I couldn't have children and I adopted.
Adoption rates are way down as people look into surrogacy instead.
Adoption is hard because the children available to adopt in the UK have mostly been removed by the courts, not relinquished, and have many difficulties, often related to foetal alcohol.
Gay couples and even single men are increasingly seeing surrogacy as a fertility treatment they can legitimately use to create a family. There are surrogacy seminars held in this country aimed specifically at men - these men are affluent and well able to afford it. The men buy eggs from elite athletes or supermodels or ivy league students then have embryos implanted into poorer women in say Mexico. They often have two surrogates at once, each carrying the child of each of the men. Or they find a surrogate who will have twins, with the embryos made from sperm from each of them. But also single men are commissioning babies.
Then there are the people in their 60s and even 70s doing it. There have been two recent cases where the courts were asked to grant parental rights to very elderly parents. One case, the "mother" had died, had been in a nursing home previous to that. The father was sending the child to boarding school as soon as possible.
There is so much dodgy business going on. People just dont turn up to collect the baby, change their mind and want the surrogate to have an abortion. They control everything the surrogate does, like what pain relief she can have during labour.
And the baby is treated like a package. We don't take puppies away at birth but babies are OK? Some of these kids will never know birth mum or dna mum. And they will told to be grateful to their parents for cresting them.
Adoption practice changed considerably when the impact of loss on the child was realised. Nowadays most UK adoptions have some kind of ongoing contact with birth family (another reason some people dont want to adopt). But surrogacy ignores this.
I could rant for hours about surrogacy! There are some good anti surrogacy accounts on X - SurrogacyConcern and StopSurrogacyNowUK. The gov has put surrogacy reform on hold for now but there are lots of people lobbying for changes. Ireland recently gave the surrogacy industry everything it wanted, partly driven by a gov minister who has a child born through surrogacy. We have to stay vigilant. There is concern that eg Stonewall will pivot to fertility rights now that they are struggling with trans rights.