Today we have learned that the Government does not intend to take up proposals by the Law Commission for England and Wales, with the Scottish Law Commission, to liberalise domestic surrogacy law in Britain; Women’s Health Minister Baroness Merron has written to the Chair of the Law Commission in England and Wales, Sir Peter Fraser, which you can view here.
The proposals were the reason for Surrogacy Concern’s founding, and we have objected to them wholeheartedly since they were announced in March 2023. Since Christmas 2024 we have been asking our supporters to take action and send our letter to their MPs, setting out our concerns.
We are very grateful to the Government for not taking up the proposals, which we believe would have been disastrous for women and children. Below we set out what the proposals would have meant, and a comment by our Founder, Helen Gibson.
The Law Commission’s plans included:
• never listing the surrogate mother on the birth certificate of her own child, even in cases where she had used her own egg in the pregnancy,
• setting up ‘regulated surrogacy organisations’ (likely the current surrogacy agencies), who would have been allowed to openly advertise for surrogate mothers,
• establishing the HFEA as a surrogacy regulator: a position the HFEA admitted to The House Magazine in November 2024 it did not have the appetite or expertise for,
• making it far harder for women to change their minds by removing their parental rights at birth; handing these instead at birth to commissioning parents,
• not placing any cap on “expenses”, which in domestic surrogacy already often soar higher than £20,000 per pregnancy,
• allowing a minimum age of 21 for surrogate mothers and 18 for commissioning parents,
• continuing to allow the use of women’s own eggs in the pregnancy,
• speeding up the process for applying for paper work for a surrogate baby born abroad,
• making it easier to dispense with the surrogate mother’s consent.
Our Founder said “we are delighted Government have seen sense and listened to campaigners. These proposals would have been a disaster for women and children, particularly women from working class backgrounds, who would have been targeted in open adverts to become surrogate mothers. Gestational surrogacy is 3x higher risk for severe pregnancy complications and is a profoundly unethical practice: babies bond in utero with their mothers and want her at birth. Surrogacy should be banned: not liberalized. We are very grateful to the Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting MP, for seeing sense on surrogacy law. Now we would like to see a ban on British people being able to travel abroad to buy babies as Italy has done and Spain looks set to do”.
Our critics say the British system of surrogacy (where arrangements are not legally enforceable and a mother cannot – in theory – be forced to give away her child) does not provide enough ‘certainty’ to commissioning parents and ‘forces’ them abroad. They claim the Law Commission plans were ‘ethical’. This is rubbish: surrogacy is always exploitative, unethical and cruel to the child. There is no safe form of surrogacy. Nobody should be pursuing surrogacy in this country or abroad. We will fight on until the UK introduces a total ban on the practice.
For now we want to thank our steadfast followers and supporters for writing to their MPs, to those journalists who raised the alarm in the media, and to the campaign groups Nordic Model Now, Stop Surrogacy Now UK, Object!, Women’s Place UK, writers including Julie Bindel and Renate Klein and campaigners including Jennifer Lahl who have done so much to raise awareness of the harms of surrogacy for so many years. We fight on.
