A woman is pregnant and on her way to becoming New Zealand's first officially recognised surrogate mother to an in-vitro fertilised baby.
Officials and fertility experts remain tight-lipped on how far advanced the pregnancy is, or where the people involved are living.
The chairwoman of the National Ethics Committee on Assisted Reproduction,
Rosemary de Luca, would say only that the pregnancy was in its "very early days."
It is not known if the child was conceived from the birth mother or whether she is carrying a genetically unrelated baby.
But Dr de Luca said the surrogacy was altruistic and the birth mother was not being paid for the use of her womb.
Since July 1997, the committee had approved 11 IVF surrogacies, none of which involved money changing hands.
This was the first to have resulted in a pregnancy.
"We will be following this particular one with a great deal of interest," Dr de Luca told a parliamentary select committee looking into adoption last week.
The pregnancy is the latest advance in the New Zealand fertility industry that has critics calling for a moratorium on all new IVF treatments until laws are written to regulate them.
An Auckland clinic has applied to the ethics committee for biological parents to be able to donate frozen embryos left over after they had children by IVF.
No laws govern any aspect of IVF treatment in New Zealand.
Guidelines are set by the committee when it meets to consider individual cases.
Fertility clinics adhere to the guidelines, but critics warn that the speed at which clinics want to implement new technology is too fast for the unregulated environment to keep up with.
- NZPA
