The Guardian reports on the challenges of COVID-19 for international surrogacy
The Guardian has quoted our director Natalie Gamble in a piece about the challenges the global pandemic is creating for UK parents having babies through surrogacy in the USA. Nicole Mowbray, writing about her own US surrogacy journey, has talked about the effect of shutdowns and travel restrictions. She says:
“Natalie Gamble is arguably the UK’s most revered fertility lawyer and campaigns for law change around the practice in the UK. She has never had so many urgent cases as in the last six weeks. She tells a story of a British couple whose baby was recently born in America with a surrogate, but the passport office closed the night before their appointment. “I wrote to the home secretary and got MPs on board, trying to get the UK government to issue British passports to babies stuck overseas. This process used to take six months,” she says. “Now it’s a week.”
As well as parents struggling to bring babies home, Gamble is helping parents who can’t travel. “For the US, we now have a system involving the embassy in London granting special entry, but the timing is managed meticulously. Intended parents must not leave it too late. There is the application process to do, paperwork to get in order, flights to find and quarantining on arrival.”
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