A UK-based couple who used a Sri Lankan surrogacy agency have been granted an adoption order for twins born to a surrogate, after DNA testing during the British citizenship process revealed that neither child was biologically related to the intended father. The case, reported by the Guardian on 7 July 2026, was decided by Mr Justice Peel in the Family Division, whose written judgment the week before laid bare a dispute over what happened inside the clinic's laboratory.

PP and QQ, originally from Sri Lanka, met in the UK in 2016 and married in 2017. After unsuccessful IVF treatment, they travelled to India for further fertility treatment; the resulting twin pregnancy ended when both babies died within days of birth due to health complications. QQ was subsequently advised by doctors not to attempt pregnancy again. The couple then turned to Sri Lanka, where a family friend volunteered to act as surrogate and became pregnant with twins using an agency called Wish Fertility.

The clinic sent PP and QQ a letter enclosing consent forms for completion, according to the judiciary's published judgment. Two embryos were created and transferred to the surrogate; both resulted in a successful pregnancy, per the later judgment on the couple's application to withdraw their parental order request. Wish Fertility confirmed in writing that the embryos had been created using donor eggs and PP's sperm, exactly as the couple had specified.

That account did not survive contact with genetics. DNA testing carried out as part of the twins' British citizenship application showed PP was not the biological father of either child. The twins are non-identical, and both are unrelated to him. Faced with results a parental order could not accommodate, the couple withdrew that application and instead pursued adoption, which the court granted. The Home Office, informed of the negative DNA finding, granted the seven-month-old twins British citizenship in March.

Wish Fertility's response to the discrepancy shifted under scrutiny. The clinic first claimed the couple had signed a consent form authorising use of donor sperm — a claim PP and QQ denied. It then argued that embryologists had used both PP's sperm and donor sperm during fertilisation, and that it was impossible to determine afterward which sample had produced the implanted embryos.

Mr Justice Peel rejected both positions. He found no evidence the couple had signed any form authorising donor sperm, and noted that no concerns had ever been raised about the quality of PP's sperm — meaning there was no clinical reason to introduce a donor in the first place. He described the clinic's claim that the two sperm samples could not be distinguished after the fact as "startling" and "improbable." He said it remained unclear whether the substitution was "an inadvertent error, perhaps as a result of poor internal processes, or was intentionally done" — a distinction the judgment did not resolve, and one with obvious implications for accountability that fell outside the scope of a family court adoption ruling.

The judge described PP and QQ as "blameless," adding they were "desperate to bring up the children, whom they adore." QQ said the DNA result had "struck us like a thunderbolt," but added that the children were "meant for us."

The proceedings also touched on the couple's frozen embryos, over which they sought declaratory relief. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) did not oppose the declarations sought, according to the February judgment — a detail that matters less for this case's outcome than for what it signals about the regulator's posture toward cross-border surrogacy arrangements gone wrong.

The case sits at a fault line that English family law has been navigating for years: a parental order under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act requires, among other things, that the intended parent's gametes were used to create the embryo. When that condition cannot be satisfied — whether through error, misconduct, or something in between — adoption becomes the fallback route to secure legal parentage, but it is procedurally slower and was never designed for the surrogacy context specifically. Cross-border arrangements compound the difficulty, since the commissioning parents have little practical means of verifying a foreign clinic's laboratory processes and are dependent entirely on documentation the clinic itself produces.

What is notable in Mr Justice Peel's reasoning is the gap he left open rather than closed. English courts adjudicating parentage disputes are not equipped to conduct the kind of forensic laboratory investigation that would determine whether Wish Fertility's substitution was negligent or deliberate; that question, if it is ever answered, will have to be pursued elsewhere, likely under Sri Lankan or Indian regulatory frameworks, which vary considerably in how tightly they license and audit fertility clinics catering to overseas patients. For now, the family court's job was narrower and more urgent: securing legal parentage and citizenship for two children whose biological origins turned out to be different from what everyone, including the clinic's own paperwork, had asserted.