The Times article on surrogacy and concerns about single fathers

We could easily tighten up on babies born abroad and returning to the UK without a biological mother under trafficking laws.

Unless there is something in place to ensure the baby isn't allowed to board the flight to the UK the issue would still be what to do with the baby that arrives in the UK with their father.

We could easily tighten up on babies born abroad and returning to the UK without a biological mother under trafficking laws.

Some people men are ingedibly selfish.

I wish there was a human right to knowing your parents & your cultural background as an anex to a right of family. We really need to think about the overall health of these babies that will grow into adults with a lot of questions.

You might have more luck complaining to IPSO

I think the article was placed as Katie Faust has been in the UK.
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If you haven’t already, I recommend listening to Dr Suzanne Vierling on how many ways men have to make money from a woman’s body. I have never looked at the world the same since.

And when his child will naturally want to know where/who its mummy is this what they will be told.....

There are a lot of prominent, powerful and/or privileged gay men for whom their imagined rights are paramount, it seems. I imagine these same men are the ones very much identifying themselves as. 'trans allies'...with no real regard or respect for women at all.

Yes, it is all just about 'equality' and with a focus on self satisfaction and individual 'freedom of choice'. No wider ethical consideration at all.

Also, a lot of these gay men seem to, miraculously, have only boys. I do wonder whether this is consciously planned, and female embryos are destroyed or terminated?

No mention of whether any of these children will have relationships with grandparents or other family members; or have any 'mother' influence in their life at all. A motherless child is really quite a profound matter.

I'm also imagining that the 50 year old single father did not take much in terms of paternity leave in which to bond with the child; he also missed the child's birth. It really is all about what these men personally want or desire. No thought about the child's need for family.

I note that yesterday's piece was closed for comment. I got the feeling they did this as the previous day there had been widespread negative comment and this was a way of 'sticking it' to the reader.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14756779/amp/Elderly-couple-70s-parents-surrogate-baby.html

The UK has lots of tight laws on surrogacy. There were plans to relax these but they were shelved.

Trouble is that people are going abroad to jurisdictions where there are next to no laws.

And then they bring the babies back to the UK - these single dads are the biological fathers, and courts won't put babies into the care system when they are being adequately cared for by their dads.

There have been several cases of older couples using surrogacy and the judge's being extremely cross with them when it comes to court to finalise the paperwork.

But still, given the option of removing the child or keeping it where it is, they reluctantly grant the paperwork.

If you use donor eggs or sperm in the UK, the child has a right to know who they are when they turn 18. This is one of the reasons surrogacy mostly happens abroad where this doesn't apply.

It reminds me a bit of that Matthew Syed Sideways Radio 4 episode on broody men, with a lot of discussion of surrogate fathers, a few months back. I usually like MS but this was just uncritical acceptance of the joys children may provide for single men.

I'm coming to the conclusion that a lot of men roughly my age, whom I've always regarded as being sympathetic and empatheric, simply have no idea of how the biological lives of women and babies are interwined and how this means our physical and emotional lives are also bound together.

the risks of a grown man sexually abusing a defenceless baby are just too high to take. We know men rape womens corpses, men sexually assault toddlers in day care facilities. Men have a strange sexual attraction to minors. There are so many pedophiles we don't have enough prison space to lock them up....safeguarding babies and children should be more important than a mans wishes...

Well put. I wish i could express clearly and have concrete evidence why I believe wholeheartedly that women almost always make better carers than men and are what children need and desire. Similarly that the childs biological mother will also almost always give a child the best upbringing and optimum life. It’s coded into our biology to nurture and protect. This does not diminish a fathers role but acknowledges that they bring different and essential qualities and attributes.

Placemarking to read the linked articles later.

@AlexandraLeaving your comment is distasteful. Bearing children and raising them has never been “women’s work”. It’s motherhood.

“Women’s work” is a term that encompasses the drudgery and the chores that are required in a household. Raising the next generation of children is not drudgery.

All children deserve and need a mother. For exactly the same reason that men can’t just “decide” they are women, men can’t just “decide” they can be mothers. Being a mother is fundamentally different in character than being a father, because men and women are fundamentally different.

We pity children who lose their mothers for good reason. Women who lose their babies experience a more intense, soul-rending pain and grief than fathers. Mothers bond with babies. There’s a biological reason for this and we cannot simply opt out of the biological truths before us because it is socially convenient.

