Banned in Britain, purchased abroad: The surrogacy gap exploiting women in poverty

New figures obtained through freedom of information laws reveal that between 2019 and 2025, single men in England filed 130 court applications to establish legal parenthood over children born to surrogates in foreign countries — nearly six times the 23 applications filed over the same period involving surrogates in the United Kingdom (UK). Over that same window, the total number of single men pursuing surrogacy as a path to fatherhood tripled.

Key Takeaways:

• New figures from England show single men pursuing surrogacy overwhelmingly turn to foreign women, many living in poverty.

• Advocacy groups warn that the trend amounts to the purchase of children from vulnerable women through commercial deals that would be unlawful if conducted on British soil.

• A coalition of campaign groups is pressing the British government to eliminate the legal gap that allows citizens to enter paid surrogacy contracts abroad and return home with a child.

The Details:

Paid surrogacy is prohibited under British law. What is not prohibited, however, is leaving the country to enter one. Once a British citizen returns home with a child born through a foreign commercial surrogacy arrangement, they can apply for a parental order granting them full legal parenthood. 

Helen Gibson, who leads the campaign group Surrogacy Concern, said the figures paint an uncomfortable picture of where these arrangements are taking place and who is bearing the burden of them.

“Single men are flying to Eastern Europe, California, South America and increasingly nations in Africa, effectively buying babies from low-income women in poverty, who are put through high risk pregnancies and who do not see their children again,” Gibson told The Times.

The geographic spread of these arrangements is significant. Among the more than 1,500 parental order applications filed in England between 2018 and 2024 involving children born abroad, the United States accounted for the largest share, followed by Ukraine, and a range of countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The annual number of such applications more than doubled between 2018 and 2024.

Closing the Gap

In March 2025, a coalition of 13 advocacy organizations wrote to government ministers calling attention to what they described as a clear gap in the law. The prohibition on commercial surrogacy within the UK, they argued, means little if citizens face no legal consequence for pursuing identical arrangements overseas before returning home with a child.

The groups called on Parliament to address the inconsistency directly.

Gibson’s organization has gone further, calling for the overseas pursuit of commercial surrogacy by British citizens to be made a criminal offense.

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The Bottom Line:

A prohibition that applies only within national borders offers limited protection to the women most affected by the practice it claims to ban. The women entering these arrangements abroad have no recourse to British law, no advocacy from British institutions, and in most cases, no path back to the children they carried. If the practice is harmful enough to outlaw at home, the case for tolerating its export grows harder to make.