(LifeSiteNews) — With renewed moves to liberalize surrogacy in the UK narrowly averted – for now – LifeSiteNews spoke to Lexi Ellingsworth about her six-year campaign to stop surrogacy worldwide.
Ellingsworth runs StopSurrogacyNowUK not only to counter the further legalization of the “international trade in babies” – but in pursuit of a global ban. So how big is this problem? If it is not stopped:
“By 2030 predictions state that the global surrogacy trade alone will be worth close to $130 billion.” This is what Ellingsworth gave in evidence to the UK Parliament in March 2024 but since then the price has gone up even further. Market predictions now place the global industry at $194 billion by 2034.
How has this come about? Ellingsworth explains:
“Through the commercialization of Assisted Reproductive Therapy (IVF) and relaxed laws, the surrogacy market constitutes an international trade in babies.”
This feeder industry is one of several, providing additional revenue streams in the reduction of human life to a consumer product.
“There are obvious connections with the global trade in human eggs, and to a lesser extent, sperm donation operating around the world and involving thousands of children every year.”
Ellingsworth acted to counter moves backed by the profitable surrogacy industry to liberalize surrogacy laws in the UK and explains why a worldwide ban is urgently needed to protect the value of human life – to stop the baby trade which erases mothers in its multi-billion-dollar business.
Life as consumer product
In her interview with LifeSiteNews, Ellingsworth says surrogacy is not only about the sale of babies. It is an example of the replacement of the value of human life by a “transactional” consumer culture, which reduces everything of value in life – including the value of life itself – to a special offer.
In this business transaction the customer has all the rights, and – as Ellingsworth points out – the mothers of the babies mere “vessels” – “wombs for rent.”
They are not even called “mothers,” but “surrogates” – by the agencies marketing the babies they birth for sale. What is more, Ellingsworth points out these agencies cater internationally for the demand they supply, allowing UK residents to legally buy babies abroad, through giving financial incentives still prohibited in the UK.
UK law permits international baby sales
Paying women directly to have babies and sell them is called “commercial surrogacy.” Whilst legal in many US states, it is not permitted by UK law.
As Ellingsworth’s work points out, however:
“Commercial surrogacy practices are banned in the UK, but there is no law to stop British citizens undertaking commercial surrogacy abroad before bringing a child back to this country.”
This means that UK residents – including single people and couples – can legally buy babies abroad in places like Mexico, Colombia and Ukraine.
UK child sex offender buys baby
Ellingsworth noted one case in her report of a convicted child sex offender buying a baby.
This horrific case, heard in court in 2021, involved two British men who traveled from the UK to Colombia in order to arrange a surrogacy.
One of the “intended parents” – a male homosexual couple – was a convicted sex offender. His sperm was used to fertilize a donated egg through IVF and the genetic relationship with the baby meant that he could apply for a parental order under UK law. The UK court recorded:
Following successful embryo transfer, EF [the Colombian ‘surrogate’ mother] became pregnant with twins.
Sadly, both twins were born prematurely on 14 December 2019, and one twin, Y, died at birth.
Z [the surviving twin] spent the first weeks of her life on the neonatal intensive care unit in Bogota, Colombia.
One man then went to Thailand, where he worked – the other attempted to smuggle the surviving baby into the UK. The court heard:
On arrival in the United Kingdom, it appeared to Border Forces at the airport that CD [the convicted child sex offender] had tried to conceal Z [the baby] under his jacket, and that he did not appear to have the appropriate documents for her.
It also transpired that he had convictions for sexual offenses against children, and he was said to have provided misleading information to Border Force officials about his and Z’s onward travel.
The court later ruled that the “biological father” – a convicted pedophile – could legally take the baby to join his “partner” in Thailand. The judge said:
“I approved the plan for Z to return with CD to Thailand. They returned there and, after a period of self-isolation, the family was reunited.”
This is how the law in the UK treats homosexual pedophiles who buy babies abroad. The case was put to UK lawmakers in 2024 by Ellingsworth – as evidence of the reality of the international trade in human life – yet the UK government seemed set to proceed with liberalizing surrogacy laws regardless.
The UK Law Commission’s 2023 report recommended liberalizing the law in a paper titled “Building Families Through Surrogacy.”
Easier UK surrogacy ‘postponed’
Ellingsworth welcomed the fact the reforms were not introduced this year – but warns they have merely been postponed.
This letter from April 2025 said the UK government was “unable to prioritize surrogacy reform” and does not intend “to put forward these legislative proposals at the current time” – it said making surrogacy easier in the UK would be considered again.
The UK Under-Secretary for Health said:
“We will publish a government response as time allows and will look to consider this issue in the future.”
This news has travelled to France.
“In the UK, despite the Law Commission finding that surrogacy laws are “not fit for purpose”, the government has pushed back against the proposed changes.”https://t.co/Z5e41MKD1T@CasaDeclaration @CIAMS_Coalition https://t.co/N5MbJoUyGi
— StopSurrogacyNowUK (@WombsNotForRent) May 11, 2025
A decades-old trade in the US
This trade has been going on for decades, with US-based Surrogate Mothers Inc. founded in 1984. CEO Steve Litz boasts it has “never discriminated against any clients on race, marital status, or sexual orientation.” His is not the only decades-old baby business either.
