Womb service: the moral dangers of surrogacy

Last month, the Law Commission published its long-awaited report on the legal status of the surrogacy industry. It contained – as expected – one particularly alarming recommendation. Alongside various tweaks to payment and regulation processes, the Commission suggests a crucial change to the parental status of a baby born by surrogacy.

At present, the woman who gives birth to the baby is considered to be that child’s legal parent, and the intended parents are obliged to apply for a parental order following birth. But if the Law Commission gets its way, the situation will be reversed. Although the surrogate will still have the right to object, the default presumption in law will be that she is not the child’s mother. In implementing this recommendation, the UK government would be making a clear statement on the nature not only of surrogacy, but also of motherhood: to put it bluntly, that it is both morally and legally acceptable to deliberately engineer the separation of mother and infant.

The surrogacy industry is still comparatively small in the UK but is growing quickly – quadrupling over the past decade to around 450 cases a year (although it isn’t easy to get a precise number, given insemination often happens in overseas clinics).

Globally, meanwhile, it’s estimated that the market for surrogate babies will be worth £22 billion by 2025, up from £5 billion in 2018. It is not difficult to find extreme and worrying cases in countries with more liberal legal arrangements. For instance, in 2018 a wealthy single Japanese man at the centre of a ‘baby factory’ scandal in Thailand was awarded sole parental rights to the 13 children he’d fathered through Thai surrogate mothers. There are also plenty of chilling accounts of human rights abuses at surrogacy centres in countries such as India, where poor women have been treated as brood mares for rich foreigners.