Fertility Treatment Regulation

Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for bringing these important questions to the House. Women’s health, fertility, and experience of motherhood are matters that are rarely given the attention they deserve, and I am hugely grateful for the opportunity to learn from the expertise of so many of your Lordships on these issues today.

I want to speak about surrogacy, and begin by acknowledging the wonderful, loving families that have been created through surrogacy and the generosity of spirit that can motivate altruistic surrogates. As we have heard from the noble Baroness, the Law Commission has proposed reforms to the laws governing domestic surrogacy. It has made many important recommendations. However, it was not tasked with considering the policy challenges or the ethics of surrogacy, as it says, nor does its work cover international surrogacy.

The practice of surrogacy in this country is growing and changing, so I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, that we need to stand back and consider the implications further before we legislate. There are four fundamental questions to answer. First—and here I am starting with first principles—do we stand by our current position that surrogacy should be legal? Surrogacy has been legal in this country for many years and is increasingly used as a means of assisting conception. However, many European countries oppose it. France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland all prohibit surrogacy on the grounds that it is incompatible with human dignity and amounts to the commodification of women’s bodies. India, Thailand and Nepal have all moved to ban or severely restrict surrogacy after seeing the reality of the industry at scale: low-income women taking on high-risk pregnancies for wealthy foreigners.

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, argues:

“Surrogacy reduces women and children including girls to mere commodities, stripping them of their equality and dignity and encouraging their exploitation and abuse”.


Of course, many completely disagree with this analysis, and a full debate in this country may reveal that our sensibilities are closer to those of the Americans than to those of the Europeans on this issue. Some may conclude that surrogacy poses no challenges whatever to female equality or human dignity; others may conclude that there are challenges, but these can be dealt with through the right legal and regulatory framework. Either way, we need a wider and deeper discussion before we change the law.

Secondly, if we conclude that surrogacy is an acceptable practice, what safeguards do we need to protect the women who become surrogate mothers? Take consent as one example. There is no legal requirement for a woman to have given birth before becoming a surrogate mother, and the Law Commission does not propose it. Is that right? Do you need to know what pregnancy and birth will entail to give informed consent? Canadian research suggests that gestational surrogate mothers carry three times the risk of severe complications compared to unassisted pregnancies. Are women properly informed about these risks?

Even more difficult, how do we feel about money changing hands? It has long been a criminal offence to buy or sell organs for transplantation in this country, and since 2022 it has been an offence for UK residents to do so anywhere in the world. The risk of exploitation is deemed too great. However, we treat surrogacy differently. UK residents are free to enter commercial surrogacy arrangements abroad. While third-party organisations cannot profit from surrogacy services here, surrogate mothers receive payments from commissioning parents. These are meant to cover expenses, but they are uncapped and unregulated. That is unlike the payments allowed for egg and sperm donors, which are capped by the HFEA precisely to prevent a market in human gametes. We do not have reliable data on average payments to surrogate mothers. We know they can run to tens of thousands of pounds; they can be paid in regular monthly instalments, and they are not tied to specific expenses. We also know that, as Maternity Action described,

“there is generally a power imbalance between surrogate mothers and intended parents. Intended parents tend to be older, wealthier, better educated and employed in higher status jobs than surrogate mothers”.

Given that structural context, what safeguards do we need to prevent the exploitation of women? The Law Commission—rightly, in my view—proposes regulating expenses, but it does not propose capping them. Is that sufficient? If so, who has the expertise and resources to regulate those payments, since the HFEA has said it does not? Further thought on safeguards is clearly needed.

Thirdly, do we believe that there should be any restrictions whatever on who may commission babies? Take age: in 2025, our courts considered cases involving commissioning parents in their 70s. There is no upper age limit for commissioning parents, and the Law Commission does not propose one. In one case, the judge noted plainly that the child would experience the loss and grief of elderly or incapacitated parents during their childhood.

Do we believe that all adults should be able to have the option of commissioning surrogate mothers, or do we believe that there should be some checks or restrictions? Commissioning parents may rightly note that biological fatherhood has no age limit, and that other couples face no suitability checks before conceiving. That is of course true. On the other hand, we have extremely strict frameworks governing adoption, which also involves the separation of a child from its birth family. Which is the more appropriate model for surrogacy?

My fourth and final question is: what do children need? Even if a surrogate mother is consenting freely and the commissioning parents will provide a loving home, how do we centre the child in the practice? In all other circumstances we would consider it traumatic for a newborn to be removed from its birth mother. Does that trauma exist for babies born to surrogate mothers? The adoption framework has evolved over decades as we have come to understand, often painfully, that questions of identity and origin matter deeply to children as they grow.

Many children born to surrogates will never see their birth mothers again. Does that matter, and if it does, how can we best support them? What those children need from us is expertise in child development—expertise that has generally been missing in this debate so far.

These are sensitive and emotive questions, but they are hugely important for the women and children involved. So, if this Government, or a future one, conclude that reform of surrogacy is the right path, I very much hope that they will commit to significantly more work and a full, open and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford described, compassionate debate on these issues before the legislation comes to this House.