SurrogacyUK responds to the 100,000-signature petition on legal parenthood

SurrogacyUK welcomes the parliamentary petition created by Adam Frisby calling for intended parents to be recognised as their child's legal parents from birth. The petition has now passed the 100,000-signature threshold required for a parliamentary debate to be considered.

This is not a new issue for SurrogacyUK. It is a change the organisation has been calling for since 2014, because the law as it stands does not reflect the reality of many UK surrogacy families.

Under current law, the surrogate is the legal mother from birth. If she is married or in a civil partnership, her partner is usually the child's second legal parent. The intended parents, the people who have prepared for the child, brought the child home, and cared for the child from the start, must apply to court after the birth for a parental order. That process commonly takes between six and nine months. The most recent published figures show 477 parental orders granted in 2024, and 380 in the first three quarters of 2025.

For families, those months are not an administrative technicality. They are the early days of a child's life: birth certificates, hospital appointments, medical decisions, nursery forms, passports, and the ordinary daily work of being parents.

And sometimes, they are moments of crisis.

Surrogacy in the UK is altruistic, not commercial. SurrogacyUK's ethos is “surrogacy through friendship”: arrangements built on trust, openness and long-standing relationships, not payment or transaction. UK surrogates are not paid beyond reasonable expenses, and many journeys grow out of deep personal connection.

That was the case for Hazel Davis, who carried Ralph for her close friends David and Ryan.

Hazel had known David for years. David had known Hazel's husband, Chris, since primary school, had introduced Hazel and Chris to each other, stood as best man at their wedding, and later became godparent to their daughter. When David and Ryan began exploring surrogacy, Hazel and Chris saw people they loved trying to build a family. Hazel offered to carry Ralph because she wanted to help them do that.

Ralph is not genetically related to Hazel or Chris. One of his two intended parents is his genetic father. David and Ryan were there throughout the pregnancy, at appointments and scans, and they brought Ralph home from hospital after he was born.

In February of this year, when Ralph became seriously ill at just eleven days old and was transferred to intensive care at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the law still said that Hazel and Chris were his legal parents.

At a time when David and Ryan were standing beside their baby's hospital bed, being told he might not survive, the legal framework around them did not match the reality of Ralph's family. Hazel and Chris were the people with formal legal parenthood. David and Ryan, one of whom was Ralph's genetic parent, were the people caring for him, loving him, and making the decisions every parent prays they will never have to make.

“I carried Ralph because Chris and I wanted David and Ryan to be his parents. They are some of our closest friends, and we wanted to help them complete their family.”

“I am not Ralph's mother. I am not genetically related to him. Neither is my husband. But when Ralph was critically ill, the law still treated us as his legal parents, not the two men beside his hospital bed who had loved him, prepared for him and cared for him from the moment he was born.”

“I remember keeping my phone close in case the hospital needed formal consent from us. That is a horrible position for everyone. He is David and Ryan's son. We should never have been the people the law looked to first.”

“If the only thing this petition changes is that the next family does not have to live through that uncertainty in the middle of a medical emergency, it will have been worth every signature.”

— Hazel Davis, surrogate

“Ralph is my grandson. He has been my grandson since the day he was born.”

“When he was fighting for his life, David and Ryan were doing what parents do. They were at his side, listening to doctors, trying to hold themselves together, and loving him through every hour of it.”

“But the law had not caught up with the truth of his family. Hazel had carried him for them out of love. She and Chris had done something extraordinary for our family, but they should not have been placed in the position of being Ralph's legal parents after birth.”

“The 100,000 people who have signed Adam Frisby's petition are asking Parliament for something simple and right: let parents be parents. Let surrogates be surrogates. Let children born through surrogacy begin life with the legal security their families have already built around them.”

— Carole, Ralph's grandmother

In 2023, the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission published their joint final report, Building Families Through Surrogacy: A New Law, alongside a draft Surrogacy Bill. Their proposals would create a new pathway through which intended parents become legal parents at birth, where the arrangement is overseen by a regulated non-profit surrogacy organisation and proper safeguards are in place for the surrogate.

Neither the previous nor the current government has acted on the draft Bill in the three years since it was published.

“The Law Commissions concluded that the current law does not work in the best interests of the people involved: the children born through surrogacy, the women who become surrogates, or the intended parents. We agree.”

“What Adam Frisby's petition calls for is not radical. It is a humane and carefully safeguarded reform that SurrogacyUK and others have been asking for over more than a decade.”

“At the heart of every good surrogacy journey is a relationship between people. Surrogates are not a route to parenthood; they are individuals making thoughtful, generous and informed choices. Good law should protect them, listen to them, and make sure they are supported.”

“But good law must also protect the children born through surrogacy. They should not have to spend the first months of their lives in a legal waiting room while everyone waits for paperwork to catch up with the family they already have.”

“We are grateful to Adam and his family for taking this issue to the public, and to the 100,000 people who have signed. As the conversation continues, it is vital that Parliament hears from the women who choose to be surrogates, from intended parents, and from families who have lived through the gaps in the current law.”

— Sarah Jones, CEO of SurrogacyUK

SurrogacyUK is calling on Baroness Merron, the responsible minister at the Department of Health and Social Care, to bring the draft Surrogacy Bill before Parliament without further delay.