LGBT groups were quick to rejoice in Strasbourg Thursday as an overwhelming majority of MEPs backed a hotly contested law establishing a new “ European Parenthood Certificate” and enforcing liberal surrogacy laws and gay adoption across the bloc.
While the legislation still requires the consent of individual member states at an EU Council level, the legislation would require states to grant recognition to families “irrespective of how a child was conceived, born or the type of family they have.”
Ostensibly meant to close legal loopholes in family law caused by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, the legislation has been lambasted by Catholic groups in particular as a direct legislative assault on the traditional family at the same time as opening the door to liberal surrogacy laws.
The European Commission first proposed the idea of the EU Parenthood Certificate in late 2022, with Portuguese socialist MEP Maria Manuel Leitão Marques directing the Parliament’s response to the legislation through her role on the legal affairs committee.
If passed, the Certificate would transform EU family law on surrogacy. Conservative groups continue to sound the alarm about the commercialisation of pregnancy in the wake of the Ukrainian war, as media attention zooms in on the existence of “baby factories” and the phenomenon of impoverished refugee women turning to surrogacy.
The European Parliament endorsed the Parenthood Certificate by 366 votes to 145 with the primary objections in the chamber coming from the European Conservatives and Reformists and Identity and Democracy groups as a majority of the European People’s Party Group backed the controversial bill.
Among the critics of the Certificate was Dutch conservative MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen, who said the EU was on “thin ice” legally as it sought to influence the social policy of member states far outside of its purview.
In an email statement to The European Conservative, a parliamentary spokesman was quick to clarify that member states would not have to “recognize parenthood against their will”, even though theoretically, the decision would force conservative countries to grant recognition to same-sex marriages from other EU jurisdictions.
Thursday’s vote was condemned by the conservative lobby group the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE) who accused the EU of rapidly expanding its brief in contradiction to the founding subsidiarity principles of the EU.
“Today, the majority of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) renounced to take a stand in favour of human dignity and used cross-border parenthood for ideological purposes, against the principle of subsidiarity” described FAFCE’s vice-president Angelika Weichsel Mitterrutzner as the group alleged that the proposed law could worsen already spiralling rates of human trafficking across the EU.
The next legislative stage for the Certificate is the European Council, where it is almost certain to be opposed by conservative-minded member states. A majority of EU states have a ban on surrogacy as MEPs moved towards designating the practice a form of human trafficking in October.
