Something Irreplaceable

The Daily Telegraph has excelled itself with this conclusion:

Carl Dean died in March 2025. There were no children from her marriage, although Dolly Parton was a surrogate mother to her younger brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, many of whom spent time living with her.

She is survived by her husband.

In spite of that, Lexi Ellingsworth writes:

As the topic of surrogacy ascends the ladder of political priorities, governments are wrestling with how to regulate this global marketplace and balance “ethical” models so supply can meet demand.

This inevitably leads them into a moral quagmire, involving complex issues ranging from child trafficking and the exploitation of women to the questions of what we know from basic reproductive biology and the false claim of a right to a child. It’s no wonder some governments cannot square this circle and say “no, it’s not for us”.

Some have. Kazakhstan has recently reached this conclusion. An increase in complex legal disputes, problems with citizenship and parentage, gaps in regulation and lack of oversight with agencies ultimately drove the decision to ban international surrogacy — but perhaps witnessing non-residents coming to the country for the purposes of getting a baby from Kazakh women is what finally motivated the government to close its doors.

In 2014 it was reported that domestic surrogacy in Kazakhstan was rising, with surrogacy pregnancies growing 10 per cent year by year — and Kazakhstan did not feature on the list of countries for parental order applications in England and Wales until 2023. So it’s a remarkable development, not because Kazakhstan is an obvious moral leader in women’s and children’s rights or that the issue was caught relatively early, but because governments with vastly different political traditions are arriving at the same conclusion: human reproduction should not be a global marketplace.

In 2024, Italy expanded their twenty-year-old law to criminalise surrogacy tourism. Though it has been disingenuously framed as anti-LGBT, large fines now apply with possible prison time for commissioning parents of babies born abroad.

Just last month, Taiwan voted to drop surrogate motherhood from an assisted reproduction Bill because of a lack of public support and pushback from feminist groups. Both Texas and Florida are reviewing state laws and two Bills have been tabled at the Federal level — one to prevent some foreign nationals and another to prevent sex offenders from obtaining a child through surrogacy. Many would naturally assume that a ban on convicted sex offenders obtaining a child through an arranged pregnancy was already in place. Sadly not. It’s about time, surely, that this particular loophole was closed.

Not for Ireland. An amendment that would have secured this was voted down in the 2024 debate and a deadline to expand EU human trafficking laws to include surrogacy was just missed. (The date of the deadline? Ironically, the World Day of Trafficking in Persons.)

Earlier this year, Chile’s Family Commission of the Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved a comprehensive ban and a cross-party bill to prohibit and criminalise surrogacy, as well as any intermediary or commercial activities related to the practice, is currently advancing through Parliament.

But where one door closes, another inevitably opens.

Malta has emerged as a potential surrogacy hub and the women there could be asked to pick up the slack from nearby Greece, which closed international surrogacy last year.

Australia also appears ready to relax their laws, with the Attorney General considering recommendations from the Law Reform Commission that would likely make domestic altruistic surrogacy substantially easier by eliminating legal obstacles. Pro-surrogacy stakeholders describe this as compassionate legislation that aligns with “modern family life”. In reality, it risks embedding surrogacy more deeply, making this ethically contested and harmful practice more convenient for the baby buyers.

For years, the industry has been quietly nomadic. When a country decides that it no longer wishes to rent out women’s bodies or export babies to wealthy foreigners, agencies pack up their bags and move.

Thailand banned surrogacy in 2015 following a series of scandals and that same year India enforced an administrative ban before fully closing its commercial market in 2021. Russia prohibited foreign intended parents, which arguably just pushed customers to target Ukraine’s women. With the invasion in 2022, this shifted again to neighbouring Georgia.Women in Africa are in the global market’s eyeline. Reports of agencies bribing Kenya’s Senators hit headlines in April and Nigeria is now the second most popular country for British baby-buyers after the USA.

It doesn’t stop there. I predict that Azerbaijan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan will soon become the new hotspots as Facebook facilitates agents who focus on these countries. The problem, in other words, is not just inadequate nation-level regulation but the market itself.

Beneath the euphemisms lies a disturbing logic. One woman is contracted and paid to conceive, carry and surrender a child to another person, with clinics managing the conception, agencies brokering the deal, and lawyers negotiating and getting paperwork signed. The child becomes the successful completion of a contractual obligation, with everything else being public relations.

The industry insists that international surrogacy empowers women — and yet we can’t ignore obvious economic imbalance. Wealthy commissioning parents almost invariably travel to countries where women have fewer economic opportunities. Poverty offers effective negotiating leverage, and the relaxation of laws always prioritises the buyers.

This is what makes the decision from Kazakhstan so significant. It represents another rejection of reproductive tourism — the idea that affluent Westerners should simply be able to shop around the globe until they find a jurisdiction prepared to produce and legally permit the family they desire.

Will Britain travel down the same road? Parliament will debate surrogacy reform this September, with proposals that would transfer legal parenthood to commissioning parents from the moment of birth, replacing the current parental order process which operates currently for both domestic and international arrangements. Gone are the days when half, or even the majority, of surrogacy in the UK was carried out on British soil. Now, 77 per cent of parental order applications are for babies born abroad.

This represents a profound constitutional shift. Motherhood no longer begins from the age-old principle that the woman who gives birth is a child’s mother. Instead, parental rights for others begin whilst the umbilical cord is still attached. Far from being an administrative tweak, this represents a legal and social revolution.

