Gay couple seek partial refund if surrogate has a girl

Two gay men have been made the legal parents of a boy, born as part of an illegal surrogacy arrangement involving sex selection.

The couple, referred to as D and C, currently live abroad but plan to return to the UK. D, who is a British citizen, was born in China. The men paid nearly £93,000 to a woman in a rural Chinese village to be a surrogate. They used genetic testing to prioritise the implantation of male embryos and asked for a “partial refund if a male child was not born”.

Despite surrogacy being illegal in China, and the UK banning surrogacy payments beyond reasonable expenses, a British family court ruled that a parental order was in the 20-month-old child’s “best interests”.

‘Profoundly troubling’

Mr Justice MacDonald “strongly” criticised D and C’s actions and said that authorising the commercial surrogacy payments should not be viewed as “a licence to engage in unlawful commercial surrogacy arrangements abroad”.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Lexi Ellingworth of Stop Surrogacy Now warned that the case “raises profoundly troubling questions of surrogacy here in the UK.

“It is difficult to think of anything more regressive than turning the creation of a child into a transaction in which the child’s sex can determine whether money is refunded or not. Yet these are precisely the kinds of practices that people can access abroad despite being prohibited here.”

Hundreds of children

Earlier this year, it was reported that a Chinese billionaire had allegedly bought hundreds of babies through surrogacy.

The video game developer Xu Bo is said to have over 100 children, although an ex-girlfriend claims the figure was closer to 300. One of the surrogate mothers hired by Bo said she was told he was using more than 20 surrogates simultaneously.

While commercial surrogacy is banned in the UK, purchasing a baby abroad is permitted. Between 2014 and 2023, more than half of intended parents using surrogacy travelled overseas to acquire a child.