Surrogacy Concern have welcomed the halting of a trial of puberty blocking drugs on children, after the MHRA expressed concerns about children on the trial being offered egg retrieval and sperm freezing.
In a letter, sent last month and co-signed by Stop Surrogacy Now UK, Family Education Trust and Lesbian Labour, we expressed strong concerns that girls on the trial, potentially as young as eight could be offered egg retrieval or fertility preservation before taking puberty blocking drugs.
Egg retrieval is a dangerous procedure with known short term health risks. It involves administration of injections of hormones, before retrieval of eggs with a needle through the vaginal wall, before the ovary is perforated and fluid containing the eggs drained. Putting girls through such a procedure is completely unethical and should never be contemplated by any medical professional.
To date, we have not received a reply from the Department for Health and Social Care to our letter, but we are glad to see the news reported in The Times that the trial is to be halted on grounds of concern around fertility preservation of children. We hope the trial is dropped completely, and thank the MHRA for their work.
The complete contents of our letter can be found below:
By email
Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP
Secretary of State
Department for Health and Social Care
39 Victoria Street
London
SW1H 0EU
23 January 2026
Dear Secretary of State,
We hope you are well. We are writing to express our very deep reservations about the commencement of a trial of puberty blockers, to be undertaken by researchers at King’s College London, and to share our alarm at the news[1] that girls joining the trial will be advised about egg retrieval.
As you know from our previous correspondence, egg retrieval carries significant risks for women, and the long- and short-term health effects are largely unstudied. Indeed, the Department for Health and Social Care has admitted never commissioning research in to the impact of egg retrieval on the female body, despite allowing payments to women for their eggs to rise in October 2024 to £985 per cycle.
To subject pre-pubescent girls to either removal of ovarian tissue or the initial stages of IVF and egg retrieval is unconscionable: we ask that you act immediately to stop these harmful plans.
In order to harvest eggs from young women’s bodies, they are put through the early stages of IVF. Women must inject hormones (known as down regulation) which ‘switches off’ the pituitary gland to stop the ovaries working temporarily. We assume young girls being put through egg retrieval for this trial would then undergo the following stages: taking follicle stimulating hormones to overstimulate the ovaries to produce an artificially high number of eggs at the same time, followed by an injection of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) which helps eggs to mature, ready for scheduled retrieval. This maturation mimics the natural process which normally triggers ovulation. Finally, eggs are collected using a needle which punctures the vaginal wall and perforates the ovary, gathering fluid from each follicle (the fluid contains the eggs). It must be borne in mind that egg retrieval as a procedure for use in IVF was originally developed for older women with low ovarian reserve; it was not meant to be deployed in the bodies of young women, let alone very young girls, who often still have hundreds of thousands of eggs, and who risk greater harm to their health in the artificial overproduction of eggs. Children cannot consent to this and must not be subjected to it, along with the associated risks. The Department must act to ensure no girl is put through such a dangerous and invasive procedure.
Along with many other organisations, we believe the puberty blocker trial is a mistake: the negative impacts of puberty blockers on brain development, bone density and overall health for the child are already well known. Children experiencing gender incongruence should be supported, and indeed children who do not conform to our society’s rigid sex-based stereotypes should be praised and cherished: they do not require ‘fixing’ or being encouraged to undergo a medical schedule which ultimately encourages them to wrongly believe that changing sex may be possible.
With the Supreme Court having ruled that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, what is the purpose of halting puberty in a cohort of dysphoric children? They should not be encouraged to go on to take dangerous cross-sex hormones or to believe that as adults they will have the right to access opposite-sex spaces.
What sort of future lies in store for a child who has taken puberty blocking drugs? Their body will be permanently harmed, and to what end? Girls in particular will suffer from damage to their reproductive organs, potentially rendering conception and/or pregnancy impossible in future. These risks are clearly understood by clinicians, as demonstrated by the fact that egg retrieval is being proactively offered.
As Secretary of State for Health and Social Care you have the power to stop this trial and protect children. We urge you to act immediately.
Yours sincerely,
Helen Gibson, Surrogacy Concern
Lexi Ellingsworth, Stop Surrogacy Now UK
Peter D Williams, Family Education Trust
Lesbian Labour
[1] Peers urge Streeting to scrap puberty blocker trial for children
