The logical conclusion: A child is now officially a commodity
A child is now a commodity that can be purchased, provided the seller lives abroad. Marriage in its proper form – the lifelong union of one man and one woman – is the institution that bound a child to its biological mother and father by design. Loosen that, as Parliament did with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, and you produce the market British family law confirmed last week.
The Times reported on Monday that single British men are “buying babies” from women in poverty overseas. Last Friday, Coram Chambers – a leading family law set – published a practitioner note confirming that section 54(8) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 – the statutory restriction on commercial surrogacy – is being bypassed in practice. Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees every child the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents. The British courts have just told us this right does not stand.
Section 54A of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 opened the parental-order route to single applicants in 2019. Between 2019 and 2025, 130 single men applied for parental orders for babies born abroad; while 23 applied for babies born to surrogate mothers in the UK.
In Mexico City, a British agency called My Surrogacy Journey pays Mexican women around twelve thousand pounds to carry a stranger’s child to term and hand it over at birth. Mexican women on average earn less than three hundred pounds a month. Surrogate carriers suffer severe maternal morbidity at 7.8 per cent, more than three times the normal rate of 2.3 per cent. Poor women take the medical risk. British buyers take the child.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 had already given same-sex couples legal recognition. The 2013 redefinition did something else: it removed the man-woman frame from the institution that, by design, kept a child connected to its biological mother and father. Once the frame is gone, ‘parenthood’ inevitably becomes a transaction and the child a product. The single gay man flying home with a baby commissioned in Mexico is the logical end of the change Parliament made in 2013.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women called in October 2025 for a global abolitionist framework on surrogacy, labelling it “violence, exploitation and abuse”. Thirteen UK feminist organisations wrote to ministers in early 2025 demanding criminalisation. Libby Purves in The Times last month wrote that “a world which once shuddered at the idea that you could buy a baby off a total stranger has pretty much accepted it”.
Baroness Merron told the Law Commission in April 2025 that the Government is “unable to prioritise surrogacy reform”. Where the Government will not act, the case is left for us to make. Coalition for Marriage was founded in 2012 to defend marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman. It is that which protects a child’s right to his or her own mother and father.
Without that definition, children become commodities, biology is relegated to paperwork, and the State becomes the arbiter of all. If you believe the child comes first, you must agree the definition of marriage needs to be restored. Nothing less will protect children.