The single men turning to surrogacy to become dads

For years, Britons dreaming of solo fatherhood have looked abroad to achieve their goal – and more may follow if the hurdles are removed

James Smith, 74,*  doesn’t know exactly when he realised that he wanted children, but it became a point of urgency when his own mother passed away, just over two decades ago. 
“Maybe it was for the sake of completeness,” says the retired entrepreneur from Tunbridge Wells, stressing, however, that it was not “a selfish desire to perpetuate myself”.
Smith’s course of action was not to get married and go about the usual routes to parenthood – “a relationship with another person just for that sake would have felt a bit like false pretences,” he says. 
Instead, finding himself single at 51, he sought out a woman to carry a child conceived through IVF and deliver him a baby biologically his own. And the result was his twin sons, Paul and David*.
The boys were carried by a woman living in California and conceived using a donor egg from a second American woman. From their CVs, handed out by a US surrogacy agency, both women “seemed eminently suitable, and that’s how they turned out to be”, Smith recalls. The twins are now 20 years old and today “it feels like we’re a completely normal family, which is what we are”.
Increasingly that is the case. Though official figures are hard to come by and estimates differ, it is thought that as many as 50 single British men have become fathers by having children with surrogates. 
“There’s no one statistic, but this is a family type that does seem to be on the rise,” says Dr Catherine Jones, a lecturer at King’s College London and an expert in family psychology. 
Dr Jones recently published a study of single fathers-by-surrogacy in Britain and elsewhere. Many were gay, but more than a handful were heterosexual, like Smith. It’s believed that many men pursuing this route to fatherhood have either struggled to find a relationship, or left long-term partners because of incompatible approaches to having children. 
The main hurdle for men in this position was money rather than stigma, says Dr Jones, suggesting that many more men would pursue it were it easier and less costly.
“Even with many fathers saving up, the cost can be difficult as fees are often really high,” Dr Jones says. 
While surrogacy is legal in the UK, it is illegal for anyone to advertise that they are either looking for a surrogate or willing to be one. Many looking for an arrangement still go abroad. 
Two decades ago the only real option for those unable to find a British surrogate was to turn to California, where surrogacy laws were (and remain) lax, and fertility doctors progressive. Still, it was a route only for the very well-off. Smith spent at least £90,000 at today’s rate to have his twins, and admits that he “doesn’t have too much of an idea” of the full sum. 
These days things are different. Many countries in Europe and across the world have relaxed their laws around surrogacy, though have stopped short of explicitly allowing paid-for babies. 
In Britain, where the demand for surrogate mothers outstrips the number of women willing to carry someone else’s baby, a hopeful parent will spend at least £45,000 on a surrogate’s medical expenses and the costs of IVF.
“51 per cent of parents who apply for a parental order in Britain, which is needed to have legal parenthood of a child, have gone abroad to find a surrogate,” says lawyer Natalie Gamble, head of fertility law firm NGA Law. There are “lots of reasons” for this, says Gamble, “including shortages of surrogates here, a lack of formal processes for matching intended parents with surrogates, and a lack of legal certainty”. 
The law remains troublesome for would-be single fathers. In California, those with a surrogate mother can have a court order issued before the child’s birth to ensure they will be deemed the legal parent. In Britain meanwhile, legal parenthood can only be settled in court after a child is born – with a judge given the final say. 
Thanks to a High Court battle led by Gamble, single men with children born to a surrogate mother are treated the same way as a couple or a single woman with a surrogate baby. The resulting change in the law in 2019 allowed single people to apply for the parental order needed for their child to be legally theirs, and no one else’s. 
“There hasn’t been a dramatic rise in single men pursuing this route since then,” says Gamble – though Dr Jones at King’s College says that her research has revealed an uptick. 
Single men who want to be parents often turn to Cyprus or Belarus to find surrogate mothers, with one Cypriot website – aimed at single men and gay couples in parts of Europe where surrogacy is banned or hard to organise – offering “packages” for just 13,000 Euros. 
Surrogacy “is much more affordable [in Cyprus] than in developed nations,” another website claims. Georgia, too, has been a popular destination for would-be parents from wealthier countries, and now its government has planned to ban commercial surrogacy, allowing it only on altruistic grounds. 
Recently it was reported that a single British man had returned from Cyprus with his surrogate-born child, after months stuck in the country with his newborn son. Primary school teacher Raj Gill, 49, complained that he had been “abandoned” by UK authorities while he waited for his child’s emergency passport to materialise, with his own travel pass about to expire. 
Fathers James and Ian Buckley-Walker encountered the same situation in Cyprus a year ago. When no passport was issued for their new son Henry, they blamed the “insane incompetence” of the passport office. 
They complain that the law is yet to catch up with the fact that single men can now much more easily pursue fatherhood in this way. Not everyone, however, believes that it should. 
“The checks on single men undertaking surrogacy are not remotely comparable to those we see in cases of adoption,” says Helen Gibson of campaign group Surrogacy Concern. 
“This situation is even more concerning when you consider the poverty which most surrogate mothers live in, the fact that commercial surrogacy is illegal in this country, and that these children almost certainly will not see their mothers, or egg donors, again,” Gibson adds. 
She and her group would like to see the Government “stop enabling people to pursue surrogacy abroad, and as a minimum to centrally record data on the numbers of British children born through commercial surrogacy arrangements abroad each year”. 
Lawyer Natalie Gamble disagrees, explaining that while “profit-making intermediaries” – firms offering to arrange surrogacy for cash, such as the Cypriot sites – are illegal to operate in this country, “it isn’t illegal to pay a surrogate [herself] more than expenses”.
While Britain lacks a rigorous framework to regulate surrogacy, checks should be carried out “with any parents and should be consistent,” Gamble says. 
“I’m very passionate about the fact that children can thrive no matter their family structure, as long as they are wanted and loved, and this is supported by all the research evidence.” 
Dr Catherine Jones, at Kings’ College, agrees – though given their small numbers there is little research into exactly how being raised by a single father, after being conceived with the help of a surrogate, affects a child’s development.
“Research more broadly across family types shows that what’s crucial is the quality of parenting and family relationships, not the number of parents involved or their gender,” Dr Jones says.
She would expect that single men with surrogate-born children will turn out to be “no different to other family types in that way”, though “we know from donor conception research that if children are told from a young age about how their family started, and their parents’ journey, that this is a good ground for those healthy relationships that are so important”.  
Of course, where children grow up with only a parent who physically could not have given birth to them, there is little avoiding this fact, as father of two Smith knows well. “I’ve been upfront right from the start. It’s just not an issue in our house,” Smith says. 
The boys have met both the woman who carried them and the woman whose eggs were used in Tina’s pregnancy.  
“[The egg donor] visited the UK on holiday when the boys were about 10,” says Smith. “They talked about football. It was a perfectly normal conversation.”
Much has changed in the world outside their home in the 20 years since Paul and David were born, but for this family, the story of their conception has always been the most ordinary thing in the world. 
“I’m a single parent, and many of their friends have single parents,” their father says. “It isn’t a conversation piece. It’s even just boringly normal.”
*Names have been changed