4 Legal Questions to Settle Before Choosing a Country

Most bad advice about surrogacy law comes from collapsing four separate questions into one. Someone says a country “allows surrogacy”, and you hear that your plan will work there.

The four questions are distinct, they have different answers, and each one can independently end a plan:

1. Is the arrangement enforceable where it is signed?
2. Who is the legal parent at birth, and how does that change?
3. Who may commission a surrogacy in that system?
4. What may be paid, and to whom?

Then a fifth question, which is not the destination’s law at all: what will your own country recognise?

One. Enforceability

An arrangement can be lawful and still unenforceable. Those are different things, and the difference decides what happens when someone changes their mind.

In England and Wales, HFEA states that a written arrangement may be made but will not be legally binding, and the Law Commission’s reform proposals keep arrangements unenforceable while proposing a route to a parental order. In the United States, there is no federal framework, and each state sets its own rules. The variation is not a matter of degree: academic review records that in Indiana and Nebraska gestational carrier contracts are unenforceable and against public policy, and that Arizona residents are prohibited from entering into them, while ASRM’s state survey lists 21 states where gestational surrogacy is expressly permitted by statute and other states with no statutes or published case law either way.

In Colombia, the Constitutional Court’s 2009 decision T-968 records that there is no express prohibition in the legal order. That is a long way from a framework, and the decision itself concerns custody and contact for children born through an arrangement.

Ask: is the agreement enforceable in this specific jurisdiction, and if not, what does each party actually rely on?

Two. Parentage at birth

The most consequential rule, and the least intuitive. In the United Kingdom, the surrogate is the legal mother at birth unless a parental order is obtained, and the intended parents must wait until the child is born and then apply to court for an order making them the legal parents, a process the Commission describes as typically taking six months to a year.

In the United States the answer depends on the state, and on whether a pre-birth order is available there. In Canada, the verified federal rules govern reimbursement rather than parentage, which is a matter of provincial and territorial law; there is no national rule that decides it.

Ask: who is the legal parent at the moment of birth, what document changes that, from whom, and how long does it take?

Three. Eligibility

Who may commission an arrangement is set explicitly in some systems and by practice in others, and the criteria that recur are genetic connection, marital or relationship status, and residency or citizenship.

ASRM’s state survey records, for example, that Louisiana restricts surrogacy agreements to married heterosexual genetic intended parents. UK material describes eligibility for a parental order as set by legislation, so the criteria applied to you are the ones written into the statute.

Eligibility turns on facts about you, not on the plan alone. Two people with the same plan in the same state can get different answers.

Ask: does a lawyer admitted in this jurisdiction think I qualify, on these facts, in writing?

Four. What may be paid

Payment rules vary from “negotiated between parties” to criminal prohibition, and they sit inside the enforceability question rather than beside it.

• United Kingdom. Only the surrogate’s reasonable expenses may be paid. Paying anything more must be authorised by the family court before a parental order can be made, and advertising for, or as, a surrogate is illegal under the Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985.
• Canada. A reimbursement model. Under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act regulations, expenditures incurred by a surrogate mother in relation to her surrogacy may be reimbursed, and Health Canada’s guidance enumerates them, requires receipts, and requires records to be kept for six years.
• United States. No federal rule; what may be paid is settled state by state.
• Greece. Surrogacy requires a prior court decision under Civil Code article 1458, applied through article 13 of Law 3305/2005, and the arrangement is altruistic by statute: the agreement for a third woman to carry must be made without any consideration, while the costs of achieving the pregnancy, of carrying, giving birth and the postnatal period, and the carrier’s lost earnings, are expressly not consideration, with the amounts set by the independent regulator. Since Law 5197/2025 (16 May 2025) both the intending parents and the surrogate must hold permanent residence in Greece. The Greece page cites each of these to its source: the 2005 provisions come from the gazette text itself, while the 2025 amendment is so far recorded from corroborating law-firm accounts, so its exact wording and any transitional provisions remain unconfirmed.

Ask: what may lawfully be paid here, to whom, on what documentation, and what does a court do about it afterwards?

Five. Recognition where you live

This is where cross-border plans fail most often. A couple may be permitted to commission a surrogacy in one country and still face an unresolved question about whether the child’s parentage, birth registration or passport will be recognised at home.

No destination record answers this question, because it is about the country you are returning to. A provider who answers it confidently without being a lawyer there is not giving you information. It is giving you reassurance.

How to use the destination pages

The destination pages carry the first four of these, and whatever a source has published about cost, for eight jurisdictions: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Each record names the source behind every position and says what remains unverified; for Colombia, that the newest decision it rests on is dated 18 April 2024, and that later legislative developments could not be confirmed.

That has a consequence you should expect. A short list of destinations is not a statement that other countries are closed to you. It means the law of those places has not been read against its sources by anyone in a position to tell you what it says.

What no published guide can settle

What is here is not legal advice, and it creates no professional relationship. Whether a rule reaches your plan turns on facts about you that no guide can hold, which is why that part belongs to a lawyer admitted in the jurisdiction, answering in writing.