French Socialist Prime Minister, Manuel Valls has said that surrogate motherhood “is and will be banned in France” because it is “an intolerable commercialisation of human beings and commodification of women’s bodies”.
His promise was made as hundreds of thousands of people marched in Paris and Bordeaux last weekend calling on the French government to keep surrogacy illegal, to ban assisted human reproduction in cases where it would leave children without a father or a mother, and to protest “anti-family” cuts to child benefit payments and parental leave.
The “Manif Pour Tous” (Protest for All) movement, originally founded to oppose the legalisation of same-sex marriage in France, has expanded its agenda to oppose what they call the French government’s “Familyphobia”.
In advance of the protests, Prime Minister Manuel Valls of the socialist party told Catholic daily La Croix that surrogate motherhood “is and will be banned in France” describing it as “an intolerable commercialisation of human beings and commodification of women’s bodies”.
It was a major U-turn for the prime minister, who in 2011 supported surrogate motherhood and called it an “inevitable development”.
Valls said that the French government intended to ignore the recent European Court of Human Rights decision which found that France would have to give parental rights to people who commissioned children through surrogacy abroad. The Prime Minister said this would effectively be legalising surrogacy by the back door.
He added that the French government would be pushing for an international intiative which would “require countries who authorise surrogacy not to grant this service to people from countries who forbid it.”
But this did little to quell the ire of the protesters, who questioned the fact that France didn’t appeal the ECHR decision.
“We don’t want words, we want acts,” one woman told France24. “We want it written into the constitution that surrogacy and medically assisted reproduction are banned, both in France and for French citizens abroad.”
In his interview, Valls also said the government will wait for an ethical council ruling on reversing a ban on lesbian couples using donor sperm to have children.
Currently, assisted human reproduction technologies such as IVF are only available for heterosexual couples who have been married for at least two years.