Debate on surrogacy law and legal parenthood, House of Commons – 07.09.26

Under UK law, the surrogate is the child’s legal parent at birth. Intended parents must apply for a parental order in order to be legally recognised as the child’s parents. This is a complex and protracted process, typically taking six to nine months, but sometimes longer.

While intended parents typically assume care of the baby immediately after birth, there is no formal recognition of their relationship with the child until a parental order is granted. This places the child in a legally precarious situation and can cause considerable uncertainty and stress for the intended parents and surrogate. It can also cause practical challenges: without parental responsibility, intended parents may need to involve the surrogate, as the legal parent, in decisions such as consenting to medical treatment or routine immunisations.

The Law Commission’s review recognised that the delay in obtaining legal parenthood may push some intended parents to pursue cross-border surrogacy, especially in countries that recognise intended parents as the legal parents from birth (even if this is not recognised in UK law).

Support for reform

Available evidence, including responses to the Law Commission’s consultation and wider research, suggests that there is majority support from those with experience of surrogacy – including surrogates, intended parents and surrogate-born children – for intended parents to automatically be recognised as legal parents at birth.

Some surrogates have expressed discomfort with holding unwanted legal responsibility for the child, with no guarantee that intended parents would not withdraw from the arrangement, leaving them to care for the child or place them for adoption.

There is limited evidence of the views of children born through surrogacy. However, focus groups held by the Children’s Voices in Surrogacy Law project over the summer of 2022, involving 23 children, 5 of whom had been born through surrogacy, found that most of the children thought the intended parents should automatically become the legal parent at birth. Views differed on whether the surrogate should be able to change their mind about giving up the baby.

The Law Commission’s proposals

The Law Commission proposed a new pathway to legal parenthood, under which intended parents would become the child’s legal parents from birth. This would be subject to the surrogate’s right to withdraw consent, and would incorporate screening and safeguards including medical and criminal records checks, independent legal advice, and counselling. Individual arrangements under the new pathway would be overseen by non-profit Regulated Surrogacy Organisations (RSOs), which would be regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

Some intended parents would still need to obtain a parental order, for example if they decide to enter into cross-border surrogacy arrangements or informal arrangements in the UK outside the regulated pathway. Courts be permitted to grant a parental order without the surrogate’s consent where the child’s welfare requires it — bringing surrogacy law into line with other areas of family law.

Around half of UK surrogacy parental order applications involve surrogates based in other countries.

Intended parents enter into cross-border surrogacy agreements for a range of reasons. Surrogacy UK’s 2025 research, Surrogacy in the UK: Myth Busting and Reform 10 Years On, found that intended parents who pursue surrogacy overseas cited reasons, including: ‘the availability of surrogates abroad’, ‘the ease of setting up arrangements’, ‘certainty’ (of pre-birth protections and/or contracts), ‘ethical reasons,’ ‘having a relationship with the surrogate’; and ‘cost’.

Different jurisdictions vary significantly in whether and how they regulate surrogacy, which raises a range of complex legal, ethical and medical implications, including:

• Practical and legal challenges – overseas arrangements are legally complex, and can result in significant delays in parents and surrogate-born children being able to return to the UK, due to the wait to obtain a parental order and visas for the child. Overseas surrogacy arrangements can place children in precarious legal situations. Where the country in which the child is born recognises the intended parents as the child’s legal parents, but UK law recognises the surrogate as the legal parent at birth, the child may face a period in which their legal parentage and nationality are uncertain or unrecognised in one or both jurisdictions.
• Exploitation – while cross-border arrangements are not always problematic, some pose risks of exploitation for surrogates and surrogate-born children, particularly in countries with less robust protections, where commercial arrangements are legal, and where there are significant socio-economic disparities between surrogates and intended parents.
• Circumventing UK legal and ethical standards – international surrogacy can facilitate access to practices that are not permitted in the UK. For example, non-medical sex selection during IVF or the use of anonymous donor eggs and sperm. The latter means that children are not able to access information about their genetic origins or health history.
• Medical risks – intended parents and surrogates who are based in the UK may also travel abroad for IVF treatments. Depending on the destination country, different legal frameworks apply and practice can vary, for example, around consent processes. Some jurisdictions also offer multiple embryo transfer, which is associated with a higher chance of multiple pregnancies and health complications.
• Contact and identity – research suggests that there is less continued contact between UK-intended parents and surrogates based in other countries during pregnancy and after the child is born, particularly where there are language or cultural differences, or where intermediary agencies restrict contact. This can affect surrogate-born children’s future access to information about origins and potential for meaningful contact with the surrogate, and with genetic half-siblings.

The Law Commission’s proposals

The Law Commission’s proposed reforms aim to encourage domestic surrogacy, and thereby discourage international surrogacy, by creating a new regulated pathway that is more accessible and attractive than going abroad. This pathway would not extend to international arrangements, with the potential for exploitation remaining outside the reach of domestic law and UK Government oversight. Those who pursue cross-border surrogacy would still need to apply for a parental order on their return.

However, even with domestic reform, some intended parents will inevitably continue to seek surrogacy overseas — for example, due to the limited availability of surrogates in the UK, or to access lower costs abroad.

Currently, it is legal for UK citizens to enter surrogacy agreements abroad, which involve practices that would not be considered ethical in the UK.

Any future reforms to surrogacy law should consider how far the UK can and should ensure that non-UK surrogates, who enter into surrogacy agreements with UK citizens, are treated in ethically and legally comparable ways as in the UK, and that all parties to the agreement are appropriately protected.

While commercial surrogacy and direct payments for surrogacy are illegal in the UK, the law allows surrogates to be reimbursed for “reasonable expenses incurred.” However, it provides no further clarity on what type of expenses can be considered reasonable. There is concern that the lack of clarity opens the door to unfair reimbursement, as well as creating a loophole for ‘hidden commercialisation.’

There is also currently no effective way to enforce limits on payments, beyond a court refusing to grant a parental order. Courts hold the child’s best interests as paramount: no parental orders have been refused on the basis of payment, and courts have granted parental orders in cases where payments have exceeded “reasonable expenses.” This includes where intended parents have used surrogacy services in countries where commercial arrangements are permitted.

The Law Commission’s proposals

The Law Commission has proposed new rules for payments, setting out clearly which payments are permitted and which are prohibited. This aims to ensure that the surrogate is not left better or worse off as a result. The Commission also recommends separating payment disputes from the process of identifying the child’s legal parents, and has set out options for how the Government could enforce limitations on payments in practice.

Moreover, it recommended that a surrogate’s ability to recover costs related to the surrogacy would not be dependent on her meeting certain ‘lifestyle’ requirements during the surrogacy, nor dependent on her carrying the pregnancy to term or exercising her right to withdraw.

The NCOB has previously explored the value of altruism in the donation of bodily material. We have argued that systems based on altruism and systems involving some form of payment are not necessarily incompatible, and there are ethically significant differences between offering compensation that aims to facilitate altruism, and payment that acts as a direct incentive.

Measures to clarify what payments are permitted are welcome. We believe that surrogates should not be left financially worse, or better off, as a result of willingly helping another person or family to have a child: payments should ensure surrogates are adequately supported and facilitate the altruistic nature of surrogacy in the UK.