Ruling: Family judge Alison Russell said the woman, who cannot be named, made the father a mere 'sperm donor' and pretended to help him and his partner have a child knowing she would keep it herself

A 15-month-old girl should be taken from her ‘homophobic’ mother and sent to live with her wealthy gay father and his lover, a High Court judge has ruled.

The mother lied when she agreed to become a surrogate for the gay couple’s desperately wanted child, Ms Justice Russell said.

In fact, she really wanted a baby for herself and regarded the girl’s gay father as no more than a ‘sperm donor’, the judge said.

In a judgment published yesterday, Ms Justice Russell said the mother had used her daughter to manipulate the court – and had tried to discredit the gay father and his partner ‘in a homophobic and offensive manner’.

She said the mother had secretly named the girl and had her baptised in defiance of a court order and without the couple’s consent.

In her ruling, the judge said the 15-month-old girl should not be affected by her mother’s negative views of her father because they will ‘directly affect her own sense of identity’.

Instead, she ordered that the girl should live with her father and his boyfriend and said that the mother – who has been breastfeeding and sleeping with her daughter – should be allowed to see her only under the supervision of social workers.

‘This case is another example of how agreements between potential parents reached privately to conceive children to build a family go wrong and cause great distress to the biological parents and their spouses or partners,’ Ms Justice Russell said.

The judge ordered that none of the individuals involved in the dispute may be named in public.

The row between the gay couple and the mother began after an apparent surrogacy deal broke down. The mother, a Romanian who has two older daughters who live with her divorced British husband, met the 43-year-old Romanian father when they were both teenagers.

The father lives with his 38-year-old partner, but the gay couple are not married or civil partners. In 2013 they struck an agreement which the father thought meant the woman would be a surrogate mother.

Landmark case: The woman, who denied claims she hoodwinked the gay couple, lost custody of the baby at the High Court, pictured, and will now only be allowed supervised access

She would play a role in the child’s life but he and his partner would be the main carers. However the mother told the court the agreement was with the father alone, that there was no role for his partner, and that she would be the main carer.

The child was conceived by an artificial method at the gay couple’s home. The mother then paid towards the rent of a house in South London where she could live with the couple.

The deal broke down shortly before the baby was born in January 2014, and the mother went to hospital for the birth without telling the father. The affair became a court battle before the baby was a month old.

TOP JUDGE IN SURROGATE MOTHER CASE MADE HISTORY WHEN SHE DEMANDED 'CALL ME MS' The senior judge who took the baby from her surrogate mother last year became the first allowed to take a feminist title. High Court judge Alison Russell is known on the bench as Ms Justice Russell. The decision to allow a judge to be addressed that way was taken by Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas and Sir James Munby, the judge who heads the family courts where 55-year-old Ms Justice Russell will operate. It is a departure from past practice, in which women judges were not permitted to deviate from established forms of address. After Elizabeth Butler-Sloss became the first female Appeal judge in 1988 she was forced to accept the title set down in law. As a result for six years she presided over cases as Lord Justice Butler-Sloss. There were signs yesterday that judicial staff remain slow to adjust to the new form of address. An official announcement calls the new judge Ms. Russell, complete with full stop, and then goes on to refer to her as Miss Russell when describing her career. Ms Russell, born in Harrogate to a Scottish family, was public school educated at Wellington but then, unusually for a successful lawyer, took a degree not at an ancient university but at the then South Bank Polytechnic. She became a barrister, specialising in human rights and family law, shorly after leaving college. She was a Queen's Counsel by 2008 and a Deputy High Court judge in 2011. The judge, who has no children, is unmarried and lives with her partner Julian Francis in Brixton in South London. She describes her interests as Spain, Handel, cooking, reading, and playing with her niece and nephews. Advertisement

Ms Justice Russell accused the mother of baptising and naming the child in defiance of court orders, of breastfeeding her to demonstrate her closeness to the baby, and of using breastfeeding as an excuse to disrupt court hearings.

The mother had used ‘stereotypical images and descriptions of gay men’; ‘insinuated that gay men in same-sex relationships behave in a sexually disinhibited manner’; and had said they were ‘sexually disloyal to each other’.

The mother also took the baby to hospital when nothing was wrong with her to try to smear the gay couple, the judge said.

The judge said she publicised her case on Facebook and social media as a means of ‘conducting her case not through the court alone but by recruiting support from others’.

The baptism mattered to the three because the mother usurped the right to name the child and establish her religion.

The mother is an Orthodox Christian, while the father is a protestant and his partner a Roman Catholic, the judge said. Ms Justice Russell added that the mother ‘decided to breastfeed on demand and co-sleep with the baby: This directly affected the amount of time she could spend with her father’.

The judge said the mother ‘has sought to present herself throughout the proceedings as a victim and someone whose rights as a mother … have been trampled over and abused.

She claims that the father and his partner are attempting to remove her child from her breast in a cruel and calculated attempt to build a family and that she is being discriminated against and victimised’.

However, she said that in court the mother was assertive and aggressive. The mother, Ms Justice Russell said, had ‘deliberately misled the father and his partner about her intentions or changed her mind as the pregnancy progressed’.

She said the gay couple were ‘clearly devoted to each other’.

The judge said her conclusion was that the mother ‘set out to inveigle the father into acting as her sperm donor so she could have another child’.

She declared: ‘While to move a young child from her mother is a difficult decision and is one which I make with regret as I am aware it will cause the mother distress, I conclude that the father is the parent who is best able to meet the girl’s needs both now and in the future.