The letter *
I hope you are well. I am a resident in your constituency, and I am writing to you to express my grave concerns about surrogacy, and proposals drafted by the Law Commission for England and Wales, with the Scottish Law Commission, to significantly liberalise surrogacy law in the UK.
I am asking you today to write to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, to share my opposition to the plans with the Government, and to ask that you vote against these proposals, should a bill on surrogacy reform be forthcoming.
Many people believe surrogacy in the UK to be a practice which largely takes place between friends and family for altruistic reasons, but this is overwhelmingly no longer the case, as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and others have found. Increasingly, surrogacy arrangements in the UK and abroad are brokered between strangers with the assistance of agencies, with significant “expenses” paid monthly, like a salary, to surrogate mothers in the UK. Many British surrogate mothers do not go on to sustain long term relationships with the children they give birth to. Surrogacy expenses now stand at an average of around £20,000 per pregnancy, with five cases of over £60,000 recorded in the Family Courts in 2018. I believe this risks encouraging low-income women to undertake surrogacy from a point of financial need.
Women’s rights groups have gathered testimonies from dozens of British surrogate mothers who have experienced harm, pressure or even regretted entering in to surrogacy arrangements. On New Year's Eve 2004 a British surrogate mother died in childbirth. In September 2024, academics at Queen’s University, Canada published a decade-long study which examined over 860,000 births, concluding that gestational surrogacy is three times higher risk for severe pregnancy complications, including sepsis, postpartum haemorrhage and pre-eclampsia. I do not believe surrogacy agencies make women aware of these risks.
Babies bond with their mothers in utero and their cells exchange through a process known as microchimerism: taking a baby from their mother at birth (unless safeguarding concerns are raised) goes against all known best practice on the care of newborn infants and contradicts NHS advice on bonding and maternal attachment. Children born to surrogate mothers are increasingly speaking out against the practice.
Taking away a mother’s parental rights at birth, as proposed by the Law Commission, removes the primary safeguarder of the child from their life. It would effectively see the state endorse the view that a surrogate mother is nothing more than an incubator; something society knows to be untrue given the knowledge we have about the mother/infant dyad, and the experience and well documented testimony of thousands of adopted adults who suffered as a result of being removed from their mothers. Agencies take pains to tell women they are not the mother of their child; directly contradicting the status of mother in British law, who is always defined as the woman who gives birth.
All forms of surrogacy remain illegal in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Finland and many other countries. In January 2024 Pope Francis called for a global ban on the practice, and President Macron of France said in May 2024 surrogacy is “not compatible with the dignity of women” and equated it to “turning their bodies into commodities”. The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women has also raised significant concerns about surrogacy.
In my view the law around surrogacy needs to be significantly tightened, but in contrast the Law Commission have proposed legislation which would expand the practice in the UK, growing the pool of surrogate mothers and effectively ending her ability to change her mind, even in cases where she uses her own egg in the pregnancy (as is often the case in the UK). The plans also remove judicial oversight for the majority of domestic surrogacy cases. Removal of judicial oversight stands in stark contrast to the bill on assisted dying, in which the need for review by judges has been lauded as a critical safeguarding mechanism. Taking the Law Commission’s plans forward would effectively give us a commercial surrogacy model in all but name: tipping the balance in favour of the commissioning parent/s, away from the surrogate mother, endorsing removing babies from their mothers at birth, and legitimizing paying significant sums to women who undertake surrogacy.
The Law Commission’s plans:
- reduce the time a mother has to change her mind,
- removes the need for Family Court and CAFCASS oversight for surrogacy arrangements on a new “pathway” (likely to be all domestic cases conducted through agencies, at least hundreds of cases per year),
- takes away a mother’s parental rights at birth and does not seek her consent again at or after birth,
- recommends surrogate mothers not be listed on the birth certificates of their own children,
- allows open advertising for surrogate mothers for the first time; a significant risk to low income and working-class women and a recommendation the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has expressed concerns over,
- surrogate mothers would still be able to use their own egg in the pregnancy, meaning at the point of handover the child is being handed away from their own genetic mother, outside of adoption frameworks, local authority and judicial oversight,
- women are not required to have had their own children, and a minimum age of just 21 has been suggested for surrogate mothers, and 18 for commissioning parents.
Over half the responses to the Law Commission’s consultation in 2019 called for a total ban on surrogacy in all forms: these responses were disregarded. There is no evidence these proposals are acceptable to the British public, or that the public more widely are even aware such liberalization has been recommended.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) would be set up as a surrogacy regulator, a responsibility the body admitted to The House Magazine in November 2024 that it was not keen to undertake, owing to a lack of appropriate skills, knowledge and funding; in its response to the Law Commission’s consultation in 2019 it called some of the proposals around its suggested function “unworkable”.
Despite the Law Commission acknowledging international surrogacy arrangements can be fraught with risk of exploitative practices, they still proposed making it easier to bring children in to the UK having been born to surrogate mothers abroad, and to dispense with the surrogate mother’s consent for Parental Order approvals by the Family Court following international commercial surrogacy, in certain circumstances.
The plans would create new Regulated Surrogacy Organisations, likely to be current surrogacy agencies, which have no experience in meeting a high threshold of statutory obligations. One likely candidate to become an RSO, My Surrogacy Journey, is a British agency which has recently set up a for-profit commercial surrogacy branch in Mexico City, where Mexican women are offered as little as £11,800 equivalent to become surrogate mothers for wealthy western couples and single men. Another agency, Brilliant Beginnings, signposts British commissioning parents to commercial destinations and agencies abroad and have advocated for “double donation” for surrogacy (where neither commissioning parent would be related to the baby). Brilliant Beginnings frequently appears at events hosted by commercial surrogacy agencies visiting the UK. I do not believe such people are suitable candidates to arrange surrogate pregnancies which would no longer be subject to judicial oversight.
The Commissions, in their 2019 consultation, did not sufficiently or proactively consult with women’s rights, children’s rights or maternity groups, instead focusing their pro-active engagement on law firms, surrogacy agencies and would-be commissioning parents. The plans have been heavily criticized by many women and children’s rights groups, including Maternity Action and others, as well as advocacy groups representing adult adoptees. “Maternity Action has a number of concerns. First, the consultation has not been widely publicised. The Law Commission failed to make a cogent case for why reform of the existing laws relating to surrogacy is required. Evidence indicates that the majority of women who act as surrogate mothers are substantially less well-off, less powerful and less endowed with status than the majority of intended parents. There is a power imbalance in the relationship between the intended parents and the surrogate mother.” The British Association of Social Workers project group on assisted reproduction also sounded a note of warning about “recommendations for change that are not sufficiently evidenced.”
I believe these proposals are biased, misogynistic, fraught with risk and do nothing to improve the welfare and safety of surrogate-born children, rather they risk normalizing a practice many people have grave ethical concerns about, and which remains illegal in many neighbouring countries. The proposals are nothing to do with improving the welfare of children, and everything to do with making surrogacy easier for commissioning parents: at huge negative cost to children and women.
I ask that you vote against these proposals should they come before the House of Commons, and that you write to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to express my objections.
If you have any questions, Surrogacy Concern would be pleased to speak with you at your convenience. They can be contacted at [email protected].
I would appreciate a response to this letter, please.