Rise in overseas surrogates ‘increases risk of stateless babies’

The Hague Conference suspended a 15-year effort to create a global surrogacy convention due to irreconcilable ethical divisions among member states. The lack of international coordination leaves babies born via cross-border surrogacy at risk of 'limping parentage' (different legal parents in different countries) or statelessness when neither birth country nor destination country grants nationality or recognizes the arrangement. UK surrogacy births have doubled since 2015, mostly abroad in the US, Ukraine, Nigeria, Georgia, Colombia, and Mexico.

Teaching:
• Use limping parentage as a metaphor for fragmented practice—when students cherry-pick postures or skip foundational steps, they create internal inconsistencies that leave parts of the body or breath unsupported.
• Frame statelessness as what happens when we lose connection to lineage and method: without a recognized home in tradition, practitioners drift without legal (or structural) grounding.
• Discuss how patchwork regulation mirrors patchwork self-care—students who rely on unregulated YouTube tutorials or drop-in classes without continuity risk exploitation or harm because no coherent framework protects them.
• Introduce the concept of 'systems literacy for the body': just as children need recognized legal identity across borders, practitioners need a coherent system (Ashtanga's structure) that travels with them across studios, teachers, and life stages.

Writing seeds:
• Essay: 'Limping Parentage in Yoga Practice'—how fragmented, inconsistent practice creates internal contradictions and why lineage and method act as legal frameworks for embodied identity.
• Shala Daily post: 'Statelessness on the Mat'—what it means to practice without a home tradition, and why systems literacy (knowing the rules, the structure, the why) grants citizenship in your own body.
• Long-form piece: 'The Patchwork Problem: Why Drop-In Culture Leaves Students Vulnerable'—paralleling surrogacy's regulatory gaps with yoga's lack of teacher standards, and how students become stateless when no coherent method holds them.
• Short essay: 'Identity and Recognition in Practice'—how Ashtanga's parental orders (guru, lineage, daily repetition) confer legal identity on the practitioner, making them legible to themselves and the tradition.

Idea map:
• Systems literacy: The article shows what happens when there's no shared system (global surrogacy law)—chaos, risk, statelessness. Ashtanga is a shared system that confers identity and protability across contexts.
• Embodiment: Limping parentage is a bodily metaphor—when different parts of the system don't recognize each other, the whole suffers. Practice unifies legal parentage within the body.
• Attention and method: The HCCH failure mirrors what happens when practitioners lack a coherent method—they're left in limbo, unable to establish continuity or identity across time and space.
• Practice as citizenship: Just as children need recognized legal status, practitioners need a recognized method (Ashtanga) to grant them standing, continuity, and protection from exploitation or drift.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/19/rise-overseas-surrogates-increases-risk-stateless-babies-experts-warn