A Kent-organised conference heard Baroness Mary Warnock, whose 1984 report led to the surrogacy laws we still have today, say she has changed her mind about surrogacy.
Baroness Warnock spoke at the conference, entitled Surrogacy in the 21st century: Rethinking assumptions, reforming law, at the Friends House, Euston Road, London, on Friday 6 May 2016.
The conference was organised by surrogacy law expert Dr Kirsty Horsey, of the University’s Kent Law School. She has described the current law – particularly the rules relating to legal parenthood following surrogacy – as out of date and nonsensical, culminating in an inability to protect the best interests of children born through surrogacy.
Baroness Warnock’s 1984 report on human fertilisation and embryology said surrogacy was unethical and recommended it should be discouraged by the law. It led to both the Surrogacy Arrangements Act of 1985 and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990.
She now says the ethical problems she associated with surrogacy in the 1980s have changed and that we should look again at surrogacy as ‘we now feel far less threatened by “unorthodox” forms of family than we did thirty years ago’.
Alongside Baroness Warnock, Professor Margaret Brazier, who chaired the government’s 1996-8 review of surrogacy*, said legal reform is crucial now as, without it, the welfare of children will be at risk. She called for a way of regulating surrogacy that draws on good practice that has evolved in the UK and avoids the danger of simply objectifying women as gestational carriers or ‘wombs on legs’.
She argued that an unintended consequence is that some prospective parents seek surrogates abroad largely unaware they could enter good, secure arrangements in the UK where surrogacy isn’t a commercial enterprise and fewer ethical questions arise. A report by Dr Horsey, comissioned by non-profit agency Surrogacy UK, was published last autumn.
Other speakers at the conference included Kim Cotton, founder and chairperson of COTS (Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy), and Natalie Smith, of Surrogacy UK and mother of twins born to a surrogate.