Campaigners frequently invoke emotional cases. Their suffering is often real and powerful, and yet compassion cannot answer the central ethical problem. Does the longing for a child entail a right to obtain one from someone else? Is it okay as long as you pay her enough? Is a baby a blank slate that strangers can imprint upon?

My answer to all this is a hard no. No one has a human right to a child. Parenthood has always involved limits imposed by biology, circumstance and opportunity. Science can overcome many of those limits, true, but technical possibility does not demand a legal entitlement.

The surrogacy industry depends on one claim: that every adult’s desire for parenthood should be met with a legal mechanism capable of satisfying it. Increasingly, governments around the world appear unconvinced. This is right and proper. The moral compass of society does not depend on a small section of society who wants the law to bend to their desires.

And Janice Turner writes:

When a celebrity has a baby via surrogacy someone is usually missing from the Instagram photo. Typically we’re shown doctors, a midwife, the commissioning parents, often a man posed semi-naked in a hospital gown as if he’s given birth. Meanwhile the woman who did lies exhausted and bleeding off-camera.

Under commercial surrogacy contracts banned in Britain, this woman may even be forbidden from holding the baby before it is swept away to a new home and she is left struggling with her hormones and emotions alone. This global industry — worth $17.9 billion in 2023 and projected to reach $139 billion by 2032 — is classified by the European parliament as human trafficking. Its objective is to turn a baby into a product created with one stranger’s egg and another’s rented womb: the concept of “mother” erased.

On September 7, MPs will debate abolishing the last vestige of humanity accorded these women by the UK: the right to change their mind. After appearing on This Morning, fashion entrepreneur Adam Frisby and his partner Jamie Corbett, who had a daughter via an American surrogate, raised over 100,000 signatures for a government petition calling for a surrogate mother’s rights to be removed at birth.

Currently, whether a baby is bought abroad or born after an altruistic surrogacy arrangement in Britain, commissioning parents must apply for a parental order to ensure the surrogate genuinely consented and to allot a social worker to assess the child’s welfare. Checks are far less rigorous than for adoption: these orders are almost always granted. Even so the surrogate’s name appears on the original birth certificate as “mother” and she can assert her rights to the baby for six months after it is born.

We have the late moral philosopher Mary Warnock to thank for preventing surrogates here from being reduced to Handmaid’s Tale vessels. As author of the landmark 1984 report on reproductive ethics, which established the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), she wrote: “Perhaps what I am saying, is motherhood is somehow sacred, as other aspects of nature may be; and if babies become commodities, we shall have lost something irreplaceable.”

Frisby and Corbett argue they still need the American surrogate’s consent if their baby needs urgent medical treatment, though it is inconceivable the NHS would so risk a child’s life. In fact the couple’s core objection is that any official recognition of the birth mother is an insult to families “like ours”. For wealthy gay men winning unimpeded, even state-funded, access to surrogacy has become a new human rights frontier, and most are impervious to the competing rights of often poor, exploited women they inconveniently need to realise their dreams.

I attended a London surrogacy convention where agencies boasted of recruiting foreign surrogates who were healthy, drug-free and biddable: good brood mares. In California and Mexico, surrogates lose their parental rights in utero, leading to a recent case where a couple ordered a surrogate to abort a foetus found to have a heart condition. She refused and fled across state lines. The baby was successfully treated at birth, then handed over — but the parents are still suing the surrogate.

So Frisby and Corbett are right: the government urgently needs to review our outdated surrogacy laws. How can commercial surrogacy be illegal in Britain — as it is in France, Germany, Spain and Italy — yet we allow anyone, even sixtysomething single men who we’d never let adopt, travel abroad and buy a child in often dangerous and amoral jurisdictions?

After all, the Home Office website has a list of countries with special restrictions on adoption. They include Ethiopia (where private orphanages may be paid to supply children), Haiti (lack of adoption safeguards) and Nigeria (concerns about corruption). Britain should follow Spain, whose embassies now refuse to issue passports to all babies born via commercial surrogacy. But in the first instance why not draw up a similar list for nations with the most lax and exploitative regimes?

Number one should be Northern Cyprus, a byword in unregulated reproductive medicine. Here no one is too old or dodgy for doctors to make them a cut-price baby using “travelling surrogates”, aka women trafficked from poor Caucasian republics. Sir Andrew McFarlane, president of the High Court family division, ruled last year on an “entirely self-centred” sixtysomething lesbian couple who each paid a “commercially exploited” Ukrainian to carry a baby there.

Next is Ukraine, where after the Russian invasion, commissioning western parents whined when surrogates refused to abandon their own kids in wartime to give birth in Polish clinics. What will these selfish people tell their children about the women who gave them life? Ukraine’s surrogacy trade has since moved to Georgia, where a recent New York Times exposé revealed Thai women being trafficked to Tbilisi, their passports removed, to carry embryos for Chinese men created with eastern European eggs. In Mexico, surrogacy is entwined with violent human trafficking gangs.

The list will need to be constantly updated: after India and Thailand banned surrogacy in the wake of baby farm scandals, rapacious agencies relocated. This year Taiwan, Chile and Kazakhstan instituted bans, but now clinics are eyeing Malta, Armenia or Kyrgyzstan. Africa, with many poor women, is an expanding destination: but why do we admit surrogate-born children from Nigeria when we have ethical qualms about its orphans?

Far from being the moment to abolish surrogate protections, it is time to examine our hypocrisy on commercial surrogacy. Baroness Warnock was right: motherhood is sacred. It is not a service to be bought from a woman forced to give up her name on a birth certificate, her face in a baby’s photo.