Free Democrats release position paper on liberalising fertility treatment

A German politician is pushing for a thorough-going revision of family law to allow altruistic surrogacy. Katrin Helling Plahr, of the Free Democrats (FDP), has released a seven-page position paper on liberalizing fertility treatment.

The current law in Germany, the Embryo Protection Act, was passed in 1990, when social mores were different. It bans all surrogacy.

FDP members of the European Parliament propose three main amendments to the law. They want full support for fertility treatments, regardless of the family model the applicants are in. They want to update artificial reproduction by permitting egg donation, embryo donation and non-commercial surrogacy. 

They also want a family law that takes non-traditional family configurations into account and accepts a multiple parenting of up to four people.

The reasoning behind this flows from the legalisation of same-sex marriage. FDP members point out that marriages of two men may require two women to create the child.  It is “constitutionally intolerable”  for children to be “made differently, depending on whether they were born into same-sex or mixed-gender marriage”.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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