Professor Nick Hopkins discusses the Law Commissions’ consultation on surrogacy & what happens next
Earlier this month, the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission published our joint consultation paper on reforming surrogacy laws. In the paper, ‘Building families through surrogacy: a new law’, we have made a range of provisional proposals and asked a series of questions. The responses that we receive will inform our final recommendations to make surrogacy law fit for the 21st century.
In recent years, surrogacy has become more common. While the exact number of surrogate births that take place each year is not clear, between the mid-2000s and now there appears to have been an approximate ten-fold increase in the number of children born this way. As it has become more popular, the number of calls to reform the system of surrogacy have also increased. The surrogacy project originates from the Law Commission of England and Wales’ Thirteenth Programme of Law Reform and from the Scottish Law Commission’s Tenth Programme of Law Reform.
The laws that regulate surrogacy came into effect in the
