Steve Yemm

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Pritchard. I will begin by recognising the very understandable motivation behind this petition. People who pursue surrogacy do so because they desperately want a family, and nobody should doubt the love that intended parents have for the children they raise. However, I cannot support the change proposed by the petition. The question before us is not whether intended parents are real parents, nor whether they should ultimately receive legal recognition; the question is whether the woman who has carried and given birth to a child should lose her legal status as that child’s mother from the moment of birth. I do not believe that she should. In our society, some things should never be reduced to questions of contract, individual choice or intention, and motherhood is certainly one of them. Pregnancy cannot simply be a service provided by one person for another, a woman’s body cannot merely be the means by which someone else’s parental intentions are fulfilled and the relationship created through nine months of pregnancy and childbirth cannot be written off because an agreement was reached beforehand. At present, our law recognises that reality: the woman who carries and gives birth to a child is the legal mother. Intended parents can subsequently acquire legal parenthood through a parental order, but crucially, that process cannot normally begin until six weeks after the birth and requires the mother’s consent. Some describe that as outdated and difficult bureaucracy, but I describe it as a safeguard. Before conception, we cannot know with certainty how a woman will feel after pregnancy, childbirth and holding the baby whom she carried for the first time. Consent matters enormously, but genuine consent must include one having the ability to change one’s mind when the reality is fundamentally different from what could have been understood beforehand. Consent given before pregnancy cannot simply become irrevocable after childbirth. Another important question is that of independent oversight. Parental orders allow the courts to consider the circumstances of the arrangement, require the mother’s consent and provide for CAFCASS involvement. That protection becomes particularly important in the international dimension of surrogacy, which other Members have mentioned. In the first 11 months of 2025, 139 parental order applications were made for babies born through surrogacy in the UK, compared with 357 for babies born through surrogacy abroad. Therefore, we should think carefully before weakening the safeguards in our law. If parental orders take too long, let us consider making them quicker, and if intended parents face practical difficulties, let us try to address them. We can make the system work better without changing the principle at its heart. Family, motherhood and childhood cannot be understood through the language of intention and contract, and it is particularly important that the law continues to recognise the reality of motherhood at the moment of birth. A woman who has carried and given birth to a child should not find that her legal relationship with that child has already been extinguished. I cannot support automatically recognising intended parents as the legal parents from birth. The six-week period after birth, the mother’s consent and independent judicial oversight are not antiquated obstacles to modern families, but protections for women and children—important safeguards that I believe are worth keeping.