A Queensland woman gave birth to twin children with separate sets of biological parents last year, in what is believed to be an Australian first situation so rare it had not been contemplated by state surrogacy laws.
The woman, anonymised in a court judgment, conceived an unplanned natural pregnancy about the same time as she received an IVF embryo transfer under a surrogacy arrangement with another couple.
Both children were born on the same day in November 2025 via caesarean section. There has been no dispute about the children’s parentage – both have been raised separately during the past 10 months by their respective biological parents.
But the situation has required a complex case in the Queensland children’s court because surrogacy rules were written to ban situations where “birth siblings” born from surrogate pregnancies were separated.
The court ultimately ruled that while the children were “gestational twins”, they were not birth siblings for the purpose of surrogacy laws, and made an order that formalised the parentage of the biological parents.
This is yet another example – if ever any more were needed – of why surrogacy is so unmindful of children’s rights. Putting women’s rights to one side – although of course women’s rights are used and abused here – children have a right not to be bought and sold. Call it all you like ‘altruistic’ but is it altruistic to buy and sell children? Not according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Palermo Convention and Slavery UN provisions outlaw it. Yet the trade in children goes on and on and on and on. Okay, both sets of parents to whom the children are given (sic) say the will ensure that contact remains between the children – there is at least a recognition that whatever the DNA composition, embryos/fetuses and the resultant babies/children born, having shared the same uterus and the woman’s body having nurtured their growth and development, these are ‘twins’ and hence have communication with one another throughout the gestation period and that has meaning! But will that be so in all such cases? And why should it have to be so? If surrogacy (the buying and selling of children) were not allowed, the situation would not arise. The shocking ignorance and cavalier attitude displayed in this trade in children is unfathomable.