Surrogacy is one of the main, newly emerging aspects of family law.
Although the scientific technology has been there for quite some time
the law has been quite slow generally to catch up.
So it is not always as straightforward as people would think
especially if there's international aspects.
A surrogacy arrangement is quite complex legally
and it is one area of law in which there is no substitute for early advice.
Simply to make sure that you can follow
and put in place all of the necessary arrangements to ensure that
you then become the child's legal parents
further down the line because if those steps aren't followed
and if the necessary safegaurds are not put in place it can mean
that the commissioning parents are not able to take legal parenthood
of the child and obviously that creates long-term problems.
In English law a surrogacy arrangement isn't legally binding and it's not legally enforceable
and any form of commercial surrogacy is illegal
and is treated, obviously, as a criminal activity. That's not the case in some other
countries and whilst it is quite common to go over to other countries because
there is a greater supply of
willing surrogates it's very important to ensure that any arrangement that takes
place abroad is not going to fall foul
of regulations and laws here because that means it won't then
be recognised and then placed for a parental order
as people would hope. People often don't realise that the
common sense basis that you would assume would be the arrangements
or in fact the scientific parenthood, genetic material,
often don't translate to who is the legal parent.
So depending where the child's been born and where the arrangements have been made
you can have a situation whereby a child has, for example, no legal parents or
for example four legal parents and often the legal parenthood doesn't follow what
you would necessarily expect
in terms of who's been involved and who's genetic material's been used
and thats the classic example of why it is so important to get advice early on
so that you know where you stand
and also then what steps you need to take in order to make sure that you are the
child's legal parents for the rest of their childhood.