France is to officially recognise children born by surrogacy abroad following a landmark court ruling.
Critics of the latest judgement in France have described it as a major step backwards for France and children, with one prominent opponent, Ludovine de La Rochère, president of La Manif Pour Tous, stating after the ruling: “The judges have acknowledged that a child can be the subject of a contract even before its conception, reducing it to a thing that can be bought or sold.”
Despite a ban on surrogacy in the country and a huge campaign against it, the Court of Cassation, effectively a court of judicial appeal, ruled that two cases before it warranted a move towards full recognition of the children of French citizens who have been procured through surrogacy overseas.
The cases in question centred on gay men who fathered children via surrogacy services in Russia. Till now, the French legal system maintained that such arrangements were unacceptable in law and refused to extend citizenship rights to the children.
Now, however, the Court of Cassation has ruled that “surrogate motherhood alone cannot justify the refusal to transcribe into French birth registers the foreign birth certificate of a child who has one French parent”.
The ruling follows an earlier decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) which similarly judged that refusing to register in French records the birth, to a French parent, of a child overseas, contravened the child’s human right to an identity.
