The German federal government is moving forward with plans to allow children born to lesbian couples to have two legal biological mothers.
According to current laws, only the woman who gives birth to the child is considered the legal mother. Her partner has to go through an adoption process to become the second legal parent. The government says this is unfair and outdated.
Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig (of junior government party SPD) says the adoption process takes too long and places unnecessary burdens on families. For example, if the mother who gave birth dies during or after birth, and the other woman hasn’t finished the adoption process, the child could be left without a legal parent.
To avoid this, the government wants to automatically recognise both women as mothers if they are in a relationship and plan to raise the child together—this would be similar to how a man automatically gains legal parenthood if he is married to the woman who gives birth.
The new plans had already been discussed under the previous leftist government, and though the current Chancellor Friedrich Merz (of the centre-right CDU) declined to pursue the reforms, it now seems his government is backtracking on yet another one of its promises.
High-ranking CDU politician Thorsten Frei—currently the head of the Chancellery—quite rightly argued back in 2021 that legal parenthood must reflect the realities of biology, not ideology. “In cases of same-sex parents, it is clear that only one of the parents can be a biological parent.”
Another CDU politician, Jan-Marco Luczak, said that designating two women as a child’s parents at birth would automatically sever the legal relationship of the child with its biological father.
The right-wing opposition Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has consistently rejected woke and pro-LGBT policies that try to redefine the realities of biology.
Despite living in a lesbian relationship with two adopted sons, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has made a clear distinction between genuine gay rights and the gender ideology that is being propagated by LGBT organisations. Earlier this year, she said: “We do not want our kids to be confused with regards to gender issues. … Simply because of my personal orientation I will not support gender, woke, and green policies that are damaging to society.”
