Rise in overseas surrogates ‘increases risk of stateless babies’

Calls grow for global regulation as rising numbers of westerners use surrogates in countries with different laws

Why Mexico is at the heart of ethical debate over global surrogacy

The rise in the use of surrogates abroad is leaving more babies at risk of becoming stateless, experts have said, amid growing calls for urgent global regulation of the practice.

The warning follows the suspension of a 15-year effort by The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to establish a global surrogacy convention, which was paused due to divisions among member states.

With more older women, gay couples and people affected by infertility seeking to become parents, increasing numbers of babies are being born to surrogates around the world. Surrogates normally carry pregnancies from a donor egg or the egg of someone who wishes to become a parent.

Laws differ from country to country, with some such as Italy banning the practice outright, while others, including some US states, allow commercial surrogacy. The UK only allows “altruistic” surrogacy, where surrogates cannot be paid more than their expenses from carrying the pregnancy.

UK surrogacy agencies argue that an outdated legal framework at home is pushing couples to seek surrogates abroad, where regulations to protect surrogates from exploitation can be less robust or do not exist at all. Anti-surrogacy campaigners say the practice is fundamentally abusive in all cases and are pushing for a global ban.

Prof Michael Hellner, who chaired the HCCH working group, said hugely differing opinions on the ethics of surrogacy between the member states involved meant the project to create a global framework on legal parentage in surrogacy cases had proved impossible.

“I invested 10 years of my life into this project. But if there’s no political will, there’s absolutely no point in us spending more of people’s time and money,” he said. “The lack of coordination between states on this issue leads to problems for the children, and the risk of statelessness is increasing.”

Hellner said the patchwork of cross-border surrogacy arrangements put babies at risk of “limping parentage” – where a child has different legal parents in different countries – and statelessness.

Experts said statelessness could happen in cases where a country does not automatically grant nationality to a child born there, and where surrogacy is not legally recognised in either the country of birth or the child’s final destination.

Hellner said the project had proved difficult when some countries were “violently opposed to anything that could be seen as legitimising surrogacy, which they think is a violation of human rights and dignity”.

There is no data on the number of births by surrogacy globally, but they have increased rapidly in the UK over the past decade, doubling since 2015 to more than 981 in 2025.

Most of these children were born abroad, mostly in the US, Ukraine, Nigeria, Georgia, Colombia and Mexico. British people using surrogates abroad to have babies are forced to apply to the UK family courts for a parental order to become the legal parents of their child and, in some cases, also need to apply for British citizenship for the child.

Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the president of the Geneva-based nonprofit Child Identity Protection and a former UN special rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, said the HCCH was a missed opportunity to have explicit international standards on the recognition of legal parentage in surrogacy, which can be a requirement for establishing nationality.

“There are lots of situations where these children are just left in a limbo and that affects their legal status, which is something that is crucial to having an identity,” she said. “The differences in legislation between different countries is still a big, big puzzle.”

The subject of international surrogacy came to prominence this week when Jens Spahn, a former German health minister and ally of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was forced to resign his position in his party after revealing he and his husband used a surrogate mother to become parents – a practice he had criticised in the past and his party is vehemently opposed to.

Member states involved in the HCCH included the US, UK, Australia and Canada, where surrogacy is permitted in some form, as well as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, which have heavily restricted or banned surrogacy domestically.

Bhaskar Mishra, a child protection specialist at Unicef, said the UN agency was pushing for better guidelines to protect the rights of children in international surrogacy.

“If the government doesn’t issue a passport in either the country where the baby is born, or where it is going home to, then there are chances the baby will become stateless,” he said. “That’s a serious risk in cases of international surrogacy agreements, and numbers are growing, and growing very fast.”

In 2025 a senior UK judge issued a warning about risky surrogacy arrangements abroad after a couple faced a four-year legal battle to bring two children born via surrogacy to Ukrainian women in Cyprus back to the UK, during which time they were essentially stateless.

The then president of the family division, Andrew McFarlane, said the case should act as a warning that courts may refuse to grant a parental order in cases where a child was born via commercial surrogacy abroad and this may leave the child “permanently stateless and legally parentless”.

Last year, Denmark was forced to change its laws to allow legal parentage recognition in foreign surrogacy arrangements, after the European court of human rights ruled that preventing this violated children’s rights.

The UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, has called for surrogacy to be abolished globally, calling it a “system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women”.

Alsalem said women and girls who were “impoverished, destitute and affected by crisis and conflict” were more likely to be exploited by surrogacy arrangements, and commissioning individuals usually came from “western wealthier states”.

“The vulnerability to exploitation and abuse through surrogacy would not be possible if it were not for the existence of demand by commissioning individuals, who are usually from western wealthier states, a dynamic that reinforces colonial and discriminatory practices,” she said.

“There is a push to normalise and legalise surrogacy worldwide, given that it is lucrative and there are many strong and well-financed powerful lobbies behind it.”

Marie-Josèphe Devillers, who runs the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (CIAMS), said she worked with surrogates who regretted their decision, and said they felt “cheated, lied to and exploited”.

One woman was a victim of human trafficking from Latin America to France, and another, from the US, said her child was sold to people other than those she had believed to be the intended parents. Devillers said she had also looked at cases where women had experienced health complications during pregnancy or birth, including some deaths.

Michael Johnson-Ellis, the founder of My Surrogacy Journey, which facilitates surrogacy in the UK, US and Mexico, said as long as it was done ethically and with proper regulation, international surrogacy worked well.

“People should be allowed to make a choice on where and how they do surrogacy, providing it’s safe and there’s no risk of people being exploited or coerced,” he said. “The wait time is about two years for a UK surrogate, and for some people who have been on a lengthy journey with infertility, that time might be something they don’t have.”

He said his agency only recommended the US and Mexico for parents seeking surrogates abroad, and was vocal in advising people on where to avoid. “We see the horror stories through the high courts of people being stuck in places like Cyprus or Georgia or Ukraine, or some of these emerging destinations that clearly are exploitative and dangerous,” he said.

Rachel Westbury runs Nappy Endings, a UK-based surrogacy agency, and has been a surrogate four times since 2011. She said desperate parents were increasingly looking abroad for surrogates but the number of suitable countries was narrowing.

“People need to stop thinking that it’s just celebrities doing it and glamourising it. It’s not just for millionaires. We have people who remortgage their home to do it,” she said. “It’s a privilege to be a surrogate. If more people knew the magic of surrogacy, when it’s done right, more surrogates would come forward.”