THERE IS A CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART of the international surrogacy industry. Its participants pretend that surrogates’ feelings for the children in their wombs do not exist, while simultaneously trying to prevent them acting on those feelings. Many commissioning parents broker the babies in jurisdictions that allow restrictions on surrogates’ rights.
In the UK, this contradiction was recently laid bare in a Family Court case (citation number: [2024] EWFC 20). A gay male couple were engaged in a long-running legal battle with their son’s surrogate. Rather than vanish after handing over the child, she wanted a role in the boy’s life. The men’s response was to insist that their son had no mother — only a surrogate — and that the child’s identity was as part of a motherless family. There was “no vacancy” for her to occupy in his life, they claimed, and it was prejudicial to gay families to suggest otherwise.
question, was a 36-year-old single mother of a teenager and naive about what surrogacy entailed. The commissioning parents were friends of her sister