In the UK a “millionaire gay couple” were “condemned” in 1999 “for fathering twins using IVF and a surrogate mother from the US.”
They used a Los Angeles-based agency called Growing Generations “which exclusively works for gay clients,” said reports, noting there were “fewer restrictions in the US on gay men and lesbians seeking help to have children.”
Today Growing Generations has established itself “over nearly three decades” of supplying demand for babies to homosexuals as “the gold standard surrogacy agency.”
Yet this gold standard comes at a price, with costs ranging from $200,000 to half a million. A better bargain can be found in Mexico, as this report from Spain’s El Pais noted in 2015.
Two male homosexual “intended parents” were “stranded in Mexico” – having traveled there because “it is illegal for couples to have children via surrogates in Spain.”
Yet the law permits the babies to be bought and naturalized – if one buyer, regardless of their sexual “identity,” is the biological parent of the child.
Agency falsified birth certificates
The men could not secure passports for the surrogate IVF twins they had bought, despite filling out the requisite documents. El Pais said:
“The part of the form where the mother should have appeared was left blank.”
The Spanish authorities said no passports could be issued in the absence of the name of the birth mother. The gay men who bought the babies said, “But that is not going to happen.”
“We are the parents – we are not going to lie.”
In this case from ten years ago the surrogacy agency which arranged this transaction falsified birth certificates for both twins – as part of its “service.”
There are no reports on what happened to these twins, or where they were raised. Like the surrogate mother herself, there is simply a blank space.
$12,000 – the cut-price of life
Today women in Mexico can be paid as little as $12,000 to birth babies for sale. Ellingsworth says that this international trade is also permitted by countries such as the UK which prohibit “commercial surrogacy” – directly paying women to have babies.
This means that anyone can approach women overseas and pay them to have and sell babies. Market values mean prices remain competitive, despite the Ukraine war placing a brake on that nation’s formerly world-leading surrogacy market.
The trade in babies continues in Ukraine to this day, of course, and business is booming elsewhere.
World Center of Baby, one of many agencies offering babies for sale to “LGBTQ” buyers, says the lower price of life outside the North American market remains attractive, and that “gay-trans parenting” can be purchased at bargain rates overseas:
“The cost is significantly lower in countries like Mexico, Cyprus and Colombia, which ranges between $70-90K making more affordable options for LGBT+ couples who wish to become parents via surrogacy.”
Reverse of trans cult a model for victory
Though the EU condemned surrogacy in 2015, its business model continues to grow. Yet opposition to the sale of babies is growing – and recent victories show this battle can be won.
Feminist action in the UK has mobilized overwhelming opposition to the “transgender” cult – resulting in a Supreme Court decision which legally defines men as men, and women as women.
As Ellingsworth says in this interview, Britain is now known as “TERF Island” by the pro-trans faction – a slur referring to women who insist on excluding men dressed as themselves from women’s toilets, changing rooms and other single-sex spaces. The term is now used as a badge of honor by jubilant women – and other pro-sanity campaigners.
The tide has turned in World War T, with a US ban on “transgender” troops accompanying the rollback of UK government and corporate partnerships with pro-trans advocacy groups like Stonewall.
Stop surrogacy – worldwide
Ellingsworth points to this victory as an inspiration for her campaign – to stop surrogacy not only in the UK – but worldwide. Her X (formerly Twitter) tag reads “Wombs Not for Rent” – and her timeline documents the horror of this dehumanizing trade.
This is another issue on which pro-life Catholics and Christians can agree on with radical feminists. The reduction of human life to a business transaction has been made possible by the technology of IVF and the machinery of liberal consumerism. In January 2024 Pope Francis called for a global ban on surrogacy, condemning the “deplorable practice of so-called surrogate motherhood,” saying “a child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.” And yet liberal laws have permitted precisely this – and other replacements.
Mother is replaced by “surrogate,” just as women were with men. These attacks on the essential basis and value of human life are, as Jennifer Bilek has noted, partners in crimes against the very “nature of humanity, and are powering progress towards a nightmare transhuman future enabled by technology.”
READ: New book written by feminist exposes who is really behind the transgender agenda
This legal trafficking in human life is an industry of grave moral evil which reduces it to a product to be consumed – by anyone who can pay.
Though the UK government stepped back from liberalizing the domestic baby trade, the international market it remains open to anyone with a bank account and an internet connection. This transactional machine can be put into reverse, and Ellingsworth explains today how and why this trade should be banned. It is for the good of all women and children, and for the cause of the value and not the price of human life.
Lexi Ellingsworth has run her campaign to end surrogacy without financial sponsorship but with support from similar organizations such as Surrogacy Concern and the Casablanca Declaration. You can follow her campaign here.
International efforts to end “gestation for others” are underway following the Casablanca Declaration of 2023.
