In November 2025 the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee opened an inquiry in to egg donation and egg freezing, which we warmly welcomed.
With Stop Surrogacy Now UK we submitted written evidence to the inquiry, and on Wednesday 11 February 2026 our founder gave oral evidence to the Committee.
We have been campaigning against egg donation and adverts targeting women as young as 18 for their eggs since October 2023, after learning that the Scottish Government were advertising for egg donors in adverts which did not list health risks.
We do not support egg donation, as it always involves physical harm to a number of women who undergo egg retrieval in the short term, and the long term effects are largely unstudied and unknown. Furthermore, egg donation is contributing to a concerning attitude of entitlement to women’s eggs, and has turned human eggs in to a globally tradeable commodity, commodifying women’s bodies, contributing to the growth of gestational surrogacy, and splintering motherhood. Meanwhile, outside of Scotland, in the rest of the UK women can be paid £985 per cycle for their eggs; a concerning risk of financial exploitation and inducement for low income, working class women and students, and health risks do not have to be listed on adverts. The Department for Health and Social Care has confirmed never commissioning research in to the long term impacts of egg retrieval on women’s bodies, and did not undertake an impact assessment before allowing the HFEA to increase payments to women for their eggs to £985 per cycle in October 2024.
We are concerned that young women are being targeted for their own eggs by for-profit fertility clinics and egg banks, many of which are now heavily invested in by private equity firms, who then sell eggs on for profit for many thousands of pounds.
Short of a ban on egg donation, as is the case in Germany, we want to see the minimum age of egg donation rise to 25, for counselling for egg donors to be made mandatory, for ads targeting women for their eggs to be banned (or if they are not, for health risks to be listed upfront on the ads), for payments for women for their eggs to be banned (or if they are not, for a reversion to an itemized expenses system) and finally for clinics and the HFEA to be mandated to track physical and psychological health outcomes for egg donors over the long term.
To send a letter to your MP about egg donation, please click here.
To watch our founder’s appearance at the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee, click here.
We now await the outcome of the Committee’s final report and their recommendations to the Government.
