Usurping motherhood

Male entitlement, surrogacy, and the normalisation of reproductive exploitation

Later this year, UK Members of Parliament will discuss a proposal to change the law governing surrogacy that would make it easier for commissioning parents to break the links between children snd their mothers. How this came about is a disturbing illustration of how entitled men, mainstream media, and social media combine to normalise reproductive exploitation.

This Morning

In August 2025 Adam Frisby, founder of online womenswear company In The Style, and his partner, videographer Jamie Corbett, appeared on ITV’s This Moming programme to share what ITV termed “their inspirational journey to parenthood.” Extracts from the programme were amplified on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.

Frisby and Corbett explain to This Morning’s presenters how they had each wanted to be parents. Not with a female partner, obviously. Nor by adoption, but by a much more technocratic and less regulated ‘journey to parenthood’ - paying the fertility industry to combine their sperm, the eggs of a ‘donor’, and the womb and vagina of a ‘surrogate’ to create ‘their’ baby. Frisby reveals why he and Corbett chose not to embark on surrogacy in their home country, England - “We are doing the journey in America. Just mainly due to UK laws, really”, he explains. Over there “you’re just more protected legally.”

Corbett describes how “we fell pregnant with the surrogate’’, but that “unfortunately she did miscarry, which was really really sad.” Undeterred, they hired a replacement ‘surrogate’ and happily announced ‘their’ pregnancy online. They were surprised to have received online abuse, which they and the This Morning presenters assume could only be due to homophobia, and not to revulsion at men exploiting women’s bodies and breaking the mother/child bond.

This Morning’s male presenter is keen to emphasise (without any evidence) that “the surrogate that you’re using, this is something that they want to do for you. It’s not a transaction. This is something they want to do, offer themselves to help someone.” The female presenter is equally keen to prophesy that “this little baby is going to have the best life ever … you’re going to make the most incredible dads.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, not least the pretence that men can become pregnant, and the repeated demeaning description of the actual mother as ‘the surrogate’.

Nothing can be more transactional than surrogacy, particularly in the US. The whole discussion between Frisby, Corbett, and This Morning’s presenters ignores the systemic pressures, both economic and psychological, that lead some women to sell their eggs or rent their wombs to strangers. Instead, these women are presented as if they are altruistic entrepreneurs, free to choose this exploitation of their reproductive capacity.

The This Morning presenters don’t refer to the evidence of massively increased pregnancy risks with surrogacy, which may well have been what caused the ‘unfortunate’ miscarriage that made the men so ‘really, really sad’ . The multiple harms, for both child and mother, that are caused by breaking the mother/child bond are also ignored.

Surrogacy is presented as if there is a human right for anyone to have children, achieved by exploiting women’s bodies. There is no such right. As Lexi Ellingsworth notes, no-one is entitled to another’s body. “If there was a rights-based approach to surrogacy,” she suggests, “surely this begins with the rights of the child?” :

“The Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to identity, and to know their origins, and ensures that the ‘sale of or all traffic in children for any purpose or in any form’ is banned …. These rights are politically inconvenient to surrogacy advocates and have been swept aside, leaving this global market unchecked.”

(Lexi Ellingsworth, Surrogacy is not a human right, The Critic 4 Apr 2026)

What is especially pernicious in This Morning’s wholehearted support for the commodification of reproduction is how it slavishly follows the now common practice of presenting opposition to surrogacy as discrimination against gay men. Surrogacy is a global industry that exploits women and children. It is exploitative whether the commissioning parents are gay male couples, lesbian couples, heterosexual couples, or individual men or women. Conflating opposition to surrogacy with homophobia is a dishonest reframing, used here by Frisby, Corbett, and the This Morning presenters as a way of encouraging well-meaning liberal viewers to see misogynistic exploitation as acceptable.

This normalisation seems to be having some success in winning public support, as was revealed during a recent return by Frisby and Corbett to the This Morning studio.

Changing the law

Frisby and Corbett returned to This Morning in April 2026, complete with baby girl, to argue for changes in UK law that would make surrogacy easier for commissioning parents, by removing safeguards and taking away the right for the mother to change her mind. As Frisby explains, “The way the UK law stands at the moment is that when a child is born by surrogacy, the surrogate is automatically the legal mother at birth, even if they have no biological connection” (sic). He goes on to complain that “Because we did it in the US we are obviously legally recognised in the US, we are her parents of course, but we come back to the UK the law kind of overrides that. So we have to go through a court process … It’s just a big process that really as new parents we shouldn’t have to go through.” He describes how he wants to change this, via a petition to parliament (petitions on the UK parliament’s website are guaranteed a government response if they reach 10,000 signatures, and a parliamentary debate if they reach 100,000).

Frisby acknowledges how important appearing on This Morning has been in wining signatures for his petition, and he concludes by thanking the This Morning team for giving him and Corbett the voice that made this possible (the signatures exceeded 100,000 as the programme aired, guaranteeing a parliamentary debate as well as a government response).

Another morning

This Morning is the 2025 winner of the National Television Award for daytime television. It has form celebrating men who acquire children from ‘surrogates’. Over the past quarter century it has frequently gushed over ‘Britain’s first gay dads’ while failing to notice their children’s obvious unhappiness. Needless to say, these children were acquired via surrogacy.

This Morning’s coverage of the dads and their family has been selective. It has avoided mentioning that Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, one of those ‘first gay dads’ (a multi-millionaire property developer and a surrogacy agency’s CEO and ‘Head of Social Work’) made his ‘surrogates’ have C-sections because he felt that having ‘his’ children come out of a vagina would be ‘repulsive’. This Morning hasn’t paid attention, either, to his leaving the other ‘first gay dad’ to have more children with Scott Hutchison, a former boyfriend of one of his daughters, or to his buying eggs from a model because he didn’t want his children to be ugly.

Barrie Drewitt-Barlow is now in the news again, though not on This Morning. Essex Police’s Serious Crime Directorate has charged him and Scott Hutchinson (now his husband) with multiple sexual offences, including rape, sexual assault, and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Today the two appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court, and were remanded in custody. They are scheduled to appear at Chelmsford Crown Court for trial on 5 June.

End reproductive exploitation

How the government responds to Frisby’s petition, and what it absorbs from the subsequent parliamentary debate, will be critical in determining how far it goes along the path of promoting and commercialising surrogacy in the UK. This will give an indication, too, of whether, in its obsessive quest for tech-driven growth, it intends to venture further into the murky no human’s land of tech reproduction.

The change in the law that is needed now is not one that further erodes the rights of mothers and children and removes barriers to yet more commodification of human bodies,. It would be one that bans the reproductive exploitation that is surrogacy.

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These two UK-based organisations provide useful resources for deeper understanding of the harms of surrogacy, together with suggestions for action:

Stop Surrogacy Now UK

Surrogacy Concern