Maternity leave for surrogacy will fail international surrogacy parents unless we act now
Many future parents of children born via surrogacy risk never being able to enjoy the new rights to leave and pay promised in the Children and Families Act...
Director at NGA Law and Brilliant Beginnings
Natalie Gamble is a passionate advocate for LGBT+ parents and families conceived through assisted reproduction. She is the solicitor who, together with the team at NGA Law, has been responsible for most of the cases which have shaped UK surrogacy law over the past 15 years. Natalie, alongside Helen Prosser, founded Brilliant Beginnings, a non-profit professional surrogacy agency based in the UK that supports safe ethical surrogacy in the UK and overseas.
Many future parents of children born via surrogacy risk never being able to enjoy the new rights to leave and pay promised in the Children and Families Act...
by Natalie Gamble and 1 others
The landscape for opportunities to bring up a family through surrogacy and egg donation in the UK has changed - though not as fast as it has internationally. We live in a globalised world in which commercial surrogacy is a reality...
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) voted on 20 March 2013 to update the guidance it gives to UK fertility clinics on surrogacy. It is a welcome decision that will mean better support for the growing numbers of families created through surrogacy in the UK....
Consent requirements for surrogacy were created in 1990 and sought to discourage surrogacy, to make it a perilous undertaking that few would brave. With more experience behind us, we now know that surrogacy is not something to be quite so afraid of...
Indian surrogacy is a hot media topic, with several stories over the past week about couples being stuck in India waiting for British passports for their biological children. As far as we are concerned, this isn't really news — it is the shared experience of every British parent who has had a child through surrogacy in India, and something we deal with on a daily basis....
The family court has been making law on known donors, with a number of recent disputes between known sperm donors and lesbian mothers...
Theresa Erickson, a high profile Californian attorney specialising in assisted reproduction law (self-styled online and in the media as 'the surrogacy lawyer') pleaded guilty last month to charges relating to her involvement in a baby selling scam. The case has sent shock waves through the US assisted reproduction law community, which is reeling at the disgrace of one of its best known members...
More people are crossing borders to build their families than ever before. Prospective parents can easily access information about treatment options in countries where regulations permit treatments outlawed in the UK or where there is little or no regulation at all. But where surrogacy is involved, going abroad raises very difficult legal issues....
A lesbian couple who had conceived a child together through donor insemination at a UK clinic recently ended up in the High Court after their relationship broke down. Their dispute involved a ten-year-old child, and the issue was whether the non-birth mother (who the court had already given legal decision-making status as a parent) should be ordered to make financial provision for her child...
It's tough to get life sorted as a modern woman. Education, work and finances now commonly take women well into their thirties before they decide to start a family, and not everyone manages to find the right partner by the time they get there. It is perhaps not surprising that increasing numbers of women are making the decision to start a family independently...
BioNews, published by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), provides news and comment on genetics, assisted conception, embryo/stem cell research and related areas.