To clarify: I would rather a child had two good adoptive fathers than no father or mother at all. But that is simply because society is dysfunctional. If I could choose to place a child with two good adoptive parents where one was a woman, the other a man, I would always choose that over two men. Because children do best with a loving mother and a loving father. Il is unpopular to say , but the rise of broken homes and women opting to be single parents is so tragic. It’s society failing to function.

A former (50 something, gay, single) colleague of mine has just had a child by surrogate in the States (with a separate egg donor for precisely the reason stated in the article) and brought back here at 6 weeks. I asked him if he would stay in touch with the mother and he physically recoiled. He said "we" dont use that word, that's not what she is.
His child has a father, an egg donor and a gestational surrogate, apparently.

Surrogacy and prostitution both depend on an assumption that using human bodies for commercial reasons is fine:
Using the same assumption, why not herd humans of all ages into intensive farms, to harvest human organs and blood, on demand, to the highest bidders?

Apparently to some extent this is already practiced, with living donors being imported, or rich recipients flying to obtain the purchased body parts.

The planet is overwhelmed with multiple billions too many humans, the majority of whom can make no contribution, just be life-long parasites, now that A.I. is increasingly able to our-perform humans. What is plentiful is cheap. A century of mass population explosion has made human lives cheap.

It would have been better to have had an international one-or-no child policy for a century. It rescued the population of China, and rescued the Chinese economy. It probably would have been an international policy, if women had been in positions of power and policy making, internationally:

Melinda Gates said that rich and poor, all over the world, what women want, above all, is control of fertility.

(Bill however, openly boasts that uncountable millions, or billions, of extra people are now alive on the overcrowded, poisoned, biodiversity-stripped, once perfect but now dying-by-humans planet, all "thanks" to him. Yet another example of how males, and male-run organisations, find it impossible to regard females as equal human beings, not merely as reproductive systems to be used.)

A Womens rights group in Australia recently presented to a NSW parliament committee as they are trying to bundle surrogacy up with assisted fertility laws. I recommend reading thier summary of the meeting, it's a good angle for opposition: womensadvocacy.net/2026/04/24/lived-experience-is-not-enough-when-fertility-support-becomes-a-market-in-women-and-children/

1. The UK needs to have an upper age limit in law for surrogacy if we are going to continue to allow buying babies.
2. There needs to be a registration system for prospective parents who want to register a surrogate baby bought here or abroad to actually monitor who is purchasing these children (and to keep an eye on safeguarding)
3. If you want to live in the UK with a baby you have bought, it needs to be made crystal clear it's a bought baby to the authorities. No more mucking about with birth certificates.
4. On that note, birth certificates should reflect biological parents. They are not ownership certificates. We should have separate legal parental certificates linked to birth certificates. None of this nonsense that it discriminates against gay people. It does not. Biology does this without prejudice. As time goes on this is more and more relevant because of DNA testing revealing the truth. We know that there is a psychological element to wanting to know and understand your origins from adoptions already that has a massive impact on identity.
5. Where an egg and a surrogate are different this should be reflected on a birth certificate. There should be flexibility on birth certificates at this point to reflect how science has moved on. This should be done for surrogates. A third person certificate should be introduced as compulsory where it is done to help regulate surrogacy - including it being mandatory information for overseas born babies whose prospective parents want to live in the UK and register them - the name of the clinic must also be included. This would offer protections for the child and mothers.

The reason none of this is happening is similar to the vegan cat syndrome of invested individuals who are in positions of power. It is expensive to buy a baby. This means all parents who buy babies are in positions of power. They are rich and successful and influential. They don't want to be subjected to safeguarding and scrutiny because that's for poor people and social services don't deal with rich upper middle classes.

The Times 100% has a number of staff who have bought babies. They are also extremely likely to be male. The article is a rich mans article.

Poor women and vulnerable babies don't have voices. They are invisible.

Share link to the story.
www.thetimes.com/article/53c6ae54-bac7-4a42-aeec-c1e6a7867523?shareToken=16e38836ddd85741e2040266d6b2adec

Another article with a more sceptical perspective.

https://spectator.com/article/single-men-shouldnt-be-able-to-have-a-surrogate-baby/

I read in shock too.

Think the first guy was 60 and single, who will the poor kid have around growing up? Just so selfish.

There’s not loads of evidence but what there is shows a higher risk of pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, and preterm birth with donor eggs compared to women who have IVF with their own eggs.