As announced last week (seeReturn of Surrogacy to the Council of Europe), the Council of Europe will review Petra de Sutter’s surrogacy report on 2 June. According to Marie-Anne Frison Roche, “the guidelines of this report have not been modified”, and the aim is still the same: “To get the Council of Europe to propose a ‘resolution’ to basically renounce the ban on surrogacy”.
Since it is legally prohibited to vote on a report that has been definitively rejected, this report is presented as a ‘new’ document. However, the author is the same and the content is “substantially the same” as the report rejected in March: “Surrogacy should be permitted when it is ‘genuinely altruistic’. (…) For it to be ‘genuinely altruistic’, a ‘family link’ or ‘friendship link’” should be mentioned in the contracts. Petra de Sutter “also wishes to propose that the ‘intended parents’ adopt the child as soon as possible”. Thus, “the child’s mother, who has carried and given birth to the child, should therefore disappear ‘as soon as possible’”.
Marie-Anne Frison Roche, Professor of Economic Law and Regulation at the French Institute of Political Studies in Paris, analyses the “strategy of industrialists and sellers of surrogacy services”, the numbers of which are currently increasing despite resistance from Europe. Instead of “facing European legislation, the industrialists exercise soft law options including “soft corrosive power”, she explained. They “will not back down given the amount of money that is to be made with human goods within their grasp”.
She called on political institutions to “say NO”.
Huffington Post (26/04/2016)