when an American woman
in her 30s gave birth to the boys.
Mukai, 39, and Takada,
42, applied to their municipality shortly afterward
asking that the babies be included in their family
register. The central government instructed the
municipality in May to refuse the application, Justice
Minister Daizo Ozawa said.
The ministry declined
to explain why, citing Mukai's privacy.
Japanese law doesn't
prohibit surrogate births, which involve removing an egg
for fertilization and implanting it into another woman,
who carries the baby until birth. But the Japan Society
of Obstetrics and Gynecology sets ethical standards
restricting in-vitro insemination to married couples and
opposing any surrogate births, and lawmakers want to
impose a ban on surrogate births and penalize those who
violate it.
As a result, few
Japanese doctors will perform a surrogate birth, and
many childless couples have turned to fertility clinics
in the United States.
Lawmakers in Japan's
conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party have long
opposed most fertility treatments because they fear
legal custody battles and other possible repercussions
for the traditional family unit.
In 2000, Mukai was
pregnant with her first child when doctors told her she
had cervical cancer. She ended the pregnancy to undergo
treatment, and later turned to a surrogate to carry the
couple's children.
If not listed on the
family register -- an official document used to prove
identity when applying for schools, jobs and passports
in Japan -- the twins would have trouble following
through with the most basic activities of life.
Pro-surrogacy doctors
say a ban on surrogate births would limit the options
for many childless couples, leaving them no choice but
to seek fertility treatments abroad. A ban also would
undermine the government's hopes of reversing the
nation's record-low birth rate, at 1.29 births per woman
last year, they say.
In another case, the
government ruled in October that a couple whose twins
were born to an American surrogate couldn't be the
biological parents.
Officials later said
they would reconsider if the couple registered the boys
as the offspring of the Japanese man and the American
surrogate mother, but the couple rejected that offer.
Japan regards the twins as American citizens.
Mukai's office said
neither the family nor their spokesman was available for
comment.
Kyodo News reported
that Mukai issued a statement expressing frustration
that Ozawa told the media about the decision.
"Should the justice
minister be allowed to release information to the press
about a matter so personal as the relationship between
parent and child?" Mukai said, according to Kyodo. "I
don't believe the announcement is at all in the interest
of child welfare."
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