On 3rd January 2019, a law was passed in the UK allowing single men to become the legal parents of children conceived through surrogacy.
And there is no legal upper age limit – shockingly, anyone aged 18-99+ can acquire a baby via surrogacy and apply for a parental order, which means the baby is legally theirs and not the woman who carried the baby and gave birth.
In the UK, where commercial surrogacy is banned but international imports are not, between 400 and 500 new surrogate-incubated babies are now registered each year.
Many single and older men are now buying a baby via surrogacy: since 2019, as many as 95 parental orders for surrogacy in England and Wales have been issued to single men. In the past five years, almost 300 men aged 50+ have applied to become the legal father of a surrogate child – and 43 of these are over 60. This summer, a 72-year-old man in Scotland got a parental order for a three-year-old boy born to a surrogate mother in the US in 2020.
And there are shocking examples of men buying babies to satisfy their depraved sexual desires, for example, a man in Australian who abused his surrogate born twin daughters and was subsequently jailed for 22 years. Surrogacy is enabling child abusers to buy babies. You may recall the Baby Gammy scandal back in 2014. David John Farnell, 56, and his wife abandoned their baby son Gammy, who has Down syndrome and a congenital heart condition, leaving him with the Thai surrogate mother. The couple brought Gammy’s healthy twin sister home, but it was later revealed that Mr Farnell has 22 child sex convictions, some going back to his twenties.