Japanese Couple Fight for Sons’ Citizenship

A year after Yasunao and Yoko Kondo submitted paperwork to register their newborn twins for citizenship, the couple’s sons are still foreigners.

As far as the government is concerned, the twins aren’t Japanese.

After years of trying to have children, the Kondos, who are in their 50s, went to a California fertility clinic that introduced them to an egg donor and an American surrogate mother. In October 2002, the Kondos became parents of twin boys.

The government saw it differently. Japan has no surrogate-birth laws, so officials ruled the boys were not the couple’s.

The two sides are now in a legal fight over the couple’s parental rights -- and are testing a legal system that makes no provision for births using modern fertility techniques.

Yasunao Kondo says he and his wife are demanding full rights as parents and citizenship for their sons.

“We want this whole idea of the parent-child relationship reviewed,” said Kondo, 53, who wrote a book about California’s surrogacy laws while studying for a PhD there and now teaches junior high school in Akashi, 270 miles west of Tokyo. “We will probably lose. This is not a society that can be easily changed by ordinary people,” he added. “But is that a reason not to try?”

How their ordeal ends could sway Japan’s debate on surrogate births and affect thousands of childless Japanese couples who seek help from fertility clinics overseas every year.

Surrogate births involve removing an egg for fertilization and implanting it in another woman who carries the baby to term. Although such births are commonplace in many developed countries, Japan was not known to have had any until a doctor announced one in 2001.

After that, the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology set ethical standards restricting in-vitro insemination to married couples and opposing surrogate births.

The government is now drawing up legislation that would outlaw surrogate births and impose criminal penalties, based on a health ministry panel’s recommendation earlier this year. The panel also urged that egg and sperm donations be illegal.

Every year, about 12,000 Japanese babies -- one in every 100 -- are conceived through fertility treatment, according to government statistics.

Pro-surrogacy doctors and activists say a ban on surrogate births would severely limit the options for many childless couples, many of whom seek fertility help abroad. A ban also would undercut Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s attempts to reverse the nation’s record-low birth rate, at 1.32 births per woman last year, they say.

“In reproductive assistance treatment, the rights of the parents, family and other cooperating parties to make their own decision should be respected as much as possible,” Fertility Rights of Mothers, in Tokyo, said in a policy statement issued in November.

Advocates of a ban say a woman’s body shouldn’t be a reproductive tool. Surrogate mothers often sign on to earn money, not out of goodwill, they say. “An overwhelming majority of the women around the world who offer to be surrogates are socially deprived. It’s a cruel abuse of women who give up their motherhood to make money,” said Dr. Hisako Watanabe, a Keio University medical school professor who was on the health ministry’s panel. “Just because other countries have legalized it doesn’t mean Japan should.”

With few Japanese doctors willing to offer surrogacy services, many couples unable to have children have gone to the United States, South Korea and other countries that have well-established practices.

Most couples who return with surrogate children are able to escape challenge from the government. But the Kondos were snared by a 40-year-old regulation that requires checks on children of couples over age 50.

“This is the first application the government has stopped for this, though there were probably cases like this in the past,” said Yoshikazu Nemura, a Justice Ministry official.

The Kondos had been trying to have children since marrying in 1986, but doctors told them complications with Yoko’s uterus would make it difficult. They tried a fertility clinic in Kobe, but the treatments failed.

Kondo began looking into surrogate births and, after finding that Japanese doctors only performed the procedure among family members, he contacted the Center for Surrogate Parenting in Encino. He said he and his wife ruled out adoption after talking with the center.

In August 1999, they flew to California. They hired a woman as a surrogate mother; she was implanted with an embryo created from Kondo’s sperm and an Asian-American woman’s donated egg.

The twins were born Oct. 17, 2002, and, under the surrogacy contract, which California’s laws recognize, the surrogate mother agreed to forfeit her parental rights.

Six days later, the Kondos applied for the boys’ citizenship through the Japanese consulate in San Francisco and got tangled in Japan’s birth rules. They presume the woman who gives birth is the mother, and it considers children conceived from a donor egg and born to a surrogate to have been born out of wedlock.

The Kondos’ application was finally rejected Oct. 10, nearly a year after they filed the papers.

Nemura, the Justice Ministry official, said the government couldn’t recognize the couple as the biological parents. For now, he said, Japan regards the twins as American citizens, which birth in the United States bestows on them.

Without Japanese citizenship, the boys would be excluded from most public schools in Japan and would be denied other rights later, such as voting.

The Kondos could legally adopt the twins and apply for a change of citizenship through immigration authorities, but Yasunao Kondo hopes that the government will give in and accept them as the parents. He has hired a lawyer to negotiate with Justice Ministry officials.

Ministry officials refused to comment on the talks.

Kondo said he and his wife regularly call the surrogate mother and send her photos and reports on the boys, who are now almost able to walk.