France’s highest court has granted legal recognition to surrogate children, in a major turnaround that will make their daily lives easier and could lead to greater acceptance of new forms of families.The previous French position was:
The Cour de cassation ruled Friday that, while surrogacy will remain banned in France, children born abroad through this practice will now be legally tied to their parents and will be granted birth certificates and immediate means to prove their French citizenship.
Surrogacy can involve a woman carrying an embryo created by in vitro fertilization using another woman’s egg and her partner’s sperm. In some cases, such as those involving male gay couples, the surrogate mother is also the genetic mother of the child.
Until now, surrogate children were deprived of any legal connection to their parents, or any civil status in France. They were considered as children born from unknown legal parents, since their foreign birth certificates weren’t recognized. One lawyer has described them as “ghosts of the republic.”
Unlike other children born abroad to a French parent, these children couldn’t get automatic ID cards or passports, or register for state health care or other services.
This exposed them to frequent problems, because many basic tasks are impossible in France without an ID or authorization from a legal parent.
The latest missive comes from Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who argued a few days ago that "France is opposed to surrogacy because she is opposed, in the name of her values, in the name of progress and humanism, to all forms of commercialization of human beings and experimentation in this area." Surrogates are "slaves" with wombs for rent, they argue, exploited by the infertile. France's leadership hides the many happy U.S. surrogacy stories, featuring instead some of Asia's forced baby factories that ensnare poor women.In France, you are supposed to have a mistress to carry your illegitimate baby for you, and you are supposed to inseminate her the old-fashioned way.
Children of surrogacy who are born in the U.S. attain U.S. citizenship but not that of their intended French parents. France insists that children conceived in this way should not be recognized as French because of how they came into life. However, in June 2014, a brave decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered France to reverse course and recognize children born of surrogacy despite the French ban.
France is no longer a sovreign nation, and takes orders on gay matters from European officials. If the European Convention on Human Rights says that gay men can rent wombs to make babies, then France has to accept it. The case was a couple of gay men who did their baby-making in Russia. The baby had a Russian birth certificate, but not a French one. France has about 1000 of these surrogate babies.
The Europeans are not necessarily accepting all reproductive technologies. They object to Britain's 3-parent babies. That means 3 genetic parents. There could still be the gestational mom, and the intended legal parents.
1 comment:
They should insert frog DNA to prove it was a French citizen.
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