Surrogacy law for single parents

Surrogacy is a way of building a family for both single mums and single dads.  For single dads, it may be your main path to conceiving a biological child who will be part of your family from birth.  For single mums, there are a range of possible reasons why you may not be able to carry a pregnancy yourself and need the help of a surrogate.

Your starting point is considering the different types of surrogacy available. All surrogacy involves some legal untangling, and this guide steers you through the UK legal issues you will need to think about.

Will you stay in the UK or go overseas to find a surrogate to help you?

Family court statistics show that UK parents through surrogacy are split reasonably evenly between those who go overseas for surrogacy and those who find a surrogate in the UK.  The law – as well as your experience – will work very differently depending on whether you follow a UK surrogacy path or an international surrogacy path.

Surrogacy in the UK

Surrogacy is legal in the UK, but the law prohibits third parties from arranging surrogacy for profit and bars advertising for surrogates, and this can make the process of finding a surrogate lengthy, informal and uncertain. Find out more about the legal framework governing surrogacy in the UK.

Surrogacy agreements are also unenforceable in the UK which means you and your surrogate need to trust each other to transfer parenthood after the birth.  Many parents worry about whether a surrogate might change her mind, but this is incredibly rare in practice. Find out more about UK surrogacy disputes.

International surrogacy

The most common international surrogacy destinations for single parents are the USA and Canada, because these are all countries in which there is an explicitly supportive legal framework for surrogacy which recognises you as your child’s sole legal parent from birth. Greece also facilitates surrogacy for single mums (although not single dads) albeit that surrogacy is not yet very common there. Other countries also facilitate surrogacy for foreign parents but often without there being a clear legal framework, which makes it much riskier.  With any international surrogacy path you should explore things very careful to satisfy yourselves that you feel comfortable with the legal framework, the risk, the ethics, the experience you are likely to have, the costs and the long term implications for your child.

Many parents look overseas for surrogacy because it gives legal certainty: the knowledge you will be recorded on your child’s birth certificate immediately.  However, it is important to understand that, even if that is the case, you will not be recognised as your child’s sole legal parent for UK law purposes and will need to follow an additional UK legal process after the birth.  You will also need to navigate British nationality and immigration law to bring your baby home after the birth and secure his or her UK passport.

Find out more about how UK law works for international surrogacy.

Legal parenthood and parental orders

Your surrogate will be your child’s legal mother under UK law, regardless of where in the world your child is born.  If she is married, then her husband or spouse will be the father/second legal parent.

To fully resolve the UK law issues, you will need to apply for a parental order after the birth to reassign parenthood fully and permanently to you, to give you full parental responsibility under UK law, and to extinguish the status of your surrogate (and her spouse). There was a significant change to UK law in 2019 to make it possible for single parents to apply for parental orders for the first time, although to be eligible you must be your child’s biological parent (which in practice excludes many single mums). Find out more about parental orders.

If you cannot apply for a parental order (for example because you are a single mum and need the help of an egg donor to conceive your child) then you may be able to apply for an adoption order, or another kind of order, instead. Find out more about using adoption law to remedy legal parenthood in surrogacy cases.

Other issues to consider

Since your UK legal parenthood will take some months to resolve, you will need to think about legal rights and responsibilities in the interim period.  You might be wondering how you will make decisions about your child’s care during this time, whether you will have a right to time off work and what would happen if you died unexpectedly.  All these issues need to managed carefully if you are building your family through surrogacy.

Find out more about managing the post-birth legal issues.

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