Issue 52: Outlawed
Saturday June 08 2019
We’re being super-productive during this two-week wait. Ticking off our surrogacy process checklist boxes, because it’s at this point that we need to think about the blinking law again.
Our US attorney, Carla, put us in touch with a London law firm to handle the UK side of things. We do some googling (ooh, fancy offices!), we make an appointment, we get off the train and amble down the street to the meeting hand in hand and I say this: “Funny that we’re going to a fancy law firm when all they have to do is a bit of red tape, eh?”
Mr B agrees, but it seems there isn’t a huge pool of surrogacy lawyers in the British legal system, so this seems OK. “Just don’t get carried away and start thinking we need the top dogs just ‘cos they’ve got a nice office’.”
And that’s the last time I remember smiling that day.
Having never been to a lawyer in my adult life, I am pretty much 100 per cent naive. We wait in the enormous waiting room (that is bigger than the entire footprint of my house) until we are collected and steered into another room four times the size, where we sit at a humongous executive desk opposite three people, Apprentice-style, and feel tiny.
I am all wide-eyed naivety and wonder, trying to give off an air of sophisticated grown-upness; in the same way you NEVER gasp out loud at a price tag in Celine, even though internally you’re gasping to the point of expiration.
The lawyer we are meeting, whom we’ll call Theresa, begins, head tilted, asking us how we met, with a deeply sensitive expression. She wants details. At this point I’m struggling to understand why this is important and chastise Mr B for waffling. He is definitely one for too much sentimental detail.
“No, no” Theresa gently chastises me in return, “it’s vitally important we make a really strong case for your relationship to the high court. We need to convince them that you’re a solid parental unit, so intricate details are imperative.”
Holy what now? Strong case? High court? WTF? We just need to change some names on a birth certificate in nine months or so, no?
When we joined our American agency, there was a tiny touch upon the subject of a UK lawyer at the end to formalise our parental responsibility once we got home. When we were appointed our first US attorney she reiterated it once; we’d need a parental order in England, but no one ever went into any more detail. We mentally squirrelled a budget of a couple of grand on the Surrogacy Spreadsheet and didn’t think of it again, until now.
Theresa sees me floundering, looks painfully sympathetic and continues: “It’s so lucky you came to us at this point because many intended parents leave it too late. We need to get you an immigration lawyer immediately to advise on how best to bring your baby safely into this country. You’ll need to be in the States for two to three months to get everything in order, if you don’t do it properly, they could take your baby away at border control.”
We’ve been in the room for about ten minutes and it is already spinning. Three months is vastly different to the two weeks we were advised by our agency. We have lives! We have jobs! And cats! And an ever-decreasing source of limited funds! I immediately start crying. Ahh yes, it’s panic, hello old friend.
The conversation went on like this for two more hours. I remember thinking I must have been very well hydrated because my tears got fatter and faster the whole time.
We basically established that in doing this commercial process in the US, to escape our own archaic laws, we are flouting those laws as British citizens. Want to come back home and be parents here? You’ve got to convince the High Court that what you did was OK. That takes up to a year, around three court appearances, reams of paperwork, a specialist QC, a specialist family lawyer, an immigration lawyer and a partridge in a pear tree. Solid gold. With a diamond encrusted collar.
Theresa finished with the kicker to end all kickers. In response to Mr B’s throat-clearing, grown-up, Celine-store price inquiry: “You two have been through hell. It’s not fair, you’ve been treated appallingly and it’s time someone looked after you properly. I want to be that person, you need hand-holding. That level of service will cost in the region of £50,000... plus VAT.”
If I was crying before, I’m not sure what to call the snivelling mess I was in by the time I left Theresa’s office.
We stood outside bereft, utterly convinced we needed this level of specialist care and utterly desolate that we could in no way afford it. Now what? We were stuck. Basically tricked into a surrogacy journey we were never going to be able to complete.
It was only once I got home and called my mum that the anger set in. “Darling, if they were taking babies away from people at the borders, we would have heard about it by now. How does anyone else manage to do international surrogacy? She was scaremongering.”
And my mum is right. Surely we can’t be the first IPs in the world to have the rug pulled from under their feet this far down the line? There are countless numbers of international surrogacy successes that don’t get stuck on this part of the story.
It’s true that the parental order process is exponentially more difficult this way round, because we’re also trying to repatriate a whole new person too. It’s true that the high court needs to hear your case, and therefore, because of all this extra red tape, it will cost thousands of pounds versus the £125 it costs to obtain a DIY parental order in the case of a UK surrogacy arrangement. It’s true you need a lawyer and a specialised one at that, but you definitely don’t need to be scared into investing in the top. You should be able to make that decision based on your finances, not your fear factor.
Help! SOS! Heeeeeelp!
Mercifully we were sent help in the form of a second opinion. (Moral of the story, always get a second opinion.) Vardags is a family law firm with a track record in fertility and surrogacy law. It confirmed that, while it is going to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be quite that expensive. Owner Ayesha Vardag says the problem often arises this far down the line because there is a huge difficulty in the disparity between the laws around surrogacy in our two countries that no one talks about. No one. Understandably not the US agencies who recruit international clients because a) they might not know, or b) they don’t want to put their prospective clients off. Nor the US lawyers who are so specialised in their individual state, they don’t know the law in the next state along, let alone a whole other continent. Ayesha is going to help us for a fraction of the cost. In fact, she wants to lead a campaign to get the laws changed.
If our fertility luck is out, I think our law-firm luck is definitely in; this is a lifeline. The next stage is pregnancy test results day, when we hopefully find out just how difficult this legal issue will become, but we know we are now in safe hands, and something has got to change so more people don’t suffer this experience. So I’m going to try and change it. Phew! Now I just need to get pregnant...