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More than 113,000 people have backed a campaign calling for intended parents to be legally recognised from the moment their child is born through surrogacy, but the UK Government says immediate reform is not coming.
A major debate over UK surrogacy law has returned to Parliament after a petition started by a gay father gathered more than 113,000 signatures, calling for intended parents to be recognised as their child’s legal parents from birth.
MPs debated the petition in Westminster Hall on 7 September, bringing renewed attention to a system that can leave parents raising their own child for months before UK law formally recognises them as the child’s legal parents.
At the centre of the campaign are Adam Frisby and his fiancé Jamie Corbett, whose daughter Leven was born through surrogacy in Connecticut in the United States.
Although the two dads are named as her parents on her US birth certificate, UK law does not automatically recognise both intended parents as the legal parents of a child born through surrogacy.
And for many LGBTQ+ families, that distinction is anything but theoretical.
How does UK surrogacy law currently work?
Under current UK law, the person who gives birth to a child through surrogacy is normally regarded as the child’s legal mother at birth.
If the surrogate is married or in a civil partnership, their spouse or civil partner may also be recognised as the child’s other legal parent, depending on the circumstances.
Intended parents generally need to obtain a parental order from the family court to transfer legal parenthood following the birth.
The process exists to protect the child and ensure that the surrogate has freely consented to the transfer of parenthood. However, campaigners argue that the system can also create months of unnecessary uncertainty for families in which the intended parents have cared for the baby since birth.
Frisby’s parliamentary petition puts the argument simply: families should not have to spend months going through court proceedings and social-worker assessments before being legally recognised as the parents of the child they planned and are already raising.
Why this matters particularly to LGBTQ+ parents
Surrogacy is one of the routes through which some LGBTQ+ people — particularly male same-sex couples — create a family.
The UK Government itself has previously acknowledged that surrogacy is an important route to family formation for LGBTQ+ people and that delays in obtaining legal parenthood can create uncertainty.
That means the debate is not simply about paperwork.
Until legal parenthood has been established, intended parents can face questions around their authority to make decisions concerning their child, including issues involving healthcare, travel and other areas of parental responsibility.
During the parliamentary debate, MPs raised examples of families encountering practical difficulties while waiting for their legal status to be resolved.
There is also an uncomfortable reality for same-sex couples: their relationship to a child may sometimes be questioned in circumstances where heterosexual parents would simply be assumed to be the child’s parents.
Liberal Democrat MP Jess Brown-Fuller raised that point during the debate, arguing that same-sex intended parents may be more likely to be asked to prove that they have parental authority.
There is already a proposal to change the law
The debate comes three years after the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission published detailed proposals for reforming surrogacy law.
Among the recommendations was a new pathway to legal parenthood for domestic UK surrogacy arrangements.
Under that proposed system, intended parents who completed a regulated process before birth could become the child’s legal parents from birth rather than having to wait for a parental order afterwards.
But this was not simply a proposal to remove safeguards.
The recommended system included pre-conception checks, independent legal advice, a written surrogacy agreement and involvement from regulated surrogacy organisations.
There would also be protections allowing the surrogate to withdraw consent, with the courts becoming involved where necessary.
Crucially, the proposal was designed as part of a much wider reform package rather than as automatic parenthood with no oversight.
The recommended new pathway would also apply to qualifying domestic UK surrogacy arrangements, rather than simply removing scrutiny from international surrogacy cases.
The Government is not moving — at least not yet
Responding to MPs during the 7 September debate, Public Health and Patient Safety Minister Dame Diana Johnson acknowledged the difficulties faced by intended parents and said the Government had heard the calls for legislative change.
But there was no announcement of a new law.
Johnson said that, because of limited parliamentary time, the Government was not in a position to bring forward surrogacy reform legislation immediately.
She added that ministers would continue considering options for future reform and that the Government would respond to the Law Commissions’ recommendations “in due course”.
So this was not Parliament voting against equal recognition for intended parents — there was no vote on implementing the petition’s demand.
Instead, the result is arguably more frustrating for campaigners: the Government accepts that there are problems with the current framework, but there is still no clear timetable for changing it.
Support for reform — and significant opposition
The parliamentary debate also showed just how divided the issue remains.
Supporters of reform argued that the law should better reflect the reality of modern families and that parents who planned a pregnancy and care for a child from birth should not spend months in legal limbo.
Others warned that recognising intended parents automatically could weaken protections for surrogate mothers and children.
Several MPs stressed the importance of preserving the surrogate’s ability to give informed consent after birth, while concerns were also raised about commercial and international surrogacy arrangements, where questions of exploitation, inequality and trafficking can arise.
Those concerns mean that any future reform is unlikely to be simple.
But they do not erase the problems experienced by families navigating the current system.
More than paperwork
For Adam and Jamie, the campaign began with something far more personal than legislation.
They became parents when their daughter entered their lives.
Yet the law has required another process to decide when those parents officially become parents.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the current debate.
Surrogacy law has to protect children. It has to protect surrogates. It also has to deal responsibly with international arrangements and the possibility of exploitation.
But it must also recognise that LGBTQ+ families are families — and that legal systems designed decades ago should be capable of reflecting how families actually exist today.
More than 113,000 people have now asked Parliament to confront that question.
Parliament has finally debated it.
The question now is how long families will have to wait for an answer.
