Nigeria has no comprehensive federal statute governing surrogacy. For intending parents, that single fact reorganises everything: there is no form to fill, no licence to rely on, no statutory parentage order waiting at the end. The arrangement is as strong as its documentation and its sequence, and no stronger.
The vacuum, plainly stated
Surrogacy in Nigeria is neither authorised nor prohibited by any comprehensive national law. Arrangements are assembled from general principles: the law of contract, family and child-rights law, medical regulation, and guidelines that operate at state or professional level. This is not a reason to despair, thousands of families have been formed this way, but it is a reason to take the documentation far more seriously than in jurisdictions where a statute does the heavy lifting.
In a statutory vacuum, the written agreement is not one safeguard among several. It is, in practical terms, the constitution of the arrangement.
What a serious agreement actually covers
The templates that circulate cover payment and handover, and little else. A surrogacy agreement drafted for the real world addresses, at minimum:
- The medical architecture. Gestational or traditional surrogacy; whose gametes; which clinic; what screening, counselling and medical consents precede signature, recorded, not assumed.
- Consents and their timing. Which consents must exist before embryo transfer, and in what form. Sequence failures are the most common defect we see in agreements presented to us for rescue.
- The surrogate’s autonomy and welfare. Medical decision-making during pregnancy, antenatal care, insurance, and what happens on complications. Clauses that purport to strip a surrogate of bodily autonomy are both ethically indefensible and forensically damaging.
- Money, characterised carefully. Reimbursement and compensation structured and described with precision, loose drafting here creates avoidable legal risk for everyone.
- Parentage, handover and registration. The intended sequence from delivery to birth registration, with the supporting hospital documentation planned in advance rather than negotiated in a ward corridor.
- Failure cases. Miscarriage, multiple births, a party’s death, the breakdown of the intending parents’ own relationship mid-pregnancy. The clauses no one wants to read are the ones that end up deciding matters.
An agreement that only contemplates everything going well is not an agreement. It is a hope with signatures on it.
Why sequence matters as much as text
A well-drafted agreement signed at the wrong moment can be worth less than a modest one signed at the right one. Independent legal advice for the surrogate should precede signature; medical and psychological screening should precede legal commitment; the agreement should precede any transfer. Each step exists to answer the question a court or registry may one day ask: did everyone understand and freely accept this, at a time when they could still walk away?
This is also why we insist, where we act for intending parents, that the surrogate receives genuinely independent advice. It is not generosity. An arrangement in which one party was unadvised is an arrangement with a fault line running through its centre.
What writing cannot do
Honesty requires the caveat: no drafting can make custody provisions self-executing. Whatever the agreement says, questions of parentage and custody ultimately engage the court’s assessment of the best interests of the child. The drafting response is not to pretend otherwise but to build the record, of intention, consent, care and stability, that makes the agreed outcome and the child’s interests point the same way. We examine that layered enforceability question separately in Is a Surrogacy Agreement Enforceable?
The practical takeaway
If you are considering surrogacy in Nigeria, as intending parent, surrogate, or clinic, the order of operations is: counsel first, structure second, clinic third, signature fourth, transfer last. Families formed in that order rarely appear in law reports. Families formed in the reverse order supply most of the cautionary tales.