An incredibly disturbing report in the Mail on Sunday reveals, once again, the dangers of surrogacy and the social chaos that results from the commodification of children and the redefinition of the family.
Almost 300 men aged over 50 have applied to become the legal father of a surrogate child over the past five years – and 43 of them are over 60, new figures reveal. And a total of 95 single men applied to become a parent, reflecting a growing trend in men, especially older men, having babies alone with the help of surrogates. Since the law changed in 2019 to give single people the same surrogacy rights as couple, there have been 2,162 applications from intended parents in England. A total of 293 would-be fathers are over 50, both solo and in couples, according to figures released following a Freedom of Information Act application from The Mail on Sunday.
Think about that hard for a moment: single, middle-aged men are renting women to gestate the children they have purchased and then becoming the legal, single parents of those children. As chair of the Women’s Policy Centre Paola Diana stated in response to the news:
Single men over 60 are increasingly applying to have children with help from surrogates since law change. This should be highly concerning. Who is checking that those men are not paedophiles? No one. That’s one of the many problems of surrogacy.
The LGBT movement has long fought for the right to utilize IVF and surrogacy in order to acquire the children that they cannot conceive naturally – organizations such as the high profile activist group “Men Having Babies,” which states on its website:
Central to our fight for more equitable access to parenting options is what we know from our combined experiences: The anguish and yearning that same-sex couples and singles feel due to their inability to reproduce without medical intervention is equal to the anguish of heterosexual couples who suffer from “medical infertility.”
The first time I covered the group “Men Having Babies” which, among other things, seeks to redefine “infertility” as not a medical condition but merely the state of childlessness, I missed that very significant phrase: “and singles.”
The LGBT movement has successfully won the battle for public opinion on the issue of same-sex couples raising children (either motherless or fatherless) – but I suspect that many folks would be uncomfortable with the idea of middle-aged, single men being able to acquire children without background checks (which are required for adoption or foster care) or any real hoops whatsoever beyond the ability to write a big enough cheque.
The Daily Mail noted that the use of surrogacy by the wealthy has risen, and that in June, a “72-year-old man was granted permission in Scotland to become the legal father of a three-year-old boy, born to a surrogate, despite the death of his wife.” Commenting on these latest stats, which were obtained by the Mail from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, family law expert Louisa Ghevaert stated:
The numbers of single men and men over 50 applying for parental orders reflects wider trends in solo and later-life parenting that are set to continue … there’s no legal upper age limit for a parental order.
Alan White of Surrogacy UK also defended the trend, stating: “As a society, perhaps we’re more used to considering maternal instinct than we are paternal instinct, but the desire to become a parent can be strong whether you’re a man or a woman.”
Helen Gibson of Surrogacy Concern, on the other hand, was horrified. “We are appalled to see such high numbers of single men and older men pursuing surrogacy, often abroad and in commercial arrangements which are banned in the U.K.,” she told the Mail. “This is a worrying trend in which mothers are erased from the lives of their children.” (Indeed, a surrogate mother recently won access to her biological son in a landmark case establishing her relationship with her son – while the gay couple with custody of the boy insisted that it was “homophobic” for her to be involved in their “motherless family” and insisted that he was being raised “in the LGBT community.”)
It bears noting that last June, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected appeals from Italian couples – many of them homosexual – challenging Italy’s ban on surrogacy, which was presented by the media as “target[ing]” homosexual men “who use it to have children.”This campaign did not succeed. On April 23, the European Parliament voted to add, as a minimum, the practice of surrogacy to their legal definition of human trafficking. The vote wasn’t even close: 563 in favour, seven against, and 17 abstentions.
