Professor Susan Golombok is a world-renowned researcher and former director of the Centre for Child, Adolescent and Family Research at the University of Cambridge.  For decades, her work has focused on the impact of new family forms on parenting and child development, with a focus on same sex parents and families created through assisted reproductive technologies, including surrogacy.  She recently published an article in PET BioNews titled When research challenges belief: Surrogacy families in the political crossfire where she addresses the worrying trend of anti-surrogacy campaigns misinterpreting surrogacy research for their own biased agendas.

In the 1990s, Professor Golombok initiated what was to become a 20-year longitudinal study of families formed through surrogacy.  The study findings have been published in multiple leading peer-reviewed journals, and the overall conclusion supports largely positive outcomes for intended parents, their children, and the surrogates. This seminal study has been leveraged by the 2023 Law Commission proposal to modernize UK surrogacy law and designate intended parents as the legal parents at birth.

Unfortunately, Professor Golombok believes that evidence-based discussions and policy decisions around surrogacy may have ended.

The last few years have produced the following anti-surrogacy publications:

  • Project 2025 (published in 2023):  A conservative manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that advocates for ‘traditional families’ and restrictions on surrogacy.
  • Vatican report (2024):  Focused on a single person, who expressed that her mental health problems were attributed to being relinquished by her biological mother.
  • Reem Alsalem report to the UN (2025):  Biased use of scientific and medical research to call for a global ban on all surrogacy as violence against women.

Reem’s report has already been challenged by the MIT-funded scientific publication UNDARK.  Professor Golombok writes directly about the misleading account of her own findings in the report:

‘It highlighted one negative result when the children were aged seven, while omitting many positive or neutral findings from repeated, in-depth assessments from infancy through adulthood. By selectively focusing on one isolated result and ignoring the broader pattern, the report created a false impression that children born through surrogacy are psychologically disturbed.’

She also highlights that Reem’s report relies on the completely inaccurate argument that child attachment forms at birth. Professor Golombok states:

‘But attachment does not form at birth, it develops over time and depends on the quality and consistency of early caregiving relationships. This is a basic finding in developmental psychology.’

She continues by criticizing the report’s use of opinion over fact. One author referenced in Reem’s report concluded that there seemed to be ‘little evidence of harmful consequences of surrogacy.’  However, Reem chose to disregard this evidence and rather leveraged the same author’s opinions that separation from the gestational carrier is “inherently damaging” and that a surrogate’s lower level of attachment to the fetus places the child at risk. Neither of these statements are supported by any robust scientific evidence.

Professor Golombok concludes the article by graciously admitting that surrogacy is complicated, individual stories do hold value, and research (including her own) has limitations.  However, she emphasizes that the debate around surrogacy should be based on the accurate interpretation of the available data.  Even if it is limited, the research around surrogacy is a better foundation for policy decisions than any number of opinions unsupported by facts.