Surrogacy is exploiting women in the name of ‘inclusivity’

Renting a womb is on trend. It has become scarily common to see vacuous celebrities posing in delivery rooms, clasping someone else’s newborn. We are subjected to an endless stream of gushing articles about how this practice ‘miraculously’ allows gay men to have children. The reality of surrogacy – the ripping away of an infant from its mother at the behest of a third party – doesn’t make for such attractive content.

In a legal case reported this week, a surrogate mother – referred to as ‘G’ in court documents – was forced to fight for the right to spend time with her own son.

In 2020, just seven hours after his birth, Baby Z was passed to a gay couple, known as ‘X’ and ‘Y’. The pair then refused to allow G access to her son, arguing that there was ‘no vacancy’ for a mother in the child’s life. On one occasion, when G arrived for a pre-arranged visit, the men even threatened to call the police and have her removed. Thankfully, she recorded the conversation.

The 36-year-old single mum met the pair through her sister. Initially, she agreed to carry an implanted embryo for them, but the procedure was unsuccessful. She then became pregnant using her own egg and the sperm from one of the men. As the baby grew inside her, she became concerned that X and Y were planning to prevent her from spending time with her baby. She was right.

Soon after the birth, G signed a parental order handing over responsibility for Z to the men. She also signed a second order ensuring she could have regular contact with the child. But the couple reneged on that agreement and pursued a series of legal cases against her. The court was asked to consider whether a step-parent adoption order should be made, which would formally cut the legal bond between the mother and her child. This was rejected, and G has retained legal parentage and parental responsibility for Z.

During the proceedings, X and Y accused G of seeking to pursue an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with her own son. They also said it was ‘homophobic’ to suggest that Z needed to get to know his mother at all. The family, they insisted, was ‘motherless’.

This is obviously absurd. For starters, a child cannot, by definition, be ‘motherless’. And G was certainly not homophobic, either. In fact, she never sought full custody of her son and was perfectly content for the gay couple to bring him up. Incredibly, social workers still took the men’s side. G initially lost the case, but she thankfully later won on appeal with the help of a group called Stop Surrogacy Now UK.

Stop Surrogacy Now founder Lexi Ellingsworth tells me the group is ‘thrilled that the judgement supports an ongoing relationship between [G] and her son’: ‘She is his mother in every sense and it is crucial that birth certificates record the truth for all parties. To suggest it is homophobic to recognise that a child needs their mother prioritises adult perceptions over a child’s needs.’

At present, aspiring parents who enter agreements with surrogate mothers have to wait for a parental order to become legally responsible for the child. This takes a minimum of six weeks. But a 2023 report from the Law Commission has recommended that this be scrapped from birth. Under its proposals, a biological mother wouldn’t be allowed to revoke her consent or exercise her parental rights until six weeks after the baby was born. The suggested new ‘surrogacy pathway’ even includes ‘provision for the court to make a parental order without the consent of the surrogate’. According to Ellingsworth, this means a mother’s name might ‘not even appear on a birth certificate and for parental rights to go to commissioning parents at birth’.

The positioning of surrogacy as about gay rights is a particularly sinister manoeuvre. Just as with the misogynistic campaign to remove ‘women’ from law for the sake of ‘trans rights’, the push to erase motherhood has come cloaked in a rainbow flag and decorated with inclusive sparkles.

The truth is that gay men are (rightly) at liberty to adopt just as heterosexual couples are. Yet surrogacy is being promoted by mainstream LGBT lobby groups as if using a woman’s womb were a human right. Looking at the steady stream of positive surrogacy stories, it seems a public-relations campaign to normalise the practice is well underway. Already, the surrogacy industry is lucrative, global, powerful and growing. Estimates suggest that within 10 years, it will be valued at around $129 billion.

Thankfully, in this case, the mother was supported to speak up in the interests of her child and for herself. But make no mistake – what happened to G will be happening to other women across the world who don’t have recourse to legal action or groups like Stop Surrogacy Now fighting alongside them.

‘Kindness’ and ‘inclusion’ are being weaponised to normalise the rental of wombs, the sale of babies and the cutting off of contact between children and their mothers. This is brutal, exploitative and fundamentally anti-human.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.