Professor Susan Golombok:

Thank you very much for inviting me here today. I would like to talk about some research being conducted at the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research on surrogacy. We have conducted four studies in recent years. The first is a longitudinal study of surrogacy families with heterosexual parents. The second is a study of gay-fathered families formed through surrogacy which we conducted in the United States. The third is a longitudinal study of surrogate mothers and their families which was led by my colleague Dr. Vasanti Jadva and the fourth is a study of surrogate mothers in India conducted by my former PhD student, Dr. Nishta Lamba.

In this opening statement I am going to concentrate on the first study but I am very happy to answer questions on the other three. The study focused on surrogacy families with two heterosexual parents. The concerns that have been raised about surrogacy families are several. One is that there is no opportunity for the intended mother to bond with the child. Another is that the surrogate may remain in contact with the family as the child grows up, which can be seen as a good thing in terms of children understanding their origins but could be seen as potentially problematic in terms of undermining the intended mother's feelings of confidence as a parent. A third concern is that surrogacy remains controversial, so that families created in this way are sometimes exposed to disapproval by family, friends and wider society. Perhaps the key question in all of this is the potential psychological harm to children from having been relinquished by the surrogate and whether this is more of an issue if the surrogate is the genetic mother of the child and if money had changed hands. These are some of the concerns that have been raised about families formed through surrogacy. Our study was designed to address these issues and look at what actually happens to children born into these circumstances.

Our longitudinal study involved a representative sample of 42 families formed through surrogacy who were recruited through the Office for National Statistics in the UK, a comparison group of 51 families formed through egg donation to control for the use of third-party assisted reproduction and a further comparison group of 80 families formed through unassisted conception that were matched as closely as possible. The research set out to answer two key questions. First, do surrogacy families differ from either egg-donation or natural-conception families in terms of the quality of relationships between children and the intended parents and the psychological adjustment of the children? We were also interested in how the children themselves feel about being born through surrogacy. The second question we looked at was how the relationship with the surrogate turned out over time. It is often assumed that the intended parents would reject the surrogate once they had the baby.

All of the families had children born in 2000, at the millennium. It was a very in-depth study and we collected data from mothers, fathers, the children themselves and also the children's teachers to gain an independent account of their behaviour at school. We used different methods, such as in-depth interviews, observational assessments of parent-child interaction, questionnaires and also ratings of any emotional behaviours shown by the child. This was done by a child psychiatrist who was unaware of the child's family background.

This study, which is just ending now, was carried out over seven time points, when the child was one, two, three, seven, ten, 14 and finally, just recently, at age 21, when they became young adults. What we found was that in the preschool years, at ages one, two and three, where there were differences between the surrogacy families and the unassisted conception families, these differences reflected more positive parenting in the surrogacy families. The children themselves were very well-adjusted but there was no difference between children in the different family types.

When we followed them up at age seven, we found that practically all of the parents had been open with their children about their birth through surrogacy. There was no difference between the surrogacy families and the unassisted conception families in terms of the quality of children's relationship with their mother. The children themselves were well-adjusted and they were functioning within the normal range. At age seven, they did show higher levels of emotional and behavioural problems than the children in the other family types but these had disappeared by age ten. Interestingly, these findings mirror what is found in research on internationally adopted children. It seems to be that children in these situations become aware of identity issues at an earlier age than other children, which seems to explain this slight increase in problems around the age of seven, when children develop a more sophisticated understanding of the meaning of inheritance and when adopted children understand the more complex nature of adoption.

When they were 14, we found more positive relationships between mothers and their children in surrogacy families, and we found that from data collected independently from mothers and from the teenagers themselves. The adolescents born through surrogacy showed high levels of psychological adjustment. We were also interested in speaking to the children at age 14 about how they felt about being born through surrogacy. They mainly were not very interested and they would say things like “I do not really mind”, “It does not affect my daily life”, “I feel it is just normal” or “I know it is different but I do not get emotional or anything.” Some were actively positive about it and one child said “I feel special and quite privileged really.” Another said “I quite like talking about it because it is an interesting fact about me.”

At age 21, while we have not finished analysing all of the data yet, the young adults said very similar things. To give an example of one that reflects the feelings of the others, this 21-year-old said:

It is not a big deal to me. It seems clear they wanted me as a child as opposed to it being accidental or something like that. I would say it is a positive thing. I'm happy about it. I have always been happy about it.

When we looked at the parent's relationship with the surrogate over time, we followed them up on this issue until the children were ten. They generally reported very positive relationships with the surrogate. The frequency of contact between the family and the surrogate declined over time but by the time the child was ten years old, 60% of the surrogacy families were still in touch with the surrogate. They were most likely to have lost contact with previously unknown surrogates.

In conclusion, the findings of this empirical study of surrogacy families point to positive family relationships and well-adjusted children. Put another way, just because people become parents in non-conventional ways does not make them less capable parents or love their children less. It seems, in fact, the opposite is true, and that those who struggle against the odds to have children become particularly involved and committed parents.

I will not talk about the other studies because of time. I have sent to the committee a document with all of our published academic papers on these topics. Although I am not showing my slides just now, the final slide shows the cover of my recent book, We Are Family, which summarises all of this research and the experiences of the parents, and has a chapter on surrogacy families and also a chapter on surrogate mothers.