Clare Dyer, legal editor
Wednesday October 31, 2007

A high court judge has issued a stern warning to surrogacy agencies to carry out more stringent background checks after it emerged that a surrogate mother had deliberately duped two couples into believing she had miscarried their babies.

The woman, named only as Mrs P, entered into the surrogacy deals and conceived using sperm from the two fathers with the intention of keeping the two children for herself, the judge ruled. One of the children was nearly four years old when her father learned of her existence.

Mrs P already had three children of her own by different fathers but was motivated by “a compulsive desire to bear further children”, Mr Justice Coleridge said. It was only when her own eldest daughter, 19, blew the whistle to the surrogacy agency, that the two couples learned the miscarriages had never happened.

The judge said surrogacy arrangements were now a feature of contemporary life. “When all goes according to plan they are a way of remedying the agony of childlessness. However, when the arrangements do not go according to plan the result, in human and legal terms is, putting it simply, a mess,” the judge said.

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