On 12 December 2014, the French Conseil d’Etat found that children born abroad to surrogate mothers may be granted citizenship as long as one of their parents is a French national. In its judgment, the court argued that the child’s filiation, ‘as established on the foreign birth certificate according to the customary laws of that specific country, is in principle to be considered legally binding’.
Surrogate motherhood, which has been prohibited in France since 1991, has become a highly controversial issue in the wake of the recent demonstrations against the Socialist government’s bill on same sex marriage. The so-called ‘mariage pour tous’ bill provoked major public unrest and monopolised the political debate for several months until it was eventually adopted by the National Assembly in April 2013. While the reform allows same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, surrogate motherhood and assisted reproduction for lesbian couples were ultimately dropped from the bill – a concession made by the Socialist government to hundreds of thousands of protesters who repeatedly took the streets under the rallying cry of the ‘Manif Pour Tous’ (Protest for All).
Read the news reports in Le Monde and Le Figaro (in French).