Gay Singapore man wins right to keep surrogate son

A COURT in Singapore has ruled that a gay man will be allowed to adopt a son he fathered through a surrogate in the United States.

The landmark ruling yesterday overturned a decision last year that rejected the 46-year-old pathologist’s request for legal parental rights to his biological child, who is now five.

The man, who cannot be named, and his partner of 13 years, who is also 46, had paid £159,000 for the process to be carried out in the US because it is illegal in the Asian city state. Socially conservative Singapore has also outlawed gay sex and does not recognise samesex marriages.

The child in question is considered illegitimate under Singaporean law as the surrogate mother and the father are not married. However, even though the surrogate mother, from Pennsylvania, waived her rights under the surrogacy deal, the father’s adoption bid was dismissed by Shobha Nair, a district judge, last December. The court said that the man had attempted to walk “through the back door of the system when the front door was firmly shut”.

In its ruling on Monday, the threejudge appeal court stressed that its reversal of the decision was based “on the particular facts of the case and should not be taken as an endorsement of what the appellant and his partner set out to do”, reported The Straits Times.

“Our decision was reached through an application of the law as we understood it to be, and not on the basis of our sympathies for the position of either party,” wrote Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon. The court had faced “not insignificant difficulty” in balancing the welfare of the child with the “public policy against the formation of same-sex family units”.

The biological father will have sole parental rights of the child. A campaign is attempting to overturn Singapore’s colonial-era law under which sex between consenting males carries a penalty of up to two years in prison.