Adam Frisby and Jamie Corbett have launched a UK parliamentary petition calling for surrogacy law reform, and it has raced past 94,000 signatures in little more than a day. The petition was still a few thousand signatures short of the 100,000 mark at which the government must respond.
Frisby and Corbett welcomed their baby girl, Leven, via surrogacy in January, and appeared on ITV’s This Morning on 28 April with the four-month-old. They said the petition, titled “Change surrogacy law to recognise intended parents from birth,” is meant to fix a system that leaves intended parents in legal limbo after a child is born.
The numbers behind the campaign are what have given it force. It drew more than 80,000 signatures in under 24 hours, and by the time of writing it had reached 94,692. Corbett said they would go through the legal process “100 times over,” while Frisby said the couple had already seen how much public feeling the issue can stir.
Their route to parenthood took them to the United States, where Leven was born and where the couple used a woman named Krista as their surrogate through egg donation. Under UK law, the surrogate and, if she is married, her spouse are treated as the child’s legal parents at birth. Intended parents must then secure a parental order before they are recognised in law, a process that usually takes six to 12 months and can involve paperwork, social worker visits and a High Court application.
That gap between being parents in practice and not yet being parents in law is the part Frisby says needs to change. He said intended parents should be recognised from birth, arguing the current system is outdated, and Corbett’s blunt answer to the legal burden was simple: “100 times over.”
The campaign has also been driven by a uglier public reaction. Before Leven was born, the pair shared their surrogacy journey online and say it brought a wave of homophobic abuse. Frisby said there were more than 2,500 comments calling them child abusers and sex traffickers, language that laid bare how personal the debate has become for the couple.
The petition now sits close enough to the government-response threshold that the next milestone is obvious. If it passes 100,000 signatures, ministers will have to address the call to change the law — and for Frisby and Corbett, that would be the first official acknowledgment that their argument has moved well beyond their own family.
