Integrated analytical report on ectogestation and legal parenthood
A independent report examining how legal parenthood is currently allocated and recorded across different jurisdictions, commissioned by the Center for Bioethics and Health Policy.
To inform our research project on the implications of ectogestation for defining parenthood, we commissioned an independent report drawing on existing law and scholarship to map how legal parenthood is currently allocated and recorded across jurisdictions, and the ethical and social questions this raises.
Although still in early development, ectogestation (the speculative use of technologies that would enable partial or full gestation outside the human body) raises significant questions for law and society in relation to definitions of parenthood. UK law currently assigns legal parenthood based on who carried the child – but how would that apply if pregnancy were interrupted, or absent altogether?
Written by Dr Zaina Mahmoud, Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, this report:
maps how legal parenthood is assigned in eight jurisdictions, including the UK as the comparator jurisdiction, and the relative roles of gestation, genetics, marriage and intention;
examines how each might respond if gestation were to take place outside the human body;
considers what would be needed to secure a child’s legal status, identity and nationality in such instances.
The report's central finding is that, although the eight jurisdictions studied allocate legal parenthood on four seemingly different bases (i.e gestation, genetics, marriage, and intention), these bases ultimately depend on the same underlying fact — an embodied act of gestation and birth — which is then used to identify the legal mother and triggers the registration systems that grant a child legal identity and citizenship. Decoupling birth from gestation, either partially or fully, could bring different implications for parenthood definitions and the resulting child's circumstances, including questions over who should be recognised as the child's legal parent once they come to life or the subsequent attribution of nationality.
This work is not about endorsing or opposing particular technologies, but about considering what safeguards may be needed if and when they are used. At the Center for Bioethics and Health Policy, we believe these conversations are most valuable when they happen early, drawing on diverse and informed perspectives to help shape responsible, future-ready policy.
The report complements our interviews with people with learned and/or lived experience of assisted reproduction or alternative routes to family formation, which have now closed, and is the foundation for our recent article in JME Practical Bioethics: Birth, interrupted? How ectogestation unsettles the legal foundations of personhood, parenthood and citizenship.
Combining legal analysis, empirical research, and deliberative engagement, these outputs will help inform the project’s analysis of the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging reproductive technologies. Next steps will include a thematic report on interview findings, which we expect to publish in early 2027.
