Why are surrogacy laws in UK more complicated than in other countries?
Surrogacy laws in UK are governed by the Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985 (SAA), as amended by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 1990. Furthermore, awkwardly applied legal parentage rules and unenforceable contracts are a dangerous combination in this legislation. Many commentators, as well as the courts, have been harshly critical of this, with rulings demonstrating that the current legal system is primarily distinguished by the absence of any cohesive regulatory framework. Furthermore, over the last ten years, there have been numerous and increasingly common legal anomalies raised in court cases, prompting leading academics and UK surrogacy agency officials to call for reform. In March 2017, the Law Commission received more than 1,300 submissions from interested parties. This made it clear that the voices of surrogates and commissioning parents needed to be heard, but the Law Commission's surrogacy report, which includes reform recommendations, isn't expected until 2021.
What is the big deal? Under the existing surrogacy regulations in the UK and Wales, the competing interests of the commissioning parents, the surrogate mother, and the child born as a consequence of surrogacy are not appropriately balanced. Particularly crucial in cases where the surrogate is not genetically related to the child, the law infringes on the long-standing assumption that