The numbers tell a story of quiet but profound change. Parental orders granted for surrogacy arrangements in England and Wales have risen from 67 in 2008 to 470 in 2024. By 2025 nearly 1,000 children were born through such arrangements, double the figure from a decade earlier. Applications for parental orders topped 980 last year, with the majority now linked to births overseas in places such as the United States, Georgia, Nigeria, Ukraine and Mexico.
This surge has left the existing legal framework under obvious strain. Agencies report turning away prospective parents because demand far outstrips supply, with waiting times stretching to three years. The founder and director of Brilliant Beginnings told The Guardian that legal uncertainty deters many women from acting as surrogates in Britain, pushing more people towards overseas arrangements she described as the wild west. The founder of Nappy Endings, herself a multiple surrogate, spoke of a severe shortage of willing women and even recounted midwives asking intended parents to leave hospitals.
These practical difficulties flow from a deeper confusion. The Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985 and subsequent legislation were written in an era when commercial surrogacy was firmly rejected. The surrogate remains the legal mother at birth. Intended parents must apply for a parental order, usually within six months, to establish their status. Payments are limited to reasonable expenses. The system was never designed for the scale or the expectations now placed upon it.
The law was creaking at the seams and had unnecessary barriers that led to transnational surrogacy increasingly taking place in jurisdictions where neither surrogates nor parents had legal protections.
Professor Kirsty Horsey's assessment captures the practical reality. Yet the proposed remedy from the Law Commission, a new pathway to legal parenthood from birth, mandatory safeguards, clearer payment rules and a dedicated regulator, risks entrenching the very commercial logic that many instinctively question. Professor Nicholas Hopkins suggests that a properly regulated domestic scheme would reduce the incentive to go abroad. The logic sounds tidy on paper. In practice it would normalise the idea that a woman's body and a child's earliest bonds can be contracted out.
Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has been more blunt. She argues that surrogacy should be abolished globally because it constitutes a system of violence, exploitation and abuse that leaves women and girls open to exploitation by wealthier parties. Her words deserve weight. They cut through the language of choice and empowerment that often surrounds these debates.
The human cost is rarely confined to paperwork. Intended parents speak movingly of years of IVF disappointment before turning to surrogacy. Their longing for a child is real and understandable. Yet we should not allow that longing to eclipse other considerations: the psychological impact on the surrogate who carries and then relinquishes a baby, the identity questions that may confront the child later in life, and the subtle shift in how we view human life itself.
