The European Parliament on Tuesday voted by a very large majority in favour of adding—as a minimum—the practice of surrogacy to its legal definition of human trafficking.
The vote counted 563 in favour, 7 against, and 17 abstentions, demonstrating the existence of a very broad consensus on condemning the practice of surrogacy among members of the European Parliament, whatever their political persuasion.
This was a revision of the 2011 European directive on trafficking in human beings, which will now include “the exploitation of surrogate motherhood,” as well as illegal adoption and forced marriage. The revision was initiated by MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, who is once again heading the list for the French centre-right Les Républicains party, a member of the European People’s Party (EPP).
To coincide with the vote, Bellamy organised a conference at the European Parliament on the issue of surrogacy in association with Olivia Maurel, a Frenchwoman who was herself born through surrogacy, now the spokesman for the Casablanca Declaration, the international organisation to ban surrogacy. Bernard Garcia Larrain, the Declaration’s coordinator, was at her side.
In its press release welcoming the vote, the organisation points out that children’s rights are unfortunately not mentioned. “Children’s rights are always forgotten,” Maurel lamented.
The organisation treats this as a first step, but says that the only fully effective long-term solution is to sign an international protocol including the rights of women and children.
While the inclusion of “the exploitation of surrogate motherhood” in the directive is naturally to be welcomed, it is important to stress that it does not represent a firm, absolute, and definitive condemnation of the use of surrogacy. The text condemns “trafficking for the purpose of the exploitation of surrogate motherhood,” and targets “persons who force women to act as surrogate mothers or who trick them into doing so.”
The ‘ethical surrogacy’ argument (when a woman ‘altruistically’ volunteers as a surrogate mother for a childless couple) often put forward by promoters of the practice is therefore not explicitly condemned, even though the directive stipulates that surrogacy is “a form of coercion, whether economic, emotional or familial” and “a form of deception” for surrogate mothers.
The new provisions will come into force 20 days after their publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. Member States then have two years to implement them. The question arises as to what attitude European countries will take towards Ukraine, a country where surrogacy is practised on a massive scale for the benefit of client parents in Western Europe.
