Ms Natalie Gamble:

Yes. The parental order process is quite a lengthy one and it does to some extent require the parents to be in the UK. What happens in international surrogacy arrangements is that a person must deal with the immigration side of things while he or she is in that limbo point before he or she has got secure parenthood. It is, therefore, incredibly complicated. It depends on the jurisdiction, who has got what kind of British nationality and whether the surrogate is married or not. Essentially, there needs to be an immigration plan in each case.

With American cases, typically, parents will apply for an American passport and use that to travel into the UK. They then get the parental order and then once the parental order has been granted, they will apply for the British passport. In places like Ukraine and Georgia, people do not get a local passport so they have to apply for the British passport. That often means children are stuck overseas, sometimes for three or four months, while those immigration processes are sorted. The passport has to go through this very complex process of trying to work out whether this child is actually British or not, and, if he or she is not, granting British nationality in order that the parents can come home to complete the parental order application. One of the reasons we are advocating for some kind of pre-birth model for international cases is because this is just so complicated and difficult. It is to the detriment of newborn children that their parents are stuck in a jurisdiction where they do not have support networks or access to healthcare and the NHS and all the rest of it. The way the two things interact are really complicated.