As far as gifts go, it’s a pretty special one. A baby.
More and more heterosexual and same-sex couples in Britain are turning to surrogate mothers to help them have a family.
This month, singer Sir Elton John and his civil partner, film producer David Furnish, welcomed their second son into the world.
Both children were born to the same surrogate mother through an agency in California, where commercial surrogacy is legal and surrogates can be paid.
While surrogacy is legal in Britain, it is a criminal offence to pay a surrogate mother more than ‘reasonable expenses’ and it is also illegal to advertise that you are seeking a surrogate mother or willing to act as one.
Couples here wanting to have a baby through surrogacy can travel to somewhere like the US where they can use a professional agency, or they can find a willing surrogate here, often through the help of non-profit organisations which host social events and online forums where surrogates and intended parents can meet.
There are two kinds of surrogacy, one where the surrogate mother uses the intended father’s semen to get pregnant through artificial insemination, and another through IVF where she doesn’t use her own eggs.
To give the intended parents the rights to their baby, the surrogate mother must sign a parental order. More than 800 of these order applications have been made in England and Wales in the past 12 years, with the figure increasing annually since 2009.
‘Surrogacy has got much more accepted,’ said fertility lawyer Natalie Gamble.
‘People are much more aware of it and the fact that options are available internationally. There are more same-sex parents than there used to be. It’s partly society becoming more accepting and it’s partly that it’s more possible than it used to be.’
And why do couples choose surrogacy?
‘It’s an option for gay dads who want to have a child and don’t want to share parenting with a mother,’ she explained.
‘For heterosexual couples, there’s usually a very long history before they think about surrogacy. The stories are endless in their variation. There are people who have had recurrent miscarriages for whom fertility treatment isn’t the answer, there are women who have had cancer and had a hysterectomy and who aren’t able to carry a pregnancy. There are women who are born without a womb but are otherwise able to produce eggs and then there are people who have just had a lot of rounds of IVF that haven’t worked and this is the next step in the fertility journey.’
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow is head of social work at the British Surrogacy Centre, which he launched with his partner Tony after they became Britain’s first gay dads when they had their own surrogate children in the US. The couple have five surrogate children.
The centre, which opened an office in Essex two years ago, advises heterosexual and gay couples on surrogacy – last year, it worked with 63 couples and helped them have 87 children, most of which were twins.
Mr Drewitt-Barlow said their straight clients come to them with ‘a lot of emotional baggage’, adding that surrogacy often represented their last chance to become parents.
He wants commercial surrogacy to be made legal in Britain.
‘The problem at the moment is there’s no legal structure in place for people going through the surrogacy route,’ he said. ‘Everybody might be really happy about Elton John and David Furnish having a surrogate, but would they all feel so euphoric if it was somebody like Gary Glitter, who’s a convicted paedophile? Of course they wouldn’t, but there’s nothing stopping him from doing it because the laws in this country don’t stop convicted paedophiles from using a surrogate.
‘The sooner we can commercialise it here the better, because then we can put safeguards in place that not only look after the surrogate who’s having the baby and the egg donor, but we can also put stringent things in place to safeguard the welfare of the child.
‘What I don’t want to see are the children being born through surrogacy ending up in local social services care.’
Steve Holford is the chairman of Surrogacy UK, which has helped more than 70 couples have babies through connections made by surrogate mothers and intended parents.
He said: ‘We don’t match parents and surrogates, we simply enable them the opportunity to meet and hopefully become friends.’
Mr Holford and his wife had their second child with the help of a surrogate mother.
‘It can be a long and often emotional process and one that requires full commitment of everyone involved,’ he explained.
‘It is similar in that sense to adoption and so hopeful parents should consider surrogacy very carefully and be sure it is something they are willing to try.
‘We are seeing a greater understanding and awareness of surrogacy, in part due to celebrity exposure such as that generated by Elton John.’
He added: ‘There is certainly a need to give greater support and clarity of rights to surrogates and intended parents, particularly within employment law.
‘Currently, the rights of parents through surrogacy do not match those of other parents, which is very unfair.’
Ms Gamble said changes to the law are needed. At the moment, only couples are allowed to apply for a parental order, ruling single parents out of having a surrogate baby.
Gay supermarket worker Kyle Casson, 24, from Doncaster, is currently preparing a challenge to this law.
‘The law is ripe to be challenged for the fact it excludes single parents because it has no logic,’ said Ms Gamble.
‘Single parents can apply to adopt a child, if you’re a single mum you can conceive through donor insemination, but for surrogacy, for no apparent reason, single parents are left out of the loop.’
Under the law, intended parents must wait up to nine months after the surrogate mother has given birth to their baby before the parental order is finalised and they are named on the child’s birth certificate.
‘What that means in practice is that children are left in limbo for a year after the birth with people caring for them that don’t have the recognition they need to be able to make basic decisions about medical care,’ said Ms Gamble.
‘Surrogates don’t want to be treated as the legal parents for that space of time either. It would make much more sense to deal with things much earlier during the pregnancy so the right people could go on the birth certificate from the beginning.’
She said it was wrong that surrogacy is left with no regulation in Britain while the rest of the fertility sector is tightly controlled.
‘People are not going to rush to be stuck in a foreign country for months with a newborn child if they’ve got a good option to do things here.’
The options abroad are narrowing. India, which has a thriving commercial surrogacy industry, has just banned foreign gay couples and single people from using surrogate mothers there.
In a study published last week, Eric Blyth, professor of social work at the University of Huddersfield, warned that both intended parents and surrogate mothers overseas are in danger of being exploited unless authorities in Britain regulate the practice more closely.
‘Exploitation is a big risk when surrogacy is conducted where there are neither effective regulation nor safeguards involved,’ he said.
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