by Helen Gibson, Artillery Row
We are already endangering women and girls
Last month, a petition calling for commissioning parents of surrogate born children to be awarded parental rights at birth reached over 100,000 signatories, meaning the petition will likely be debated in the House of Commons. The petition was launched by a fashion entrepreneur, Adam Frisby, and his partner Jamie Corbett, both of whom enjoy large TikTok and Instagram followings.
British citizens Frisby and Corbett pursued commercial surrogacy in the United States, in arrangements which would not be legally recognised or enforceable if undertaken here. Despite knowing in advance such arrangements would require scrutiny and sign-off by the courts of England and Wales on their return to the UK with their surrogate born daughter, last month they took to the TV screens to plead their case, to gain parental rights at birth, to the British public.
In a ten-minute segment on ITV’s This Morning, during which Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard cooed over Frisby and Corbett’s baby daughter and did not make any attempt at balancing the discussion of surrogacy, the pair lamented the process they needed to go through to get legal parental rights for their daughter. Namely, applying for a parental order, receiving a visit from a CAFCASS appointed social worker, and filling in paperwork to be submitted to the High Court.
A parental order transfers legal parenthood of a child from his or her mother, and her husband if she is married, to the commissioning parent(s). Parental orders are long established, and were first introduced in the HFEA Act of 1990, with parental orders for international surrogacy first being ratified by the courts in 2008. Regulations have changed in recent years to enable same-sex and unmarried couples to apply, and in 2019 single people were allowed to apply for parental orders for the first time. Since 2019, 170 single men have done so.