Riveting and comprehensive was the lecture on human rights, adoption and surrogacy of professor Elizabeth A. Pangalangan, one of the 15 holders of the Chief Justice Panganiban Professorial Chairs on Liberty and Prosperity, held recently at UP Diliman.

Her scholarly, eloquently delivered thesis focused on this: Adoption and surrogacy are, at the outset, parent-centric and are usually contracted by, and for the benefit of, the adopters and the commissioning parents to satisfy their craving for parenthood and family love. Eventually and doctrinally, however, courts lean in favor of the best interest and overarching human rights of the children.

Human rights and adoption have been dissected in many ways by scholars and jurisprudence. However, surrogacy is quite novel. Thus, in my limited space today, I will focus on surrogacy. (In a few days, Pangalangan’s extemporaneous and PowerPoint-assisted lecture will be posted in http://www.libpros.com after she finishes transcribing and editing it.)

Surrogacy is an arrangement whereby a woman (called surrogate) agrees to bear a child whom she intends to transfer for custody and care to another or others (the commissioning couple or commissioning husband/wife) upon the child’s birth.

There are two general types: (1) traditional—the surrogate is inseminated by the commissioning father’s sperms, either naturally or via in vitro fertilization (or IVF). Here the surrogate, as the egg donor, has a genetic link to the child; and (2) gestational — the surrogate carries the embryo created by the union of the egg and the sperm of the commissioning couple. Example: “The delectable twins of Mar and Korina” (Opinion, 3/10/19).

With surrogacy, a child can have two fathers: (1) the biological and (2) the commissioning. But he/she can have three mothers: (1) the genetic or biological mother (the source of the egg), (2) the commissioning mother and (3) the surrogate who bears and gives birth to the child.

According to Article 164 of the Family Code, “Children conceived as a result of artificial insemination of the wife with the sperms of the husband or that of a donor or both are…  legitimate children of the husband and his wife, provided, that both of them authorized or ratified such insemination in a written instrument executed and signed by them before the birth of the child.” No other Philippine law governs artificial insemination or surrogacy.

That surrogacy services are now offered in several local hospitals and that many Filipinos have gone abroad to avail of it should be enough to impel Congress to legislate on it, consistent with our Constitution and family values.

Professor Pangalangan offers four possible legislative options: (1) prohibit all forms of surrogacy; (2) prohibit commercial surrogacy but allow altruistic ones, that is, prohibit payment to the surrogate because trading in human flesh is abhorrent but allow surrogacy when no financial reward is made; (3) allow but regulate commercial surrogacy; and (4) allow all kinds of surrogacy arrangements.

Our Supreme Court has not issued any decision involving surrogacy. But Pangalangan discussed many foreign decisions, the most interesting being Yamada vs Union of India (Sept. 29, 2008). Here, Baby Boy Manji was born in India from the egg of an Indian surrogate and the sperm of a Japanese husband.

Unfortunately, prior to his birth, the commissioning Japanese couple separated. Saying she had no genetic link to the child, the ex-wife refused to take him. Neither did the surrogate want to keep the baby, insisting she bore him only because of the surrogacy contract.

Mercifully, the Japanese husband claimed the child, but could not bring him to Japan because that country does not recognize surrogacy. Thus, it refused to give him a passport. The husband’s petition to adopt the child was denied, because India bans single-parent adoption.

On humanitarian grounds, the Supreme Court of India eventually allowed the child to leave India with a certification (not passport), and Japan issued him a tourist visa. I think this case illustrates the complications that legislation must anticipate to solve similar problems that could involve Filipinos.

Last Wednesday, I spoke in two legal forums. The first was at the top-notch School of Law and Governance of the University of San Carlos in Cebu, where I seconded Dean Joan S. Largo’s pivotal lecture on how our economic rights trumpeted by the 1987 Constitution can be enforced by the judiciary.

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Having just returned from a “learning visit on clinical education” in the United States, the young and energetic dean, one of the 13 holders of the “Chief Justice Panganiban Professorial Chairs on Liberty and Prosperity,” began with a contrast of “how the poor, in a country of the rich, grappled with the notion of justice. One thing is certain, the road to justice is paved by the access to justice of the powerless.”

She then compared this situation with another glaring contrast, this time in our country: Despite the repeated invocations by its framers that our 1987 Charter is “pro-poor,” that social justice is the “heart of this Constitution,” and that “[t]alk of people’s freedom and legal equality would be empty as long as they continue to live in destitution and misery,” our economic rights have remained mere grandiose rhetoric to this day.

More than three decades after the Constitution took effect, our people still wallow in grinding poverty. This sad reality is caused in part by the failure of Congress to pass enabling legislation to substantiate and fulfill these benevolent invocations.

The solution lies in urging our Supreme Court to be as “bold and daring” as the highest courts in South Africa, Colombia and Argentina “in enforcing economic rights not only in the laws but also in judicial edicts” like the writ of prosperity.

After all, “[n]owhere can we find a constitution so humane, and a court so powerful than in the Philippines, making a writ of prosperity truly feasible if the Philippine judiciary wants it.”

To claims that the reticence in enforcing economic rights is due to the utter lack of resources, Largo gamely retorted, “Indeed, it is in countries with the scarcest of resources that the writ of prosperity lends itself to greatest relevance and importance… When a court issues the writ… it does no more than prod the elected branches… to comply with the legal standards and mandates embodied in the Constitution.”

Readers may access Largo’s lecture in full at http://www.libpros.com.

On my part as chair of the Foundation for Liberty and Prosperity, I asked Dean Largo to seek the help of her colleagues in the Philippine Association of Law Schools (PALS), which she heads, to use the “rights-conferring declarations” of the Constitution to determine which of the many economic rights can be the subject of judicial enforcement sans legislation.

I also urged her and her PALS colleagues to use the rule of law to unleash the entrepreneurial ingenuity of our people. What our nation needs is a government that affords opportunities for education instead of habitual mendicancy, fosters free competition instead of suffocating regulations, and rewards talent and hard work instead of sycophancy and connection. My talk can be accessed at the same website.

Hosted by the San Beda Law Alumni Association, the second forum was a testimonial dinner for recently promoted Bedans, including Supreme Court Justices Jose C. Reyes Jr. and Ramon Paul L. Hernando, Ombudsman Samuel R. Martires, Sandiganbayan Justices Maryann C. Manalac and Kevin Narce B. Vivero, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Emilio B. Aquino, Deputy Commissioner Arnel S. Guballa of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and several others.

My extemporaneous message was simple: Bedans reached their lofty offices with the expectation that they will outperform the graduates of another university who, in the past, cornered most of these exalted posts. While there may be bad eggs in the San Beda basket, the vast majority are good and selfless.

I challenged them to prove by their deeds, more than by their words, that their immersion in “Ora et Labora” will result in prudent and graft-free governance. And, yes, amid their roars and cheers, I reminded them that their fellow Red Lions and harshest critics, Sen. Leila de Lima and former Sen. Rene A. V. Saguisag, are ready to pounce on their lapses and missteps.