In UK gay couple win court battle for custody of baby over surrogate mother

06.05.2015

A gay couple have won the custody of a baby girl conceived by a surrogate mother.

According to BBC, in a decision passed by the High Court earlier this year and just published, the child will live with her father and his partner rather than her mother.

The dispute centred on the initial agreement between the parties, with the men insisting the woman was enlisted as a surrogate for the couple, using the man's sperm, while the woman said they had agreed for her to be the main parent.

The judge decided that the pregnancy was a result of a same-sex couple aiming for a family with the assistance of a friend, and so the daughter should live with the two men and spend time with the woman from time to time to coincide with "the reality of her conception" and her "identity and place within her family."

The little girl just turned one this year.

Judge Justice Russell added that the woman was "disruptive" during the men's evidence, pausing proceedings to express breast milk, and that she "tried to minimise the role that the father had in the child's life." "Far from being a child that she conceived with her good friend, as she describes it, her actions have always been of a woman determined to treat the child as solely her own," she said.

Russell added that the woman used "offensive language," including "stereotypical images and descriptions of gay men" and she had "insinuated that gay men in same-sex relationships behave in a sexually disinhibited manner".

Each year in the UK some 2,000 children are born to surrogate mothers, there are no special laws covering arrangements, Although some 2,000 children are born to surrogate mothers each year in the UK, there are no special laws covering arrangements, the Guardian reports. The woman who gives birth is considered the mother, and the father is not recognised until he's on the birth certificate, unless married to the mother.

Natalie Gamble, a solicitor specialising in surrogacy law who represented the two fathers, told in the interview that these kinds of cases are rare. However, she added that the "informality of surrogacy law in the UK" is "driving parents overseas and that brings all kinds of other problems."

Gamble said that the UK could look stateside for inspiration. “In California, for example, there is a very clear structure for people at the outset of an arrangement,” she said. “Everybody entering into a surrogacy arrangement has psychological screening, legal advice, medical advice and support to think through all the issues and enter into a very clear contract.”

Based on: BBC