The European Court of Human Rights must rule on the refusal of the German authorities to accept “recognition of double motherhood arising from ‘shared motherhood’ ” in a civil partnership agreement between two women.
The issue of “shared motherhood ” is illustrated as follows:
The petitioner is a woman whose eggs were fertilised in vitro with thesperm of an anonymous donor. The embryo thus formed was implanted in the uterus of her partner who carried and gave birth to the child.
The petitioner is requesting the inclusion on the child’s birth certificate of “biological mother of the child” carried by her partner. She is not satisfied with “shared parental responsibility or recognition of a family connection by adoption“.
In attempting to obtain recognition of the “voluntary/automatic and ‘natural’ allocation of dual female parentage” before the Court, the petitioner also wants recognition of the fact that the child “is the offspring of two‘natural’ mothers” and “that two women can create a child”.
“It is not in the child’s greater interest to have dual female parentage but consistent parentage is important. ” “Thus parentage has nothing to do with sexual orientation(…) A child can never be considered as the offspring of two women or two men because they would not have created that child”.
This contentious issue, which is currently being debated before the European Court of Human Rights, is not without consequence. If the Court recognises dual female parentage, it will have to deprive “children of their parents to give them guardians instead”. “Legalising something that is unnatural does not make it natural. If two women are recognised as the ‘parents’ of a child, this does not make them parents, but voids the term “parents” of substance and meaning”.
Village de la justice, Andreea Popescu, (17/04/2017)