Are you a progressive, open-minded person? Do you believe in a future where everyone who wants a child should have one? Then the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST) would like to hear from you about proposals to overhaul “outdated” laws on surrogacy. If you have qualms about making “access to surrogacy” easier, don’t bother: your kind of evidence probably isn’t welcome.
That message underpins POST’s latest call for evidence on surrogacy. POST bills itself as “an impartial research and knowledge exchange service,” feeding parliamentarians with “cutting-edge research evidence” on emerging science and social issues. Technology certainly supplies conundrums for academics and legislators to chew over, but the underlying moral questions remain exactly where they always were.
Nonetheless, it is understandable that surrogacy has captured politicians’ attention: Big Fertility has trickled down from the stretchmark-averse celebrity set to ordinary couples unable (or sometimes unwilling) to bear the inconvenience of pregnancy. A steady gush of heart-warming features showcases the winners of this brave new market — gay couples gifted “miracle babies” by altruistic sisters, or beaming straight “commissioning parents” extolling the virtues of the Mexican woman they’ve wrenched a newborn from. Yet for all the PR, some campaigners remain unmoved by the idea of reducing women to “gestational carriers” or severing the primal bond between a mother and her child.
Helen Gibson, founder of the campaign group Surrogacy Concern, tells me she’s “at a loss to understand why POST are spending public money consulting on legal reform, when the Government has been clear it does not intend to move on surrogacy law in this parliament.”
This isn’t the first consultation. In 2019 the Law Commission of England and Wales, alongside the Scottish Law Commission, ran a full public review at a cost of around £944,000. As Gibson explains: “Over half the responses to the Law Commission’s consultation called for a total ban, a demand echoed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls in her recent report on surrogacy. We would make these points to POST directly, but our request to meet has been ignored.”
The willingness to gamble with women’s health and babies’ lives is nothing short of baffling
Were POST to grant a meeting, here is what they might hear. A 2024 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that surrogate pregnancies carry sharply higher risks — ranging from sepsis and pre-eclampsia to dangerous postpartum haemorrhage. A year later, a Canadian study tracking over 767,000 pregnancies reported that surrogate mothers also suffer significantly higher rates of postnatal mental illness than women who keep their babies. Add to this the evidence from prenatal programming. Research on prenatal programming further shows how babies adapt in utero to their mother’s environment, biologically primed for the woman carrying them — not for the clients waiting with a contract in the hospital car park.
Given that pregnant women are sternly warned about eating soft cheese or taking paracetamol, the willingness to gamble with women’s health and babies’ lives is nothing short of baffling.
Nor is the financial incentive trivial. Even in countries where commercial surrogacy is formally banned, “expenses” are permitted. In the UK these routinely reach £15,000–£35,000 per pregnancy. As Surrogacy Concern points out, such sums inevitably draw poorer women into riskier pregnancies — often on behalf of strangers.
It is no surprise, then, that the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Al Salem, has called for the abolition of all forms of surrogacy. Many European countries have already banned it outright. Britain, by contrast, dithers between “reform” and “regulation,” as though there were a right to commodify female fertility.
As with the decades-long campaigns to legalise assisted suicide or prostitution, and the relentless push for gender self-identification, these projects share a telling trait: they are ruthlessly individualistic and wilfully blind to sex difference. The fact that women are more likely to see themselves as burdens and agree to die is brushed aside; the reality that abused girls are funnelled into prostitution is treated as an irrelevance; the danger posed to women by admitting trans-identifying men into female-only spaces is dismissed as an inconvenience.
“Progress” demands that women be kind, that we give way with our bodies — whether in deciding to die or giving birth to a child that isn’t legally ours. In this way, complex social and moral questions are flattened into personal decisions. Merely consumer choices, with the wider consequences brushed aside.
And so it is with surrogacy. To question whether everyone has a right to their own biological child is treated not only as cruel and backward, but as gauche — as if failing to prioritise “agency” is unsophisticated, even homophobic. In the name of progress, women’s bodies are treated as raw material and their boundaries as obstacles. This isn’t the future. It’s technology-assisted feudalism.
