NGA has been quoted in a long piece in today’s Observer about a surrogacy agency operating in Georgia as well as various other unregulated destinations (including Mexico and historically India, Thailand, Nepal and Cambodia). The piece raises concerns about ethical issues about how surrogates from poor countries are recruited and protected, as well as wider concerns about obscuring ownership and the contracts those involved are asked to enter into.
We were quoted in the piece about the important of direct relationships between parents and surrogates to ensure surrogacy arrangements are ethical:
According to Natalie Gamble, a UK lawyer who specialises in surrogacy cases, the role of the agency should be as a “safeguard” ensuring an equal relationship between both commissioning parents and the surrogates, so the rights of both are properly looked after. She said that a key part of ethical surrogacy is “that there is a very close and direct relationship between the parents and the surrogate and that there is equal balance of power that everyone has going into this on a fully informed basis.”
We also spoke about the need for law reform to regulate surrogacy better to safeguard all involved:
In wealthier countries throughout the Global North, lawmakers are struggling to keep pace with these new and controversial technologies. Consultations on law reform that have grinded on for years continued in Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium, the UK and elsewhere, but with little sign of a compromise emerging. “In the real world, international commercial surrogacy is not going to go away completely, ever,” said Gamble. “It exists, it’s well established. And we also need to deal with the consequences of that.”
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