Westminster Hall — sitting of 7 September 2026: transcript & video

00:10 - 00:15

Intervenant 1

Order, order. Dave Robertson to move the motion.

00:15 - 02:29

Intervenant 2

Thank you, Mr. Pritchard. Can I say it's always a pleasure to serve in a debate where you are in the chair, and I'm sure today will be no different. I beg to move that this House has considered e-petition 763161 relating to UK law on surrogacy. The petition calls for a change in the law so that intended parents of babies born through surrogacy can be considered the legal parents from the moment of their child's birth. Under current law, that isn't possible, and intended parents must go through a months-long process in the courts and are visited by a social worker before they're considered parents to their children in the eyes of the law.

Ahead of this debate, I met with the petition creator, Adam, and his fiancé, Jamie, and their daughter, Eleven, who was born via surrogacy in Connecticut. I'm pleased to say that Adam and Jamie have joined us in the public gallery today, and while baby Eleven hasn't joined them, she did make a cameo appearance on our call ahead of this debate. Adam and Jamie are listed as Eleven's parents on her birth certificate in the US, but more than six months after her birth, they still aren't recognized as her legal parents here at home in the UK. That's what prompted Adam to create this petition. And as he said when we met, we're changing Eleven's nappies, we're putting her to bed, we are her parents, we are bringing her up.

And yet, he says, babies like her are in a legal limbo under current legislation. My role today is to introduce this petition by setting out the petitioners' views and framing the debate that is to follow, and it is really good to see so much interest from members across the House in today's debate. In preparation, as well as meeting Adam, I've drawn on the expertise of a range of organizations and individuals, with the expert support of the petitions team, who often are not thanked enough, I feel, so I'd like to place on record now my thanks to the entire petitions team for their support in preparing for the debate. Some of the groups that we met were Surrogacy Concern and Stop Surrogacy Now, Brilliant Beginnings, Dr. Herjeet Marway of the University of Birmingham, who's the founding chairperson of Ethics Committee of Surrogacy in UK. We also met with Professor Nick Hopkins of UCL, a former Law Commissioner for England and Wales, and Professor Gillian Black of the Scottish Law Commission and Edinburgh University, who together authored the joint Law Commission report on surrogacy reform, which was published in 2023.

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