Noda Seiko -- legacy politician, crusader for the right of married men and women to bear separate surnames, everyone's pick during the LDP years as the woman most likely to become Japan first female prime minister, is pregnant. (Link to NHK report)
Using a donor's eggs, sperm from her partner (or as the newspapers put it "really her husband") and a clinic in the United States, the 49 year old politicians, who documented her struggles with infertility in numerous books and articles, will give birth, if all goes well, in February, when she will be 50 years of age.
Of course, there is the antediluvian legal issue: since the eggs are not hers, is she really the mother? The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour has issued a report recommending that children born of eggs from donors be considered legally the children of the woman who carries the baby to term. The Diet (Who back there said "of course"?) never codified these recommendations into laws. The Ministry of Law (let us just dispense with the notion that it is a Ministry of Justice, shall we?) finds that until now, all legal decisions regarding these cases have recognized the birth mother as the legal mother.
All Noda-sensei has to do now is find a hospital in a ward, city or township office without some blood-and-semen arch-conservative running it, that she might register the birth in peace.
But that is all in the future. Until then, omedeto gozaimasu!
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