There has never been, nor will there ever be, anything quite so special as the love between the mother and a son, so the proverb goes.
But this fundamental bond has been tested in a landmark legal battle in London where a surrogate mother had to fight her child’s same-sex parents through the courts to see him regularly, MailOnline can reveal today.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, won the case after the gay couple for whom she carried the baby for nine months tried to stop her seeing her own biological child and erase her from his life.
The two men claimed that the little boy would be confused if he saw his mother because he lived with them in a ‘motherless family’ and was being raised within the LGBT community.
The couple told her there was ‘no vacancy’ for her ‘just because [he] has same-sex parents’ – even though he was conceived using her egg and carried in her womb.
They also called her homophobic for insisting the little boy recognised her as his mother, accusing her of pursuing an ‘inappropriate relationship’ and arguing that regular contact with her would give him the impression that having same-sex parents made his family incomplete.
In the first case of its kind, the court had to consider whether a step-parent adoption order should be made, extinguishing the ties between the child and the surrogate.
The gay couple’s local authority even supported their case, opposed by the surrogate mother, who was represented by 1GC Family Law led by barrister Janet Bazley KC.
But the British courts have ruled in the surrogate’s favour.
The case was first reported on by feminist writer Julie Bindel in The Critic this week.
‘In the space of a few years the term “motherless” has moved from an emotive description of absence to a positive identity argued for in court’, she wrote.